By Charles Springer Homeless in Santa Monica
If you want to complain about the homeless, complain to those who are making it increasingly harder to get off the streets. Case in point, there is a 700-plus affordable housing complex which is being taken to build condominiums. The tenants are fighting tooth and nail to keep this complex from being gobbled up by a management company based in Colorado. They are abusing the law to take these units. This is a prime example of the way people in low-income brackets become homeless.
Some of you seem to ignore this fact. You seem to think that the homeless population just appears out of thin air and is there to plague your community. Well, you are seeing one of the causes first-hand going on right now in Venice Beach. This has been going on for well over 10 to 20 years now. Affordable housing being literally taken from those who live there to make way for higher income living.
This has gotten to the point of which even a family making $50,000 a year cannot afford to live almost anywhere in Los Angeles County. Many of those who are squeezed out to the streets are those in poverty. Homelessness is the visible sign of poverty in this city, county, state and nation. In addition, some of you cannot stand to see this. It makes you uncomfortable to see this because the income bracket that is being affected is getting higher and higher. In addition, it is getting to the point where you yourselves will be affected eventually.
How long do you think this will take? How long do you think your own wealth will save you from being out here with the homeless community? How long do you think this economic bubble will keep being inflated until it will burst in your faces and you lose everything?
Well instead of blaming the homeless for all of your woes, which some are very ludicrous to say the least, such as the driving down of property values and chasing away business, you should be looking to the causes of homelessness and poverty, and trying to stop it in its tracks. You should be coming together instead letting yourselves be divided. Conservatives against liberals, poor against rich, ethnicity against ethnici-ty, religion against religion, sexes against sexes. Look at how foolish this looks on paper as you read this. Look how anyone can conquer by just pitting one against the other as a smoke screen while the backroom politics goes on and our very society is raped, pillaged and plundered before our very eyes. Our Constitutional rights being eroded and taken in the name of freedom.
I ask you, how long will we the people let this go on? When will we look at the reasons for the Constitution being formed in the first place as they unfold before our very eyes and become one nation again? Some of you might get angry with me for writing this. You will say I am crazy and on drugs or lying or just because I am homeless I have no voice. Well, where is your voice in our government right now? When you deny me my rights you deny yourself your rights by keeping these divides going.
I ask you this, when will you begin to see the truth in front of your face and put aside the pettiness you hold so dear and break the wall of these divides to come together and demand this insanity stop so we can all live in this country as Americans again? I may be homeless and you may say what you will about me, but you cannot take away my American citizenship. You cannot take away my determination to make a change for the good. You cannot take away my integrity. You cannot take away my self-esteem as a human being, because every time you do, you take away your own humanity.
How long will we continue to sleepwalk through life and not hold those who are our elected officials accountable for what is going on in front of our faces? If we do not wake up soon, one day we may wake up and find ourselves under the gun.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 12, 2005. Read the original PDF.