By Anna Von Reitz
I have the deepest empathy for all those who are struggling over housing issues. This shameful state of affairs is totally unnecessary and is the result of gross breach of trust and misadministration . We are moving as quickly as possible to correct it by ousting the District Courts and by forcing them to review their decisions and exonerate those taken against Americans. Believe me, I am putting the hammer down on the rats so hard that they can barely squeak. Their abuse of the court system, their failure to provide remedy (and therefore the illegality of the Federal Reserve Note), and their trespass on our States of the Union is being rammed down their throats on a daily basis.
Their breach of trust and service contracts is the topic that won't go away, and the Due Process that was served on them for seven (7) years won't go away, either.
Our approach at the Federation level is to ignore the brush fires in favor of catching the arsonists ----and putting them in jail or deporting them outside our borders. This solves the basic problem at the source, and will then allow us to attend to the individual situations.
At the present time, using the data and statistics available, the homeless population is largely composed of the elderly, young families, and "unemployables" who are disabled in some way. The split is uneven and varies from state to state, but remains consistent overall.
What can we do for the homeless right now? We can open our hearts and really look at them and really see them. That's the hard part. Look into their faces, stop to talk, try to figure out who they are and where they rightly belong. Then do what we can to get them there.
Jim and I once converted an old log outbuilding on our property into a make-shift home for homeless men. Jim went out on the streets and talked to them, and those he deemed safe, he brought home. They had to cut their own wood, shovel their own snow, keep their own outhouse clean, do their own laundry, haul their own water, and cook their own food. I typed up their resumes if they had skills for those kinds of jobs, and they were all welcome to pursue any day work they could find. I scouted the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores for clothes for them and furniture for their needs. There was no electricity in their shelter, but they had books and board games and hobby supplies. Our 16" x 40" shed had an average of three men, sometimes up to five or six all living peaceably together, surviving the winter. We gave them basic food -- ham hocks, onions, root vegetables, beans, rice, flour, coffee, lard.... the basics of life, a bed to sleep on, chairs to sit on. Come winter, they had a "freezer" in the form of an insulated fish locker.
The hardest cases were men too old to work hard, who had no family. They made friends and tried their best to help and guide the younger men.
All that came to an end in 1996 when the Miller's Reach Fire devastated our whole community and burned down our house and the shelter building, both.
Our success at running a make-shift, unofficial shelter for homeless men depended on Jim's unerring ability to discern those who could fit into the social setting we had to offer.
In case there was any doubt, we are most cruel to homeless men in this society; women can usually find somewhere to stay and get preference, especially if they have children. I guess men are supposed to freeze at lower temperatures than women. Whatever reason it is, men take the worst of the homeless blight.
"Taking in strays" as our disdainful neighbor called it, isn't for everyone. Jim was still a mighty man in middle age so there were no bunkhouse fights or problems of that kind, but it was most likely because Jim was formidable in his own quiet way, and because he knew men. He could sort the addictions and the hard luck stories and discern the truth. He knew when someone would fit into our place and who wouldn't.
I think about all those men "just passing through" our lives, some for a week, some for a month, some for a winter. I know what happened, ultimately, to a few of them -- but most just went on down the road. The one thing they had in common is that they had shelter from the cold and a lifeline through the winter.
We often wondered how all the churches in the area stood there all warm and bright, and largely empty all the time, and never appeared to think that the homeless clustered helplessly nearby, freezing and starving, might be their brothers, or even their Lord -- that they might be honor-bound to do something practical to help. To at least try. The attitude of the snooty neighbors just echoed the institutional failures. Good people, they believed, don't end up on the street.
Our experience contradicts that self-satisfied excuse. Good people wind up on the street every single hour of every single day, and it's not their fault that they do.
An effective effort begins with having the courage and taking the time simply to talk to the homeless as people. Find out who they are. And then having the street smarts to evaluate what they tell you. Are they mentally ill? Veterans suffering from untreated PTSD? Workmen who hit a stretch of bad luck? Abused wives with nowhere to flee? Orphaned or abandoned teenagers chucked out of State programs at the age of 18? Chronic alcoholics? Drug addicts? Criminals working a beat? Immigrants who don't know the language or culture?
Someone has to ask the questions. Who are they? How did they get into this situation? What do they need, right now, today, and what do they need to make their way forward?
Somehow, despite over two billion Christians, Jews, and Muslims who have all been taught better, the homeless and the orphans continue to suffer and die.
Nobody is honest. Nobody admits that the condition of the homeless scares the wealthy and the complacent. Yes, it frightens them. They recoil and glance swiftly away. Or keep their head turned avoiding eye contact altogether. They don't want to ask the questions. They don't want to know the answers. They just want to get away and keep endlessly working, so that they don't end up the same way.
Sometimes, in a misguided attempt to help, people wind up creating something worse. Here's an example of it -- the so-called "orphan trains" that saved children from one bad situation, just to land them in something arguably worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0eYVPgLVdg&list=PLNPtrE3klhpBBw0uuszXzrQb-PVx6QBHv
If you can take a moment to go beyond being "entertained" and listen to a woman's experience of being an orphan at the mercy of the Childrens' Aid Society, it may change your life. It may bring you into a whole new realization of the ways that the homeless have been exploited, and how commercialism, abuse, and enslavement go hand in hand, and always have.
But before you run off to do your homework and watch this video, I want to say something crucial.
The woman who shared her life story in this video was wrong about something. She thought that she "lost" something, in her case, the ability to connect and to feel, and she believed that she couldn't get it back. She believed that she was just "broken" and could never be mended.
That belief became the truth for her. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others defined her as a thing, a worker, a tool, a slave. That was the only definition she knew. The only way she was taught to react. She most likely lived out her life never realizing that she could redefine herself, could be her own parent, could live for some other purpose than work, work, work. Most likely, even her own children, never stopped and asked the questions. Never took the mending or the potato peeler out of her hands. Never sat her down and played a song for her and certainly, never taught her to dance.
Everyday, I have to deal with the brokenness of the world, with broken children, and broken adults. They come to me in droves. They cry on my shoulder. They tell me things that they can barely admit to themselves on a dark day in the bathroom, alone. And it always comes as such relief to them, to simply tell the truth, whatever the truth is. To have someone listen.
To have someone be truly present for them.
No matter how you cut it, it all begins and ends with communication. The answers, and the healing, begin with communication. And courage. Always, solutions take courage.
Sometimes the most fierce battles are the ones you have within yourself, when you are tired, when you are fed up, when you feel like you've got nothing left to give, when the weight of your own problems seems to be just about more than enough and your pocketbook is slim.
It happens when you walk by that Salvation Army volunteer, because you are embarrassed by poverty and faith. It happens when you turn aside from the young beggar in the parking lot, asking for gas money when he doesn't have a car. It happens when you think that you don't have anything in common with a black man in his forties or a Muslim mother from Sudan.
One day, the moment comes, when all the riches in the world mean less than nothing at all. All the pride falls away. You are left looking back at your life, and what you did, or failed to do with it. You suddenly see yourself as your own Observer, realizing what a gift and resource you were given, and also, realizing how you wasted it, spent it chasing things that didn't matter, and failed to do what you were called to do, and what you could have done.
Don't let that moment find you, when you have nothing left to say.
Granna
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