Edit

I kinda made this post out of spite for the fact the most previous post in this community, whose title I quoted/copied, was getting so many downvotes… At the time I posted this, the previous post had about a 30% downvote rate, and it really, really made me mad.

I am relieved tho to see people in the comments here who have real, actual empathy for their fellow humans. Thank you for contributing here.

It blows my mind how normalized it is to hate on those who are struggling. Especially in 20fucking23 when so many of us now are on the verge of it ourselves. Let’s be better, everyone - to everyone. I beg you.

  • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net
    0·
    1 year ago

    Nope nope nope nope nope. How do you know what communities and organizations the people in the tents belong to? Or how they’ve organized their network of tents and mutual aid, what relationships they have with nearby homeowners and business owners, how they gather and share resources and make decisions?

    Squatters and the unhoused routinely, out of necessity, form partnerships and communities with other unhoused and insufficiently housed people. We’d call those communities “communes” if they were made of rich white people owning homes. And yeah, people in those communities use drugs just like people who own houses do.

    Thinking more deeply about it, I think you’ve identified by example one of the many ways neoliberal ideology encourages discrimination against unhoused people. Neoliberalism teaches us that every unhoused person is an individual whose individual choices are to blame for his low social and economic status. So we assume unhoused people are alone, that they don’t belong to communities, that they have no family or social support, that they don’t have a network of mutual aid - even though, when someone is unhoused, having networks of mutual aid are even more important than they are for people with secure housing. And that lets us dismiss the unhoused as people without social connections who only care about their personal self interest.

    But no, that dude in the tent shooting up fent probably is part of a commune. He meets with other unhoused people to pool money and buy food or take advantage of free meals at the local gurdwara or use a gym membership to take a shower. He advises newly homeless people, he seeks advice from elders in the community, he hangs out outside his tent or at a local meeting spot and chats with other community members. He’s part of a network of mutual aid that shares intellectual and social and financial resources to help each other in their disadvantaged circumstances. And if he’s not in a network of mutual aid which fits the definition of a commune, it’s not because he can’t be, but because he chooses not to be.

    Unhoused people are not animals. They are humans. That means they communicate with other humans. And that means the unhoused form the same networks of politics and society and economics and mutual aid as everyone else.