Joseph Homer: Bee fails to ask right questions about homelessness (letter to the editor)

Re “ ‘No panhandling’ signs installed to educate public” (Front page, June 6): Again and again I read articles unfairly representing people experiencing homelessness, misunderstand their plight and interviewing only the people who often put them in difficult situations.

Did the article interview any homeless people about how panhandling is the last means they have to make enough to stay in a hotel bed and not on concrete? Did the article describe the terrible deficit of available and affordable housing the county has? Does the article highlight how many of the people panhandling perhaps can’t work, are barred from work or who are doing the best they can to get by in an unforgiving economy? No. Again, The Bee – like so many others – furthers a moralized, incomplete understanding of homelessness as the result of poor individual decisions, i.e., drug abuse and alcoholism, rather than the direct and unequivocal result of an unfair economic system which radically underserves its population.

Precarious economic conditions cause homelessness; lack of a support network causes homelessness; inability to deal with emotions and difficult situations cause homelessness. If you want to know what causes homelessness, ask the person down the road: they will know

JOSEPH HOMER, MODESTO

Read more here: http://www.modbee.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article82391977.html#storylink=cpy

Everybody Out

One of my favorite non-regular events are fire drills. Unlike other somewhat-predictable events, fire drills disclose a telling weirdness that forces us to relax momentarily. When we are drilled on our response time to a non-existent threat, we are forced to leave our normal routine and mill about one another nonchalantly or sometimes with concern but almost always with little to entertain ourselves but each other.

Being outside in such a non-purposive way is unfamiliar and a little strange to us, and some even attempt to break the coda of the drill as quickly as the disturbing calm sets in. It’s as if we don’t know what roles to play when we leave the scripts of working with or spending leisure time about one another.

And the pause reminds us also of the rhythm and pace of our lives lived, always doing, working, playing, being, never-ceasing. It is the exception to the rule of the world of work and a world based on the production of something, the creation of value. Evidence of the specific way in which we govern and inhabit space and occupy our lives.

Eventually, we brave the awkwardness of losing our roles or wimper in their temporary bereavement, but often we recover, and we move forward, reprising our scripts and routinized selves.

And we do so as if nothing had happened in the first place, but for it, for the experience, we know each other better, and for a brief moment, see one another as actively-coping beings and not finished, finishing products. In the process, we inevitably, if implicitly acknowledge our basic meaning-seeking, meaning-creating selves that inhabit a shared, everyday-created, everyday-reconstituted world.

Hi, my name is Joseph Homer...

…and my hobbies include looking at new school course catalogs and pretending I live in New York

Modesto...

Where having skills doesn't really matter anyways