New Winter Shelter Options
City officials, county officials, everybody is interested in upping Winter Shelter options for the local homeless. Happily, a few new possibilities have landed smack in our laps.
One is for the homeless to camp with Occupy Sacramento. Sure it sounds like camping, and in violation of ordinances, but it truly is the case that people can camp in the process of protesting (or so I'm told). So .... why not save two birds with one tent? Camp to protest, and while you're protesting survive the winter.1 Sounds like a Godsend to me.
It cannot be denied that the homeless have reason to protest. And, indeed, the SafeGround folk have an established history of protesting. Much of the Occupy Wall Street grievences match up with items that should be on homeless people's lists of gripes, anyway. And where is Occupy Sacramento? Why, in Chavez Park, a central spot for us homeless to hang already.
The other ideas come as a result of a search for homeless stuff among recent Google+ postings. What I found was a recent picture of the Montana cabin that Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, lived in. His cabin had been shipped across country for use at his trial in the late 1990s. Today, the cabin is stored in an otherwise empty warehouse in Sacramento.
Might not the cabin and the warehouse make for nifty space to shelter homeless folk!? Great idea, ya!? The cabin looks like a fine, upstanding, sturdy structure -- better than any of those plywood sheds that the ShakeDown folks -- er, I mean SafeGround folks -- are Jonesing for. And the warehouse -- WooHoo! -- looks big enough to hold hundreds.
But of course the nice cabin and big, big warehouse will be denied us. In an area where there is a multitude of empty structures, many homeless people are going to be outside this winter, including on the coldest of nights when temperatures dip into the 20s.
It's a chilling disgrace. And I sure wish citizens would hold the homeless-services industries' feet to the fire re all of this. It is they who bulk up their charities and are far the most to blame while providing stinting attention to the poor. If somebody dies this winter I am going to take MY protest to the warehouse that the twin disgraces Libby Fernandez and Joan Burke work in [if you call their putzing around "work"].
Oh, and while my dander is up, something else I learned today: The national head of Volunteers of America got a raise in his salary of something like 7%. He now makes more than $324,000/yr. A curiously huge sum for someone who works to coax citizens to "volunteer" their labor to aid the poor. Living large on the backs of others, eh, Mr. CEO? It stinks. It stinks to high heaven. Screw you, VOA.
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1 Bad news. The police arrested 20 people camping out on the first night of the protest. Freedom to protest is encumbered, at least in Sacramento. And, on the night of Oct 8, per Alexander Leach, the Liberal reporter for Sacramento for examiner.com, 14 more people were arrested. The Occupy folks are now seeking a variance to the city's anti-camping ordinance. Good luck with that. [I meant that last sentence both literally AND sarcastically. Sarcastically in the sense that I don't think there's a chance in hell they'll get their variance since we homeless will pounce after any variance is granted and stage our own OCCUPY SACRAMENTO for the sake of saving homeless people's lives this winter. A legal tent encampment could save lives, you see.]
 |
| Logo of Occupy Sacramento on their Facebook page. Occupy Sacramento is our burg's protest contingent as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement that is raising awareness and wants to fix the mess in America where corporations and those who are extremely wealthy have an exorbitant degree of power, as a result of, effectively, buying politicians. |
It cannot be denied that the homeless have reason to protest. And, indeed, the SafeGround folk have an established history of protesting. Much of the Occupy Wall Street grievences match up with items that should be on homeless people's lists of gripes, anyway. And where is Occupy Sacramento? Why, in Chavez Park, a central spot for us homeless to hang already.
The other ideas come as a result of a search for homeless stuff among recent Google+ postings. What I found was a recent picture of the Montana cabin that Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, lived in. His cabin had been shipped across country for use at his trial in the late 1990s. Today, the cabin is stored in an otherwise empty warehouse in Sacramento.
 |
| The Unibomber's once-remote cabin that he built in the outback of Montana is now more remote than ever before while being tantilizingly close to soon-to-be-cold homeless Sacramentans. |
Might not the cabin and the warehouse make for nifty space to shelter homeless folk!? Great idea, ya!? The cabin looks like a fine, upstanding, sturdy structure -- better than any of those plywood sheds that the ShakeDown folks -- er, I mean SafeGround folks -- are Jonesing for. And the warehouse -- WooHoo! -- looks big enough to hold hundreds.
But of course the nice cabin and big, big warehouse will be denied us. In an area where there is a multitude of empty structures, many homeless people are going to be outside this winter, including on the coldest of nights when temperatures dip into the 20s.
It's a chilling disgrace. And I sure wish citizens would hold the homeless-services industries' feet to the fire re all of this. It is they who bulk up their charities and are far the most to blame while providing stinting attention to the poor. If somebody dies this winter I am going to take MY protest to the warehouse that the twin disgraces Libby Fernandez and Joan Burke work in [if you call their putzing around "work"].
Oh, and while my dander is up, something else I learned today: The national head of Volunteers of America got a raise in his salary of something like 7%. He now makes more than $324,000/yr. A curiously huge sum for someone who works to coax citizens to "volunteer" their labor to aid the poor. Living large on the backs of others, eh, Mr. CEO? It stinks. It stinks to high heaven. Screw you, VOA.
=====
1 Bad news. The police arrested 20 people camping out on the first night of the protest. Freedom to protest is encumbered, at least in Sacramento. And, on the night of Oct 8, per Alexander Leach, the Liberal reporter for Sacramento for examiner.com, 14 more people were arrested. The Occupy folks are now seeking a variance to the city's anti-camping ordinance. Good luck with that. [I meant that last sentence both literally AND sarcastically. Sarcastically in the sense that I don't think there's a chance in hell they'll get their variance since we homeless will pounce after any variance is granted and stage our own OCCUPY SACRAMENTO for the sake of saving homeless people's lives this winter. A legal tent encampment could save lives, you see.]
posted by Thomas Armstrong at
October 06, 2011
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