Perspectives
Homelessness is a problem, but it can also reveal some important new perspectives
What is homelessness?
According to the average home-haver, it is the lack of having one’s own proper home. Problematic, but we all know it is caused by God, when He makes you incapable to work for a living for some divine, unknown reason. Wherein lies the solution? While waiting for the next actions of God, Harper suggests we should all pray and continue shopping and – just maybe – consider furthering our investments in the military.
Constantly, humans are dying today because a huge amount of the earth has been paved over. Pavement and concrete sever whatever connection our feet once made regularly with the dirt, the earth, and now as a result though we may still appear to be grounded, it is on nothing but pure artificiality and thus we find ourselves accordingly detached from reality. In one area of Asia, we’re busy inventing factories to make plastic spatulas and other mandatory accessories for western living; simultaneously people are dropping dead from starvation and individuals across the globe are going without food or shelter – without ever buying up any of our plastic spatulas.
Corporate interests effectively – and without much regard for general humanity – perpetuate the existence of poverty. They produce colourful spatulas and guns which we are then supposed to purchase and wield in order to fight off poverty, but this will not work because the spatulas and guns don’t function as the necessary foodstuffs and shelter which are precisely what human individuals require to remedy most, if not all, human manifestations of poverty.
Fortunately, if one has the stomach for it, one possible solution for the self-starting homeless individual is to find a police station, or just a parked cop car, and proceed to poop either in front of it, on the sidewalk, or some such thing. If one cannot manage to poop, say, for having not eaten recently, or a lack of water intake, then the gesture itself should suffice. In most modern nations, this will signal to the relevant authorities your individual needs and you should be promptly escorted without harm to a facility which resembles housing within which you can poop and sleep and become a more virtuous community member. You’ll obtain a free orange jumpsuit along the way to help fit in. If one exists yet in a world without police, keep pooping if you can and we’ll get to you eventually.
Even more fortunately, though, there is another angle.
What else is homelessness? According to one eccentric vagabond – an artist and craftswoman who obviously and proudly lacked both a good hairdresser and a good dentist, it is cashing in the true value of one’s real freedom. As odd as it may sound, I eventually came to believe her. Her assertion was that having a set of elaborate walls worth hundreds of thousands of dollars constitutes an unnecessary business expense, since her business was just living life and the whole city is already full of endless walls.
The modern life suggests we need more and more things like plastic spatulas. But perhaps it is time to rethink what we think we need. As for my homeless friend, she went on happily ranting at some length in a train of frantic thought about what she argued was the great circle of life: how these shiny bits of silver just materialize and fall out of thin air while she walks along picking them up off the ground and out of the grass, for free.
Dustin Christianson
Contributor
