In our work with the homeless, we see people daily who carry their entire worldly belongings in backpacks and plastic bags. There are perils during the warmer months for sure–infection, injury, overdose, and accidents by traffic or even by drowning; but the dangers of living rough are brought into fine focus in winter, when the difference in getting one’s needs met, or not, suddenly becomes a hairline’s width depending on which way the weather goes. It’s all hands on deck for many of us each winter in Columbia Missouri, as cold temperatures bring into relief how slim the cushion between existence and death is for disadvantaged members of our society.
Our Columbia homeless crisis, for whatever reason, has gained appreciable local attention the past year, with frequent media & social media stories about evicted families, a soup kitchen mutual aid program run out of the back of people’s cars, ARPA funding for the homeless, the kindness of a diner owner, the inhumane requirements for opening an overnight warming center, and a full-capacity-full-services Opportunity Campus shelter slated to open for the homeless sometime in the next several years.
It often helps me to stand back and look at our homeless population the way a biologist from another planet might. If one could view the pool of humanity as a giant whole, one would note variation in people’s conditions emanating from different sources; from genetic sources; from variation in parental or community care; and from variation in plain ol’ stochastic (the biologist’s fancy way of saying “random”) environmental luck–perhaps fire or disease or job loss. Some humans could end up in a bad state because of one of two of the above categories; some could end up in a bad condition due to all three; or someone profoundly suffering from just one of them–say, fetal alcohol syndrome–could be ruined for the rest of their life.
The question when viewed from the outside is a simple one: what are we to do?
Capitalism, as designed, has no answers to this question. In the US, social service programs from the Great Depression helped for a time and continue to help, but closures of mental institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, mass incarcerations, and welfare reform have weakened or overwhelmed these tools. In the 1980s, trickle-down economics was supposed to help the unfortunate, but was actually a disingenuous way to disguise globalism’s search for cheap labor, and resulted in the subsequent looting of the middle classes, creating not just a poorer population but also creating anger in a working class focused on the wrong enemy (immigrants and people of color) and leading to authoritarianism in the United States.
What are we left with? In the words of the late David Graeber, we are “a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings.” Without thinking much about an alternative, we have tacitly given government (as we know it) decades to fix this mess, and while government continues to be the most powerful thing (next to weather and disease) that we encounter, it continues to fail (despite its embracement by an educated populace and their exhortations to “vote” ourselves to a good society).
The bottom line is this: if you strip off everyone’s clothes and put them next to each other–whether rich or poor, whether on one side of a border or another–we are all just a bunch of David Graeber’s fragile beings; all of us, including Donald Trump, will be wearing diapers again if we become old enough or lucky enough to die in a peaceful setting. And while perhaps there may be no easy cures for our failure to take care of one another, it seems that the decline and collapse of capitalism might offer an opportunity for a nurturing localism to grow a society, where, instead of relying on a distant representative government, we become the “government” and actually take care of each other. We here in Columbia see what this might look like each winter in our service with the homeless, where a community of dozens of the non-elected take up where the government fails–feeding people and providing them fuel, clothing, and shelter. While some local movements as presently constituted are overwhelmingly geared toward the privileged, we also see possibilities through shifting the focuses of local food, community gardening, homesteading, and community school movements toward the whole community instead of serving artisanal and elite sensibilities as most of them do currently; this may be something that happens naturally as society shifts. One can always hope.
One thing seems for sure: although we can protest and “speak truth to power,” such as when governments enact egregious things like 9-degree thresholds for an overnight warming center, when the outrage subsides the system will go back to normal, because “normal” means that distanced elected representatives will serve moneyed interests who keep them in power (except for notable exceptions whom we applaud). If nothing else, the withering of society in the face of climate change–if not replaced by an overreaching authoritarianism–may allow us to create dual power systems, such as we see in Columbia Missouri right now, to make good things happen as society continues to decline.
References
http://www.midmojbgc.org/2020/12/21/national-homeless-persons-remembrance-day-2020/
https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/local/2022/01/08/columbia-homeless-family-endures-cold-temperatures-after-eviction/9108625002/
https://www.komu.com/news/midmissourinews/mobile-soup-kitchen-provides-food-to-unsheltered-members-of-the-community/article_de9cfc3c-40c7-11ec-9682-2387944cbc2f.html
https://abc17news.com/news/columbia/2022/01/21/watch-live-dozens-are-protesting-at-wabash-bus-station-over-columbias-warming-center-policies/
https://www.columbiamissourian.com/opinion/guest_commentaries/opportunity-campus-provides-columbia-a-chance-to-address-homelessness-and-its-causes/article_a781a47e-3347-11ec-9ceb-d7ca1f9265c5.html
https://jacobinmag.com/2016/02/welfare-reform-bill-hillary-clinton-tanf-poverty-dlc
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/david-graeber-posthumous-essay-pandemic
http://www.midmojbgc.org/2021/06/26/when-a-lethal-globalization-is-the-sickness-a-nurturing-localism-is-the-cure/
https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/covid19/council-members-weigh-in-on-wabash-warming-decision/article_01642b28-7ee4-11ec-a5f2-1346cb96387c.html