10 GROUNDCOVER NEWS HOMELESSNESS The not-so-great American essay Hello, readers! First time writer, and fresh reader here. Having personally experienced homelessness from coast to coast in recent years, and never having been homeless before the coronavirus panic, I feel like I bring a fairly fresh perspective upon the matter. I learned various tricks-of-the-trade quickly from “veterans” of the street, some of whom have had 30+ years experience on the matter. Ironically, most of that knowledge became obsolete overnight during periods of the changing socioeconomic landscape of these last several years, (such as public bathrooms and water faucets being locked down). Also, I experienced for myself both tyrannical enforcement by security forces (anti-warmth patrols concerning very public private property such as wide outside places or immovable objects) and bureaucratic xenophobia by social services. Apparently, need is often an exclusive club for identity stereotypes. But the last time I checked, need can happen to anyone, anytime. It was often other homeless people who were more willing to help than the pachinko-machine-of-a-system that we call public and private subdivisions of the Department of State and Department of Health and Human Services. (Pachinko is a Japanese roulette gambling machine. The additional rationale for the metaphor is the fact that gambling businesses don’t gamble — they all operate on statistics.) Not to When not homeless myself, I would AUSTIN CASH Groundcover vendor No. 627 say there aren’t heroic figures who go above and beyond to do their jobs at times, because there are. But if given enough time to tweak the system’s settings, authorities may abuse the ability to bottleneck within such top-heavy bureaucracies, due to such motivations as ego or polarized herd mentality. I’ve noticed within my short time here in Ann Arbor that Groundcover News gives a perfect excuse for the local mainstream society to safely approach homeless people (when they actually know about the paper). I think a decent chunk of people across the country would like to help people in general, but either can’t or don’t trust the average homeless person’s situation — be it a potential drug use problem or an unstable personality, or the unobservable, largely ineffective system. Although they still may “blind dump/give” into it occasionally hoping it will work out for the best. work around this issue by almost never giving money away, but would rather, when I had a moment, physically go to a place and buy a tangible object to hand off to an individual. Yahweh, the creator, commanded us to give 10% of our blessings in life to the causes important to Him, which is called a tithe, and frankly even someone making a mere $1,000 a month would have $100 to give by that standard. Now imagine if everyone walking down the street right now suddenly had $100, monthly, to give for meals, clothing or even communal housing for the less fortunate (no matter who they are)! People talk about social change more and more; they’re even getting closer to the grassroots design started around two millennia ago by the early “Christian” congregations, but the solution has been staring us right in the face as a society all along. We’re often too “sophisticated” for it now, but human issues are quite cyclical — we just tend to forget. The sin of Sodom (sin being a distortion of the divine perfect), after all, was documented as abundance plus pride while not giving to the poor (Ezekiel 16:49). But it seems familiarity has bred contempt for us in our recent generations. Also, sometimes people are just downright ignorant from not being taught in this day and age of disassociated social media groups, streaming, and algorithmic-induced endorphin rushes (that, too, preceded by the TV and radio). I grew up as a latchkey kid raised by the public grade school and the TV within postmodern American suburbia in a nominally Christian family, with really nothing more than Sunday school under my belt from kindergarten, and was eventually systemically put on a self-destructive path right before puberty — not even going to high-school. I did obtain a G.E.D. while working retail on the weekends during my later teenage years. Yet during my first 15 years of life I knew little to nothing about the foundational faith which I would personally profess later, and mostly was supplemented growing up by ideas of the humanism, new age and futurism that hovered around the coming of the new millennium. A family friend is the one who taught me about Yahshua of Nazareth, the Messiah (who western society calls Jesus Christ) more in depth. She even bought me my first Bible and began to counter the situation of me not attending high school via personal tutoring. Later, having been put off by the very homogenized, corporate herd culture that is the “Christianese” culture located in and around the Bible Belt of America, I started to consider myself personally “a believer in The Way” and not specifically a Christian (John 14:6, John 6:29). That being said, I struggled see ESSAY next page MARCH 22, 2024 Memes sourced from ImageFlip.com
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