According to Jesus, the only way to get to Heaven is to treat ‘the least of those amongst us’ the same way that you would treat Jesus Himself — with the understanding that Jesus Himself was also the Son of God. [Matthew 25:40]
According to this standard, the Olympia City Council will not be going to Heaven.
There have been scores of academic peer-reviewed studies done upon the subject of homelessness. Their almost universal conclusion is that putting homeless people into homes is the cheapest and most effective method of dealing with the problem.
(Though the studies usually don’t mention it directly, this is also the most humane method of dealing with the problem.)
These studies also conclude that the most expensive, least effective (and though they don’t usually mention it directly the least humane method) is to criminalize homeless people and start running them through the jails, giving them a bunch of fines that they will never be able to pay, and otherwise leaving them to crap in the bank’s flower bed if they don’t freeze to death between their repeated and costly stays in jail.
All of this information is immediately in the face of anyone who starts researching this issue. It is not a secret.
This being the case, can anyone explain to me why nearly every city in the United States chooses the most expensive, least effective, and least humane way to deal with homelessness rather than the cheapest, most effective, and most humane way?
I think that this would be a very good question to put to the Olympia City Council.
A lot of people are currently mobilizing to do just that, in fact, and in a manner that the council will not be able to easily ignore.
The situation is especially reprehensible when you consider that for every homeless person in the United States there are five empty foreclosed homes dragging down property values, rotting away abandoned and unloved, and making the neighbors uncomfortable. In many cases the banks that claim to own these homes can’t prove that they do in fact own them and even if they do ‘legally’ own them then more likely than not this means that their masters on Wall Street conducted criminal fraud in order to obtain these homes in the first place…
…so screw them.
Eminent Dominion?
Washington CAN is thinking of taking on a campaign targeting the banks that refuse to work with homeowners to stay in their homes; they want the State of Washington to use the rule of ‘eminent domain’ to force these banks to sell these foreclosed homes to the state at current market rate so that the state can then refinance the loans and keep the people in their homes.
The controversial practice of ‘eminent domain’ is used by governments to take control of private property when there is a ‘compelling public interest’ in doing so.
I think that than keeping people in their homes qualifies as a ‘compelling public interest’.
This is likely to become a serious campaign and the other side will poodliate in their droodliays and fight us tooth and nail thus transforming it into a ‘controversy’ which means a lot of people will be talking about this concept so I think this will be a very good campaign. Stay tuned.
CIVIL Uprising
As far as defending the homeless: Homeless people are tough to defend because hardly anyone really likes them. Other than social workers and the occasional activist they have no constituency and no political clout. They piss off conservatives and embarrass liberals. None of them ever have any cigarettes. Most people wish they would just go away. Many of them are almost completely helpless and many of them are truly offensive human beings. A highly disproportionate number of them are seriously mentally ill. A highly disproportionate number of them have drug and alcohol problems. A highly disproportionate number of them are veterans who fried their brains in service to their country and were then thrown onto the trash-heap once that country was done with them.
More and more of them are families with children.
All of them are humans.
— C.I.V.I.L. [Citizens in Violation of Illegal Laws] has been on hiatus lately, but whenever the downtrodden are being trodden down, CIVIL stands ever ready to mount their horses and draw their swords!
There are some major actions being planned in early March that will be aimed at the city around their criminalization of homelessness. Join C.I.V.I.L. [Citizens in Violation of Illegal Laws] on Facebook to plug in and/ or to stay apprised or send an email to dana98501@gmail.com
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