In the midst of a hate blitzkrieg from the Sacramento Bee against the homeless, something that isn't known by some or gets forgotten, needs to be pointed out:. We homeless like cleanliness, tranquility and wholesomeness, too. As with anyone, THAT is how we would want our lives to be. Calm and open to possibilities.
You wouldn't know this in the way Marcos Breton, Ginger Rutland, the paper's editorial board and senior management choose to depict the poorest of the poor.
Many of the things said about the homeless used to be said about blacks and Jews and the Irish and gays. The same hate mongering that went on in the USA mere years ago [against gays], as recently as decades ago [against blacks and Jews], and more than a century ago [against the Irish] is not rejected or repressed when said cruelly about homeless people.
It remains, for now, politically correct to hate the homeless. The Bee is at the forefront in Sacramento in encouraging a mad belief that the homeless are at the root of what's wrong in Sacramento. It is the same kind of mad hatefulness that has bedeviled human beings since our species first started to organize itself into societies tens of thousands of years ago. Some people are tribal in their outlook and simply have to contort the situation to have some group to target and hate and blame. For many at the Bee, that targeted group is us.
Make no mistake, there are people who are homeless who are overwhelmed with problems -- like mental illness, addiction, narcissism and "almost psychopathy." Homeless people are, in social terms and with respect to income, the lowest 1%. We are the folks who are rejected, who are broken, or have fallen out of our lives. Knowing all this, I can tell you, having spent four difficult years in Homeless World, that homeless people vary mightily, one from another, yet as a group they are amazing. I would prefer the lowest 1% to the highest 1% IN A HEARTBEAT.
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