7 Things No One Tells You About Being Homeless - Cracked.com
http://www.cracked.com/article_20720_7-things-no-one-tells-you-about-being-homeless.htmlI can attest to the truth of what the author writes. Many of my patients are represented by all seven criteria.
Cracked is a humor website. But this article is the plain cold truth, and reminds me of a line from Lord Byron's Don Juan: "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep."
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Both pages and all of the points are well written and gave me some awareness that I didn't have.
Thanks again for posting this.
Some fun stuff 
are very real, I wonder how much of the fear of being homeless is an artificial construct of our times.
Would the Pre-Columbian Native Americans, so much more adapted and in tune to their environment than we are today, have the same fears or would they just laugh at them? Granted we have more luxuries and life enhancing gadgets to pine the loss of and more restrictions on land access than the Native Americans had, but still you have to ask how much is our fear of "homelessness" the result of poor adaptation and management of our environment? Surely, part of the fear stems from the loss of the natural skills we once knew many are trying to re-learn.
For thousands of years, this was a perfectly acceptable home within reach of everybody, not to mention sustainable.
I think the problem is mostly in our minds because we look at such low impact living models as an indignity. Rather than employing our technology to improve such sustainable options, our energies are focused on interior and exterior decorating and getting our high carbon footprint houses as close to castles as we can get them. Our priorities are out of whack and our materialism knows no bounds.
And then there's this bold gentleman: https://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/
where they will live in abandoned factories and become vegetarians?
Look, I understand what you are trying to get at, but even though you might THINK it wouldn't be very expensive, the parameters you have already suggested require infrastructure and that takes maintenance and that takes money.
You just aren't going to be able to convince a couple thousand homeless people to move into the old Packard plant and start growing cucumbers hydroponically.
A place like this? Seriously?
I don't know where you live, but I lived for ten years not far from that spot and I can tell you, it gets bloody cold for quite a few months of the year.
It sounds wonderful in a post, but I just don't think it is at all practical.
There are better solutions to the homeless problem.
Besides, if you really wanted to find a place that you could live off the land in a low impact way, there are plenty of places to do it in this country. They just aren't free.
"If you have better solutions: I'm all ears. "
Yup...sure do.
Don't let people fall through the cracks in the first place.
Like any normal, progressive and particularly CHRISTIAN (as much as so many Americans claim we are) society would do.
I don't mean to literally throw a book on your desk and ask you to read it, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Let's start here. Click on the 2013 "Proxy Statement" report and look at page 36, "Executive Compensation".
Let's just start there, for fucks sake. Of all the revenue General Dynamics generates on an annual basis, roughly 85 to 90% of it is as a direct result of US government contracts, ie. tax dollars. They make precisely ONE product that does not take a DOD purchase order to acquire. Gulfstream Jets. The fact that they have executives making in excess of $15 million a year ON THE TAXPAYERS DIME while we have the social problems we struggle with in this country is a national disgrace.
People on the right try to make hay about how much a teacher or a firefighter or a sewer worker makes, but you never hear them complain about how much WE TAXPAYERS paid Jay L. Johnson in 2012.
General Dynamics is merely the FIFTH largest defense contractor in this country.
Want to fix the homeless problem? Want to fix the vast majority of the rest of the problems in this country? Turn down the flow of dollars to the Pentagon.
But that isn't easy to do, because it isn't a flow like a garden hose, or even a fire hose or even a 36" water main.
Money flows across the Potomac toward the Pentagon like water flows out of the penstocks of a major dam;
It has become almost unstoppable.
But you're right. My number one solution is to adjust the tax rates that we had in the '50's for inflation and go back to rebuilding and restoring our crumbling infrastructure. The MIC will be reigned in when that happens.
However, I also think that we have a generation of people who have no idea where food comes from and very often the food that we are provided, isn't safe. We need a revolution in sustainable, healthy agriculture. Otherwise, when the economy picks back up - our opportunity to educate the citizens about these things will may have passed, and more people will go back to the CO2 burning lifestyle of constructing suburbs and using up the worlds natural resources.
This isn't a problem that we are going to solve just by making the rich pay their fair share (and making cuts to defense).
I think we need to tackle both at the same time.
There's nothing funny about cucumbers. 
we just weren't so damn dependent on modern conveniences. We could all quit our jobs and spend all day hunting and gathering and cooking. Really, it's completely feasible.
When it comes to a choice between the homeless and what Stephen King called, in another context: 'the smug bastards', I'm coming down on the side of the homeless. I'll advocate for their rights to my dying breath.
Response to Aristus (Original post)