Sacramento Homeless blog

This comes from an opinion piece titled " Decriminalizing Poverty ," written by Bruce Western, in the Dec. 27, 2010, issue of The Nation [emphases mine]: In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity, particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has become our surrogate social policy . For all the billions spent on draconian criminalization, addiction remains a scourge of the disadvantaged in inner cities and small towns, drugs are still plentiful and the drug trade remains a ready but risky source of casual employment for low-education men and women with no legitimate prospects. Though drugs are at the center of an array of serious social problems in low-income communities, things are made worse by a dysfunctional policy in which arrest, imprisonment and a criminal record have become a normal part of life . The most important lesson policy-makers can take from this historic failure of social engineering is that the drug proble...

Poverty and charity are two evils. The former grinds our bones and souls and children into rubble while the latter weakens and ultimately eliminates our ability to live lives for ourselves – leaving us dependent upon the kindness of bureaucrats. You know the ones - those people who have your life in a manila folder hanging from wires in a green filing cabinet that sits behind a locked door that you don't have the key for. The arbiters of philanthropy and good will organizations never prepare us for liberation or revolution; they never question their superior position of humility and selflessness or the rightness of their charity. Charity is the lesser evil but it is still evil. ― Walter Mosley , from his words accepting an award from Liberty Hill Through my veins run 10,000 years of history that touches every continent, deity, and crime known to humanity. This history is not composed of the false accounts of the past; it is the blood and the beat and the light that passes ...