In Case You Missed This... 'Occupy Wall Street Brings Homelessness Into The Open - UKGuardian

[WillyT]

Occupy Wall Street brings homelessness into the open
The homeless have long been criminalised by US laws against outdoor living. Now Occupy activism highlights their plight
Barbara Ehrenreich for TomDispatch, part of the Guardian Comment Network
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 October 2011 12.45 EDT

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As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed, and medical care and rudimentary security provided – to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: where am I going to pee?

Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the US have access to portable toilets (in Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC) or, better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (in Fort Wayne, Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in DC, a twenty-something occupier showed me the pizza parlour where she can cop a pee during the hours it's open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night. Anyone with restroom-related issues – arising from age, pregnancy, prostate problems or irritable bowel syndrome – should prepare to join the revolution in diapers.

Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities – "as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist", travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. A report entitled Criminalising Crisis, to be released later this month by the National Law Centre on Homelessness and Poverty, recounts the following story from Wenatchee, Washington:

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Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It's where we're all eventually headed – the 99%, or at least the 70%, of us, every debt-loaded college graduate, out-of-work school teacher and impoverished senior citizen – unless this revolution succeeds.

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More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/24/occupy-wall-street-homelessness-us?commentpage=all#history-link-box

:kick:

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[bengalherder]

2. I was working full-time and homeless in berkeley, CA for 6 mos.

Reagan years. You know, $3.35 min. an hour. I lived in my van.

I was lucky, I had a route of friends and co-workers that could help me take showers, etc. while I saved money to get into an apt. I had a van, I had pet rats for company and a bed. Not too bad.

But I got broke into twice and constantly moved on by the Berkeley police who stressed to me the illegality of living in my car in Berkeley.

This shit has been around a while, it is time that it got addressed.