tent living . . .
Posted by admin on December 8th, 2009
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Yesterday I heard a loan modification person say she didn’t think homelessness had reached crises proportions. Really?
Numbers.
Type “America’s tent cities” into google: 7,720,000 items and 2,550,000 images (many of them duplicates, thank God). One blog sarcastically noted that “banks can’t (or won’t) finance the purchase of them (the tents).”
Equally sad is that the tent cities in America are not controlled or set up “properly” for the most part. If people have to live in them, then please treat this as the national disaster that it is and provide services such as you would after a flood or earthquake.
Instead, authorities (those that live in homes) destroy the tent villages; one group of officials cut up the tents of the homeless people so that they become tentless on top of being homeless.
Yes, there are chronic homeless individuals and that has been a problem in major cities for decades; however, we have a new class of homeless . . . people who in the last couple of years were working and paying their mortgage or rent to stay in “acceptable” housing. These people can be counted among the taxpayers of America. I promise you that you will find people living in those tents that are holding down jobs, getting to work every day, hiding their shame and embarrassment at their situation, and continuing to pay taxes.
Tent cities in some refugee camps around the world are established by various UN entities and while tent dwelling isn’t the average American’s ideal living situation, when tent camps are sent up properly, they are at least orderly and have appropriate facilities. After San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, members of my family lived in tent villages in Golden Gate Park. That was a state of emergency, and it seems that we are now in another state of emergency.
Some nations, such as Tibet and Turkey (images right) have taken tent living to a fine art and it has been necessary in some areas. “People of the Wind,” filmed in 1976, is a documentary of the Bakhtiari tribe of Southern Iran and depicts their annual 200 mile trek from the high summer pastures through a 12,000 foot pass in the Zagros Mountains (with tents, of course). The migration is to maintain their flocks of sheep and is mandatory for survival. Narrated by James Mason. Music by G.T. Moore (guitar) and Shusha (vocals) is haunting. (A 14-page pdf about this movie: People of the Wind).
In America, mortgage lenders have displaced more than 10 million people; wars in “third world” countries are not currently displacing that many men, women and children, yet we consider wars despicable and send troops to defend those families.
Why aren’t we sending troops to defend America’s working families? Again, I am truly curious? What IS the breaking point. When does someone decide that displacement of 10 million people is against our civil rights?
America’s working men, women — and often children — shaped this country into the great place that it is (was?). Why aren’t we being protected? How did we become “the enemy” and “inconvenient?” We are being “internally displaced” (meaning having to move within our own country) and our displacement rivals or exceeds international numbers:
2009, Sri Lanka: 300,000 war-displaced Tamils forced into camps;
2009, Yemen: 150,000 people fled fighting;
2009, Sudan: 250,000 displaced;
2009, Georgians: 192,000 displaced (Moscow, Reuters)
2008, Columbia: 380,000 forced off their farms by guerillas, paramilitaries or drug traffickers;
2008, World: 4.6 million from armed conflicts;
2008, World: 20 million displaced because of natural disasters such as flooding, earthquakes and storms.
When is the last time you read the America’s Declaration of Independence? It’s on line at the National Archives.
I still haven’t gotten around to asking a bookie or an actuary what the odds are of 10 million people defaulting on their loans without some type of “outside assistance” from the lending industry. And I still haven’t gotten around to finding out if lenders are totally covered no matter what they do to individuals, i.e. do they all have insurance and/or government (taxpayer) dollars to cover them so there is no loss no matter what?
Tags: declaration of independence, odds of default, tent cities
