A Second Look at Urban Homelessness

I have spent some time with homeless people. Indeed I am sometimes thought to be a homeless person, I suppose because I don't care much for sartorial splendour. I have taken several homeless people into my home, and I have often asked good, rich, christian folk who think 'something should be done' about homelessness why they don't just let someone homeless live in their spare bedrooms. Everytime I go to Seattle, I walk through what seems a boulevard of nightmares, so many 'homeless' people having setup housekeeping on the ramps and sidewalks leading to the Coleman Docks. (The photo above was taken in November 2017 on First Avenue.)

But today when I read an article in Wired, one of the many glossy venues that make money hucking celebrities and catastrophes, about the 55,000 homeless folks living in Los Angeles, often in squalor, it provoked me to think about the situation slightly differently from how I (we?) usually do, and to ponder about living in squalor in the context of the recent enormous migration to cities. Despite the supposed advantages of living in green acres,  Eva Gabor was not the last to say, 'Darling I love you but give me Park Avenue'.

It was when I lived in a tent that most people considered me homeless. I was fresh off a three-years-long kayaking wander and I didn't want to have walls between me and the sounds of the rest of the world. But I never lived in squalor. REI and friends made it possible to live quite luxuriously in a tent. I even had a silk persian carpet, although it didn't come from REI. There is a long history of living in tents luxuriously. Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, progenitors of many of the world's troublemakers, lived in tents. Of course when I lived in a tent, I was convienently reliant on city water and electricity and sewage. And when the going got really rough out there in the wilderness, Abraham and his harem hightailed it to Egypt, the ancient equivalent of Park Avenue, for a good meal.

But for very many people, country living has not been luxurious. It has been squalid.  The water supply for the kitchen was often polluted by the toilet. (One high tech feature of Benedictine monasteries wasvto put the kitchen upstream from the latrine.) Health care often consisted of little more than a rag dipped in coal oil. Food was scarce and blankets were thin.

A local church here in Port Townsend serves soup to whomever in Wednesdays. (It gives them a chance to do good while wearing rubber gloves.) I go every few weeks, partly because I am lazy and it saves me washing dishes, but partly also to eaves drop. I am always after data. I went there yesterday, and sat with two homeless men. They had not met me before, and told me a list of places to eat free in the PT area. Even the small city of Port Townsend has amenities for the homeless.

Eighty-five years ago, the people who lived in penthouses on Park Avenue or Wilshire Boulevard could not see the people living in squalor in the green acres in between, nor could the squalid even imagine life at the top. But now people living in squalor know what everyone else does: there are advantages to living in the city. There is access to clean water. People will give you socks and blankets. There are a lot of free meals. It ain't Park Avenue, but people keep choosing it over the woods.

Having everyone squeezed together in cities means that the people living in squalor are no longer invisible to comfortable folks: they have become a problem, a much more incarnate problem by far than the photos of James Agee. What sort of problem the exposure of the inequalities of human life poses is, of course, debatable, with there being many different viewpoints but no clear solution visible from any of them.

I would like to offer a few thoughts on this very visible situation, foolish as I may be.

Being homeless and destitute is not new but cities and communities provide a better environment than the countryside.

The short-term effects of mechanisation and digitalisation of what have been human jobs will amplify the differences between the rich and the poor. I continue to find that the condition of the poorest people is improving, and that the trickle down effect has worked and continues to work, but that it's not most importantly money that trickles down. Few people who read the book or watch the movie Grapes of Wrath consider what an unusual thing it is that the Joads are refugees with a truck. The California in which the Joads arrive was as centered around the motorized vehicle as was the Joads family. But there are fewer and fewer jobs for the Joads in today's California.

We can adjust to the new situation. Our situation comedies have tried, with Friends replacing Ozzie and Harriet. But we will not necessarily adjust to the new situation. I have asked the hive mind of Facebook if there is a successor to comedies situated at home. All I could think of was Game of Thrones.

The situation is not, despite my digs at the church, a moral one. I have singled out Christians who want something done, just not in our backyard, because no matter how elevated, how compassionate, our rhetoric is, we are all uncomfortable with the strange, the other. My adventures in bringing the homeless home home was indeed an adventure. These days strange others are coming at us faster than ever before.

The situation is what I call a post-economic one. Economics has usually been an effort to manage scarcity, hopefully to diminish it. But we really do have the abilities to end scarcity. It is our  self-blinded insistence on false understanding that stands in our way. The North Koreans live in darkness because their leaders have convinced them that the world is depriving them of electricity. Rich Europeans with no knowledge of biology or chemistry, but who can afford any foods they want, are trying to outlaw the advances in farming that can provide food for seven million people.

I think that always the key to understanding a situation is to consider not so much 'what is'  as 'what is happening'.  From that viewpoint urban homeless joins urban wealthiness as part of our moving to the city, as part of our becoming a visibly more interlinked world.

It's certainly a new world. Are we brave enough to look at it?

The Irish Wake: Thoughts on Migration within the Global Village

Recently I watched a series of videos (https://youtu.be/ZbJuT8IaMr0) about the great ocean liners connecting Europe and the United States for more than a century following the middle of the nineteenth century. Something which surprised me is that much if not most of the profits of those vast and luxurious sea-faring hotels came from the steerage passengers immigrating to America from Europe. Looking back at that era through the rear-view VR headset of Twitter, we often romanticize or ignore the conditions of that migration, usually dividing between those of us who welcome more immigrantion and those who fear it.  Something else I learned suggests to me that to look at today's migrations through the rear-view mirror misses something profoundly different about the world in which today's migration occurs. That difference was suggested to me by the Irish custom of the American Wake.

Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century was what some today might describe as a shit-hole country. We might argue about the reasons for the conditions in Ireland, but it was a place many wanted disparately to escape. As many as 4.5 million Irish would emigrate to the United States, about half the population of Ireland, making them a third of all U.S. immigrants. Often before they left, families and friends would hold an American wake. Once they left the docks of Ireland, they would be as separated from their families as if they were dead.  Migrants in that misty age left a country which was largely imaginary to the people of the country to which they were going, just as their destination was largely imaginary to the the people whom they were leaving. They would be strangers in a strange land, celts among angles and saxons, catholics among protestants. Many jobs would be closed to them, and the Ku Klux Klan would harass them. But, it was expected that the separation would be complete and final.

So far as I know, even though many Americans saw the Irish as dirty, ignorant, drunken catholics, there was no fear that they might take over the government or impose Irish law or customs. Rather, they were seen as diluting the purity of WASP America. The most dangerous thing about them was their catholicism, a danger shared with the Italians and Poles and Hispanics. The danger was not that they would try to impose Irish rule, but papal rule. (I saw this fear fleshed out during the 1960 U. S. presidential election. My great-grandmother, a protestant, had a catholic sister who visited that summer. During the heat of an Arkansas summer, the two sisters , Nora and Georgia, made war with their rocking chairs.  The evil catholic sister was denied use of the car to attend mass. She faithfully walked each morning.) But it was expected that Irish- and other catholic-Americans would put their Americanism first, as John F. Kennedy tried to do. Some Irish-Americans did send money to support the Easter Rising, but I have found no evidence that they took any religious stance towards the Spanish-American War, although the St. Patrick's Battalion, a unit of 175 or so led by John Riley, had fought with the Mexicans in the Mexican-American War.

In general, the huge migration to the United States beginning in the 1840's of which the Irish were a large part, took place during, and was part of the nationalism and industrialisation of the age. The counties the Irish left, the duchies the Italians left, the petty principalities the Poles left, were more a part of their self-identity than any nation, a concept which was yet emerging in europe. In the United States they would land in a nation very consciously building itself, a country which enjoyed Henry Clay's claim that it had a manifest destiny. They were part of something larger, something about which one son of celtic immigrants would sing, 'This land is your land, this land is my land'. Just crossing the ocean they would have travelled much farther than their forebears. Now they spread out into a nation comprised not of uniting territories with ancient histories of their own, such as Bismark and Garibaldi were attempting, but a nation of territories cut out of whole cloth by the original states (Texas and California excepted). Industrialization was creating new jobs every week.

Now migration takes place in an era of globalism and post-industrialism. Nations are no longer the largest units of power: for many people Google provides more essential services than does the national government. Jobs is a category in chaos: it makes no sense to bar immigrants from jobs which no longer exist. We are all pretty much strangers in a strange world.  There is often very little time for the families and friends to hold a wake for emigrants when they are leaving as the shells are falling, but neither is there any sense that, if they can survive, emigrants will never be heard from again.

We live in McLuhan's famous global village, where all of us have the latest gossip on everyone. It is a front porch on which we all are sisters fighting for identity--McLuhan argues that all acts of violence are ways of defining identities--as the world around us becomes smaller each day. Few historic artifacts have been more significant than Apollo 17's photograph of the blue marble that is 'this fragile earth,our island home', as Howard Galley described it.

The Irish migrated from a small island to what seemed a vast continent. Now we all live, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not, is a small island in space. Few of us are willing to do the work to understand what this implies. We tend to either deny our fears, or misplace them.

Some of us, who often call ourselves progressives, deny being fearful and stressed, and like to think we can absorb all the cultures and people that come to our shores. (Some of my friends in this category belong to a church which does not allow homeless people to sleep on their property or use their restrooms, and which cancelled Sunday breakfasts because people were migrating in from the streets.)

Some of us, who often call ourselves conservative, claim that without interference from foreign people and ideas, we could return to the greatness we imagine existed before World War II or some other watershed.

I would suggest that Alvin Toffler was right, and all of us are walking around in shock. We are all strangers in a strange land, and as the events of violence in the United States show again and again, we are quite capable of being overstressed without outside influences. If we want outside influences to justify our feelings of distress, there are plenty of them, willing to blame all the problems of contemporary life on capitalism or patriarchy or socialism or international trade or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--pay your data and take your choice.

Once when Marshall McLuhan had been lecturing about the rate of change in which we live, he was asked, 'what should we do?' He replied, 'No one knows yet'. When we are all urged to take action, this is not a very satisfactory answer. But it is an honest answer, one which suggests that we need to pull back from bashing each other with our wheel chairs and realize that in a village most of the communication is gossip, neither gospel truth nor fake news. It is important that we listen. It is important that we, so far as we are able, understand. Most importantly we need to recognize our own fears, and develop some way of responding to them besides the fight or flight that were our options when we were few in number, wandering through the savannahs and deserts. On our little porch in our shrinking village, fighting just kills our sister and there's no room to flee.