Without a Home

All too often politics becomes an abstraction, a game where one side wins and one side loses, and only vaguely does one remember why one is rooting for one’s own side against the other guys. At other times the dots are connected, and we remember that public policy has results in real life.

I work at a moderately large suburban library. Despite being in the richest county in the country, we have a number of homeless people who come into use the library. Some read all day, others use our free internet access, still others just find a comfortable place to sit down. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, and have all sorts of different ways of dealing with life. Some have a cheer that many a rich man should envy. Others are on drugs. A few have serious medical conditions. Some have obvious mental health problems.

Their number is swelling, though. We see more new people every day. We often can’t tell they are homeless by their dress or manner or anything else, until we see that they know and greet the others, having met at a soup kitchen. There is a camaraderie of sorts among them.

Last night one of them, who used to be something of a problem patron but who for several years now, started again to be disruptive to other patrons. There had been a few other incidents with this patron, and rightly or wrongly, everyone, including myself, suspected that whatever medication had been helping her with her mental health issues was no longer being taken.

A couple of new guys, not seen before, smuggled some liquor into the library, and were flying high by closing time.

Also yesterday I noticed a missive from one of the local charities, telling us another homeless man had died from a chain of events that would never happen to a person with a roof.

I could tell you other case histories, some brief, some longer. We see a lot of these people every day. We try very hard to give them the dignity of being treated like every other patron who walks through our doors.

During the great depression, joblessness reached 25%. America was a largely rural area back then, and I think more of the homeless wandered from town to town on trains, and fewer stayed in one place. We’ll see it differently this time around. Homelessness will strike the good and the bad, the sane and the insane, single people and families. Our shelters and soup kitchens are already taxed, and resources will run thin. Those who are without homes will find it harder to get medical care, and harder to get food. Many will lose hope. Many will turn to drugs, or drinking. Many will die prematurely.

How we respond matters a lot. I don’t have all the solutions, or know exactly what government should do, and I do think that a good deal of the blame lands squarely on the current administration for deregulation and opposition to paying people a living wage. But we’re talking about a huge number of people. A change of 1% in the employment rate is a few million people, significantly larger than, say, the number of abortions that happen in this country, or the number of people executed. It’s larger than number of rich CEOs with golden parachutes, or the number of dollars Sarah Palin got out of the Alaskan treasury “for her kids.” We’re most likely looking at a jump in unemployment much larger than 1%. This isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s the number one “values” issue of the day.