Down and out inside America- collected memories

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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There was a night homeless walking in the snow inside a blizzard with the temperature being negative fifteen degrees I approached a bridge because I seen a fire smoldering inside a steel barrel drum from a distance.

There an elderly man with glasses who was also homeless offered me drink of whiskey keeping warm near the lit fire.

I asked him where he got the steel drum from? And he said that he stole it from the nearby abandoned warehouse.

I asked him why he was homeless and he told me that after spending his monthly income on medications to keep himself alive he had no money left for rent or anything else afterward.

I then seen his mangled hand missing four fingers and asked him what happened.

He said he lost all four of his fingers in the previous winter due to frost bite.

It was from that night going forward I knew how wicked, tyrannical, and unequal this nation really was bringing ruin to the people who live here. After that night I never seen that elderly man ever again.

:clown_face:

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Why were you homeless?

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@Ichthus77

1.)No family support structure.

2.)No professional career occupation.

3.)Some of the worst economic years.

4.)Was single at the time.

5.) No money.

6.) The programs that supposedly exist to help the homeless inside the United States are the worst ones of the entire industrial modern west as a whole.

You’re always just one lost job and last paycheck away from being thrown out onto the streets. And I survived on those streets destitute and elsewhere for many, many years.

:clown_face:

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How did you get out of it?

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Pure random luck. Most never get out of it and that’s the simple truth of it all.

:clown_face:

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Please describe the events of your getting out of it. What took place and how long did it take between homelessness and when you no longer felt your housing situation was unstable?

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I don’t want to divulge into too much because I like my internet anonymity.

I will say I was almost homeless for thirteen years straight and it took me five years to fully recover from that horrifying life experience.

:clown_face:

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wow, you sound pretty familiar.

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Follow up question. How much did your “wife” help you get out of homelessness?

Feel free to keep your anonymity and just give a general percentage.

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I guess your collected memories aren’t going to be very …memorable …are they?

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@Ichthus77

Depends on what you mean by memorable.

But I am also smart enough to not play your games woman.

:clown_face:

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I’m not playing that game. I’m not your woman; your wife is the only one you should be calling woman. Muting this thread.

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I met an old lady from Louisiana living on the streets, she was in her 70s with her southern accent. Like the song “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena” by the Beach Boys she was full of piss and vinegar for an old gal where she could talk your ears off constantly for hours on end.

She was very nice to me, helped me with food and cigarettes living on the streets where in return I would help her being that she was an older person.

The winter was quickly approaching and as always for any homeless person living on the streets it is the worst portion of the year, thousands of people die every year being homeless forced to live outside because they simply just freeze to death overnight. While people are gearing up for Christmas with lights, decorations, and holiday cheer the homeless living on the streets are just trying not to die where falling asleep in the cold can be just another death sentence.

Because she was old and frail going to the forests on the outskirts of town to make fires keeping warm overnight wasn’t possible as she was largely immobile. Instead I found a church in the downtown portion of the city to crash in at nights sneaking into their outside patio with an overhang to shield us both from any rain or snow. The old lady from Louisiana was a Godly woman and a devout Christian always talking about how Jesus would judge the rich for their treatment of the poor.

She herself was thrown out onto the streets by her own daughter if you can imagine that because her daughter viewed her as being too problematic to be taken care of.

One night a pair of church parishioners and the priest came across us sleeping in the patio where the priest himself accosted us.

He shouted, “You cannot stay here! If you don’t leave right now I will call the police on the both of you!”

I responded back, “But, are you really afraid of this religiously devout old lady and myself who are just trying to have a safe place to sleep at night?”

He replied, “Rules and laws are what they are.”

I replied back, “What would your God Jesus say of your treatment of the poor you being a man of the cloth as a representative of his church? Wasn’t your own God homeless too walking amongst the cities of men?”

He responded, “You have no right to lecture me, street urchins the both of you!”

Finally as I am gathering my stuff to leave the premises where the old lady friend of mine was crying screaming to the very heavens for the Jesus she revered above all I turned to the good priest and had my last words with him. I then said, “I don’t really think you believe in anything, you’re a scoundrel and the worst kind of religious hypocrite. Your faith is as dirty and diluted as this filthy concrete floor I was laying upon.”

And with that we both left those cathedral grounds wandering the entire city all night in exhaustion without any sleep for the both of us.

After that night we eventually came across a tent city of other homeless people, fifty tents in total. I couldn’t stand that city any longer and I just planned to keep moving onwards.

I offered to take the old lady with me as I worried about her safety and health, but she insisted on staying saying Jesus had plans for her in defying the human cruelty of the local city’s inhabitants. After that day I never seen that old lady again and I often think about whatever happened to her with her Louisiana southern draw or charm.

:clown_face:

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A lot of people are on the street because they cannot hold a traditional 9-5 job that pays a living wage due to mental or behavioral health issues. Mental health is sorely undertreated and people are undersupported in our society unless they have the money to afford it. Many organizations such as NAMI have been advocating for people with mental health issues for years to help them get shelter, food, and other essentials. There are local organizations and governments that provide a better safety net than others. But on the whole, a person with severe behavioral or mental disorders is basically left out to die on the street in the US unless they can attain SSI (which pays next to nothing) or else SSDI (if, like me, they worked for most of their life). Even disability provides scant coverage to pay for living expenses. Many are unable to apply for things like SSI or SSDI becasue they can’t effectively practice self-help. So they rely on charities and charities are underfunded and just tell you to go to another charity if they can’t provide it. So you go to the next charity and they send you back to the first you went to.

The religious right love to cut social programs and are usually economic fundamentalists who haven’t yet advanced beyond Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and therefore advocate for “less government” and more voluntary private charity, which doesn’t fill the needs out there. It’s disgusting.

I’m sorry you went through that. I can see now why you have the beliefs you do. I don’t advocate for any kind of dictatorship but some ordinary voters out there need to get their heads out of fundamentalism and evolve if unless they just want to euthanize their fellow human beings which is what they’re basically doing. Of course, abortion is “murder” but casting people with mental health issues to the gutter to starve is fine for them.

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in my opinion the main problem is lack of anti-monopoly enforcement. Yea I use the word “anti-monopoly” not anti-trust, clearly the phrase “anti-trust” has not been effective thus far in anti-monopoly enforcement.

because rent prices seem to be the most unreasonable prices in my opinion, if rent was more reasonable then poor people wouldn’t have so much poverty everywhere. Because these land owners all get bought out by giant corporations that price gouge everywhere. So there also has to be Socialist anti-price-gouging policies as well.

To me it seems more logical this way than raising taxes for everyone. This way the taxes are raised for noone, while also the poor suffer less. The only people that do not gain from this, are landlords and corporations.

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That too. Socialized housing is difficult to get funding for also. In this economy you either “swim” or die. The tough love crowd says it helps them learn to “swim”, except many end up dying on the street or in a shelter instead because they can’t find the help they need.

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@GaryChildress

Most of the nation likes to think a majority of the homeless are mentally ill or drug addicts, but that’s just not the case at all from my experiences. It certainly is a convenient political cover for the homeless epidemic in this nation because if we were more honest with ourselves we would know that it is massive economic inequality causing most of it. Certainly there are a lot of drug addicts and mentally ill people living on the streets, but they in no way make up the majority like the popular political stereotype would suggest otherwise.

There once was a popular euphemism on the streets I was acquainted with.

“If you’re not a drug addict or mentally ill now give it a couple of months to a year and you will be eventually.”

So few of the population know about the absolute hell and penury of people living on streets inside of the United States where even more care to not know at all. The stress, misery, despair, desperation, and absolute hopelessness of living like that which causes people to act out publicly.

Most have no clue how condemned people really are forced to live like that, the dark and dirty underbelly of society really being hell on earth of constant tormented souls living in the shadows. A kind of hell that you have to climb out of under the most worst kinds of human conditions, that is if it doesn’t kill you first or you don’t die trying in the process of escaping from.

Climbing out of the lowest depths and bottom of society you learn very quickly how much of a human prison this civilization really is, a harvester of pure human suffering.

:clown_face:

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That makes sense. I used to be a peer support specialist for a community mental and behavioral health organization (I’m bipolar with psychotic features myself) and it’s extremely difficult to assimilate a person who has been on the street for long back into a 9 to 5 life that can support a person in this society but it can be done. However, some are just too broken to overcome the amount of trauma they’ve experienced. That’s why there needs to be a safety net to begin with so that no one falls to that point and after that there needs to be a basic income and housing for those who are unable to recover a productive life.

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@GaryChildress

On that we can find some agreement.

:clown_face:

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I was drunk walking around in Savannah one night having been kicked out of a bar because I had been rapping loudly in Dutch. I was drinking vokda with orange juice, finding myself at one point on the bench from Forest Gump. I proceeded to the motel, but the room was closed as the people I was with were still in the bar. I was yelling again, it must have been because a dude that was walking there said to me ‘youre a hellraiser, I can tell’ and grinned. I decided to take a walk behind the motel, where the city transitioned into the ‘hood’. I walked there drunk as hell, found myself on a trail of shards of glass, looking at the moon and how it reflected in the trail of glass. I spread my arms. At that moment I heard behind me: “Yo whitey!” I turned around. “We seen you whitey!” Three enormous black dudes came walkimng up to me, putting their hoods on. One of them asked “you got a twenty?” I said something like “well what will you give me for it?” He seemed to find that ressonable, and offered me a handful of weed. I looked at it sceptically. “Thats definitely some reefer” he said. I was still hesitating what to do, didn’t much like being coerced even though the weed was very sticky and it was a handfull, definitely worth 20 dollars, when another one of them knocked his fist into my head, and I was on the ground. “Take it all!” one called as they emptied my pockets. They took whatever cash I had left, no idea how much it was, as I had been spending quite a lot that evening, but one of them came running back and tossed my ATM card onto my stomach. I felt deep gratitude for that. I stood up, noticed the weed in my hand, dropped it on the ground - it was so sticky that some of it clung to my hand. I walked back to the motel, was able to get in this time. Next day I decided to take the bus to New Orleans. Lots of shit happened there too. In the hospital I lay next to a guy with a cockroach stuck in his ear. Another guy played a guitar with one string, singing: A broken heart ain’t so bad, if you don’t take it so personal! Which I then did not realize was probably a comment on myself, as that’s pretty much the state I was in.

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