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10 GROUNDCOVER NEWS HOMELESSNESS The New Revolution Content warning: suicide, death, profanity, righteous anger. Some facts have been masked to protect confidentiality (and some names have been changed to protect the innocent). Imagine you or someone you know gets mugged on the street. You were out late, had to go to the C-store to get a snack. Someone gets your attention while someone else hits you in the back of the head. You wake up in an ambulance without your wallet. There’s something else wrong but you can’t pin it down. After the emergency room stitched you up, you went home — brain foggy, struggling to remember things, struggling to find things. You have a closed head injury and your life is about to change for the worse. You begin struggling with time. You are late for appointments, for work, and you can’t tell the difference between 10 minutes and an hour. This goes on for some time because you also now lack the ability to determine something is wrong and you need help. Bills pile up, your performance at work declines. An eviction notice shows up on your door. Your job lets you go. You drink a little too much one night and get arrested for drunk driving. Your car is impounded and you have no money to get it out. Because your social skills are also in decline due to the injury, you have no one to turn to for help. So you do what hundreds of thousands in our country do — you get some tarps and set up a bed behind an abandoned warehouse. Your day now consists of finding food and avoiding getting mugged again. You go to day shelters and sleep outside at night. The life you lived before your TBI (traumatic brain injury) is but a distant dream — one that you wake up from from time to time. When you do, you realize you have become “them.” They are the homeless. You’re shabby, you start drinking more to block out the pain in your head and the pain in your life. You see yourself in the mirror and think “what the hell happened to me.” The more you try to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” the more you realize your ability to do so is severely compromised because of the brain injury. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t choose to get mugged. The hospital didn't catch the TBI. Shit happens. But now you got MAGAs and NIMBYs calling you a loser and a freeloader. Because “you could work if you wanted to, you’re just choosing to be lazy and drink.” Now you come to Ypsilanti because you heard Ypsi is open to helping the homeless get back to self-sufficiency JIM CLARK Groundcover vendor No. 139 — which is what the activist community is trying to do — make the homeless go away by solving their problems, not sending them down the road to Alligator Alley. You meet people who genuinely care, but you also meet raging right-wingers who insist that “it is the duty of the government to protect its citizens” means more police. But you are a citizen as well, so how is the government protecting you? In a perfect world, protecting you would mean helping you find housing and support services. The “taxpayers” believe they are somehow entitled to more protection from the government than its most vulnerable citizens. You are a refugee in your own country because your government failed to protect you. Instead what do they do? They evict you from your campsite behind the warehouse because “the property owner doesn’t want litter (your things) and an eyesore (talking about you).” If this isn’t your worst nightmare, the next part is ... So what do you do? You've burned your bridges, you have no faculties left to “get a job,” and now your own government has turned against you. What do you do? You hang yourself. In back of an abandoned warehouse, in the muddy swampy MDOT right-of-way. It might have been easier to get drunk and pass out on the tracks and wait for Amtrak, but you got the job done. Grisly? Macabre? Triggering? Well it happened. Your worst nightmare was someone else's reality yesterday. Zoom out. A cold war is a state of political hostility and tension between nations, waged through economic pressure, propaganda, espionage and proxy wars rather than direct military combat. The class war is a cold war. The power elite is the 1% of 8 billion people on the planet. This is about 80,000,000 rich people, who own nearly all the wealth. Of them, the ultra-rich number 4,000. This small oligarchy rules the planet. They are actively trying to kill the lower tiers on the hierarchy of wealth. To them it is a moral obligation. But even more so, to them it is something going on outside the limousine window. They believe the poor are the problem, and they have control of the goods and services across the globe. In some sense, we live at their mercy. They paywall us from food and medicine, they raised the cost of living so high that an income of $55k isn’t enough anymore. They have created a system that can predictably kill people without anybody sitting in a room deciding to kill them. They control what we have access to, they control what we buy, they control what we think. And we let them do it because they steered us toward becoming weak, stupid and oblivious — by design. If you’ve ever been homeless, you know how hard it is to get back on the horse. To be ruined, to be truly penniless, means no money in the bank, no paycheck coming soon, no car, no phone, no change for the bus, maybe a change of clothes, maybe some hygiene supplies, maybe the Kodak pictures that were your grandmother’s — if you have a backpack. And it might get stolen along with the last of your memories. To get the things you need takes days and weeks when you need it in hours and minutes. You may have a housing voucher, but it may get eliminated because we can’t have freeloaders. You may get a Bridge card, but you have to work 20 hours/week to qualify. If you could work 20 hours with a TBI it would be a miracle. But you don’t need a TBI to be ineffective, you just need to be homeless for a week. No sleep, poor food, no rest, no safety, no clear plan for the next year, month, week, day... you don’t even know where you’re sleeping tonight. Get a job. Yeah, that will fix it. Right. Landlords raise rents high enough to cause the bottom to drop out on many people’s lives. Rent goes up, wages don’t, so you can’t pay your rent and you get evicted, get a misdemeanor for sleeping in public (unless you’re in Tennessee where it is now a felony to sleep outside). Food and gas go up but not wages — medicine becomes more and more inaccessible. Tuition goes up ... Come on, how many more dots do you need? We are in a class war, a cold war, being waged by the power - Ypsilanti Bell Kramer encampment sweep update: On August 6, “Notice To Vacate” signs were posted at the camp with a September 1 deadline. Just after 7 a.m. on Tuesday, September 2, five cop cars and 10 officers from the Ypsilanti Police Department, escorted by PATH team, woke all campers and served them each trespasses. YPD reiterated the imminent threat of forced eviction, but did not give a specific date. elite. They are getting bolder. How do people die in a cold war? They starve. They become desperate and make mistakes. They turn to drugs because being numbed makes starving and dying easier. They die of pneumonia in prison or something caused by black mold. They get hit by trains and cars. They fall off bridges. They get beaten and left for dead. But the most popular and preferred way the rich kill the poor is by creating all the elements necessary to drive someone into severe depression where they do the job themselves. Shawn Hardman was driven to suicide because the government failed to protect him. This makes him a casualty of war. In war, you have an enemy and you want them dead. Who were Hardman's enemies? Who cut him off from life support? Who kept him from housing? Who kept him from working? Who kept him from getting help from the state? The landlords, the business owners, the property owners, the right wing and even the local government. We are in a cold war. In a hot war, you kill the enemy with guns and bombs. In a cold war you kill the enemy with neglect, ghosting and othering. Hardman was a casualty of war. And in war when you are attacked, you counter-attack. Hanlon's razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." People know the homeless are there but choose to wear blinders. Knowing there is a problem but not caring is complacency. Knowing there is a problem and letting it remain because you like the outcome is malice. Knowing homelessness kills people and allowing it is cold-blooded murder. There are monsters out there who starve the homeless the same way white settlers starved the aboriginals of this area. They pulled up the wild rice so the “brown skinned savages” would have nothing to eat. They pushed them out of their homes and took all their food. Doesn’t that sound familiar? The New Revolution is on ... Whose side are you on? SEPTEMBER 4, 2026

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