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?
