This Crow Won’t Fly
The United States has a long history of using mean-spirited and often brutal laws to keep “certain” people out of public spaces and out of public consciousness. Jim Crow laws segregated the South after the Civil War and Sundown Towns forced people to leave town before the sun set. The anti-Okie law of 1930s California forbade poor Dustbowl immigrants from entering the state and Ugly Laws (on the books in Chicago until the 1970s) swept the country and criminalized people with disabilities for allowing themselves to be seen in public.
Today, such laws target mostly homeless people and are commonly called “quality of life” or “nuisance crimes.” They criminalize sleeping, standing, sitting, and even food-sharing. Just like the laws from our past, they deny people their right to exist in local communities.
In June of this year, Rhode Island took a meaningful stand against this criminalization, and passed the first statewide Homeless Bill of Rights in the country. The Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP)—a West Coast grassroots network of homeless people’s organizations—is now launching simultaneous campaigns in California and Oregon. Rhode Island will only be the beginning.
Today’s “quality of life” laws and ordinances have their roots in the broken-windows theory. This theory holds that one poor person in a neighborhood is like a first unrepaired broken window and if the “window” is not immediately fixed or removed, it is a signal that no one cares, disorder will flourish, and the community will go to hell in a handbasket.
For this theory to make sense, you first have to step away from thinking of people, or at least poor people, as human beings. You need to objectify them. You need to see them as dusty broken windows in a vacant building. That is why we now have Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) with police enforcement to keep that neighborhood flourishing by keeping poor, unsightly people out of it.
We have gone from the days where people could be told “you can’t sit at this lunch counter” to “you can’t sit on this sidewalk,” from “don’t let the sun set on you here” to “this public park closes at dusk” and from “you’re on the wrong side of the tracks” to “it is illegal to hang out” on this street or corner.
Unless we organize, it isn’t going to get much better soon. Since 1982, the federal government has cut up to $52 billion a year from affordable housing and pushed hundreds of thousands of people into the shelter system or into the street. Today we continue to have three million people a year without homes. 1982 also marked the beginning of homelessness as a “crime wave” that would consume the efforts of local and state police forces over the next three decades. Millions of people across the country sitting, lying down, hanging out, and — perhaps worst of all – sleeping are cited in crime statistics.
WRAP and our allies recently conducted outreach to over 700 homeless people in 13 cities; we found 77% of people had been arrested, cited, or harassed for sleeping, 75% for loitering, and 73% for sitting on a sidewalk.
We are right back to Jim Crow Laws, Sundown Towns, Ugly Laws and Anti-Okie Laws, local laws that profess to “uphold the locally accepted obligations of civility.” Such laws have always been used by people in power against those on the outside. In other words, today’s Business Improvement Districts and Broken Window Laws are, at their core, a reincarnation of various phases of American history none of us is proud of.
And they reflect a political voice now openly entering the political and media mainstream that dismisses social justice as economically irrelevant and poor people as humanly irrelevant.
This is not about caring for or even advocating for “those people.” This is about all of us. As Aboriginal leader Lilla Watson said, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” If you are not homeless, if you are not the target now, then understand that you are next. Isolated and fragmented, we lose this fight.
But we are no longer isolated and fragmented. On April 1, WRAP and USCAI (US Canadian Alliance of Inhabitants) sponsored a Day of Action in 17 cities. We are one of hundreds of organizations and allies, from Massachusetts to NewYork and from Tennessee to California, all separate but all working together to give meaning to social justice and protect the civil and human rights of all of us.
We can only win this struggle if we use our collective strengths, organizing, outreach, research, public education, artwork, and direct actions. We are continuing to expand our network of organizations and cities and we will ultimately bring down the whole oppressive system of policing poverty and treating poor people as “broken windows” to be discarded and replaced.
To join our campaign for a Homeless Bill of Rights in both California and Oregon contact WRAP at wrap@wraphome.org and we will hook you up with organizers working in both of these states or others as this movement continues to grow.
Posted on August 27, 2012 by WRAP Comms
This Crow Won’t Fly:
http://wraphome.org/?p=2466&option=com_wordpress&Itemid=119
Criminalization Fact Sheet:
http://wraphome.org/?p=2474&option=com_wordpress&Itemid=119
I believe there are substantial books, articles, documentary films, and other media and print documenting an apparent problem in the world when it comes to the Church (Bride of Christ) and supposedly christian organizations, corporations, and the State all of whom are in a position to cooperate and help the disenfranchised and destitute in the world but the more I have searched this out I have found the true believers in the world are increasingly joining the ranks of the poorest in society having forsaken all to follow Christ and given all they had to the destitute and disenfranchised have now become them.
Without much representation for those of Faith in Y’shua in the Fascist-Communist-Socialist once great Republic under Elohim in which we live I have had to Occu-hop to find sustainance and Petition the worldly-government for a redress of grievances (well known language under the Articles Of Confederation ‘No Answers = No Taxes’) Though I pay for the highways and byways I travel freely on without duty or tariff with the gasoline tax as when my friend Kody, dog Bubba-Lou, and I traveled to The Farm, a community outside of Nashville, TN, and later on a Greyhound Bus to Charlotte, NC did I also venture to the DNC and also to a first-ever Owen Family Reunion near Chatham, Va. and White Oak Mtn. I do however refuse to gamble with education.
Most folks would be shocked to know that the CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) National or Federal, Sate, and County, and Regional or Local show that our monies are being squandered while cities in which people dwell play on our ignorance touting “The Budget, The Budget” while the budget is merely one little part of the CAFR referred to as the General Fund and the CAFR published by the Auditor/Comptroller’s office shows the whole picture – All revenues and expenditures as mandated by the U.S. Constitution, the Law of the Land. Also, the excess revenue is supposed to be reapportioned equally among the people. And yes there is excess revenue or atleast there was until shortly after the documentary film “CAFR Exposed” by Alex Jones (syndicated talk-radio show host from Austin, Tx) went viral online. When Enron-Scandal Billionaire Arnold Schwarzenegger was put in office there was 800 Billion Bux and when Bush was done wreaking havoc to our U.S. Constitution and the new puppet in chief took office thanks to the same Diebold Voting Machines the Corporate Oligarchs command and control there was still 80 Trillion in the Coffers – Enough to pay off the National Debt and the personal debt of the 98 percent. However, that money was quickly dispersed to Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan/Chase Banks and countless friends of the Private Cartel we call the Federal Reserve which isn’t Federal and has no Reserves. This is all to be expected from grievous dogs who believe ‘competition is sin’ and ‘war is the health of a nation’ and have 10 unlawful wars raging around the world. They have accrued Quadrillions in debt with credit default swaps and are just signing it over to the avg. working man in the EU and thus bankrupting nation states like Greece and Italy whereby they can then through the corporations which have grown up around themselves buy up all their resources claiming even their water and air – no kidding.
It won’t be long and millions of Americans will have the epiphany that ’08 was just a hiccup and that their friendly neighborhood cult has been in collusion, doing nothing to prepare, quandering all the tithes, and all the while preaching Hitler’s favorite verse Romans 13. What will you do when asked to turn in your guns at a bread-line or to report to a FEMA CAMP aka Haliburton-Hotel for mandatory Vaccination and mandatory implant of Obomneycare’s medical device aka RFID made by Verichip/ Digital Angel or are you still so nieve as to think you are a special minion on the ‘winning team’?? Unless you are in the Billionaire’s Club it won’t be a Kiss-my-ass pass but rather a signifying characteristic of cattle. I will not be among those who will opt to do business in Babylon but rather I aim to prepare for Daniel’s last week I believe we are looking at very, very soon. Storable food, wild edible foods, power generation, off-grid living, yurts, geodesic domes for growing food, greenhouses, solar ovens, heirloom seeds, shortwave radios, and guns with which we can hunt and protect ourselves and our property individually and collectively so long as you know how to hide them from those who can overwhelm you with force and aim to take all these things.
I think the writing has been on the wall for a long time but now with NDAA and the E.O. aimed at outlawing supplements without a prescription, and those H.R. and Senate Bills aimed at shutting down the internet and thus our only source of real news they are aiming to pull something big here. When I here NATO plans to carpet-bomb 5 key states including Kentucky, Alabama, Tennesee, West Virginia, and ? I’ll let you wonder – No it’s not RI, AZ, ID, MT, ND, or CA the latter of which is like its own freakshow of a country – a place they have been beta-testing to see how screwed up Americans could let it get without screaming bloody-genocide like enough babies aborted if they were allowed to mature to voting age they would be the largest constituency of full-grown tumors sufficient to rival our Military Industrial Compex/Prison-labor industry only surpassed by the Federal Reserve which prints out instruments of our serfdom out of thin air.
What they are most afraid of is that We The People (not hey hey we’re the monkeys) would wake up and smell the flouride and chlorine and vaccines and chemtrails and kill our televisions, hang our star-spangled banner upside down, sound the alarm, and rally the militias, and oathkeepers, and patriot Sherriffs to mount posses, and deputize the lawfully armed citizenry to arrest the Banksters and their goon squads and detain the foriegn troop buid up intended as foreign mercenaries to be used against us to deprive us of our person, property, and our lives but firstly they must take our means of defending such – our arms we have the right to keep and bear as in to have and to hold unless they trick us into giving them up for say SECURITY. History has born out well this is what tyrants do before a genocide. Wake Up Or Waco is another great documentary buy Alex Jones I recommend. infowars.tv
I have his full permission to use these titles and in my article… I know Facebook and Youtube are famous for removing ppls material simply because they say it contained copywrighted information but since they hate stuff like LinkedIn I’m sure this disclaimer is unnecessary.
Check out my facebook page and hit me up if you have any ideas about how to empower people to live off the land and homestead or enjoy collectives or communities on lands truly owned like Lodial-title or something of the sort. Any way to get out of the Mega-cities which are basically just huge Concentration camps since the time Chicago was declared to have no protection under Habaeus Corpus, Posse Commitatus, and recently to have no right to defend one’s self or property when invaded without warrant and not to be able to put the offending “Officers” under Citizen’s Arrest. They are not above the Law… only the Juror is. We will hold the Organized Criminals (polititians and their Corporate masters) to account and show them they should have served WTP and not the dogs who think themselves to be wise and enlightened but have become fools. Babylon is going down… again!