(00:00:00) The community for Creative non-violence has been in existence in Washington since 1970. We came into existence originally in response to the war in Vietnam. We were and are essentially a religious community. Although not in the traditional sense of the word. We realized fairly early on within the first year or two that at least for us there was a domestic counterpart to the violence of Southeast Asia and for us that manifested itself most clearly in the existence of hungry and homeless people within just a couple of blocks of the White House. In fact, the president's neighbor for many many years and many presidents closest neighbor for many years was a woman named Mary very old sent our lady who used to sleep sitting up by the gatepost near the White House. And so we opened up a soup kitchen back in 1972 and that began our involvement with very poor and very destitute people since that time. We've either operated or still operate soup kitchens shelters medical clinics a whole range of services for people who live out on the street. And now we we operate what is probably the largest shelter in the world certainly the largest shelter in the country. It's about fourteen hundred beds and it's about six blocks from the Capitol and we've just spent about 14 million dollars renovating it and making it a fairly decent place to be but the members of the community received no salaries we do what we do because it's the right and necessary thing to do. We live in the shelter and a couple of community houses and we share the resources that are available to the people that we serve the clothing that we wear the food that we eat the furniture that we have. All of that is donated. All of that is available to us as it is to the folks who live at the shelter as guess. My presence here probably is is an indication of the fact that homelessness has become a national concern as has the absence of affordable housing. It usually takes longer to hit areas like this where you do not have yuge numbers of people living visibly out on the street. You dont have heat grates and you don't have back alleys and you don't have tens of thousands of people all over the streets in numbers that make it impossible to ignore, but from the little bit of time I spent here I have discovered that you do have shelters and you do have homeless people and you do have a waiting list for affordable housing here. I understand there's more affordable housing available in Fargo, but there there isn't any money it's always Catch-22 is like that it's amazing in Fargo. They have more affordable housing, but they have no Public Assistance over here. There's Public Assistance, but no affordable housing. It works that way everywhere in most parts of the country. There's no affordable housing and so section. Certificates which is what the federal government gives out so that people can augment their income in order to shop around and find affordable housing in most parts of the country. There is no affordable housing. And so the Section 8 certificates are of no value can paper your walls with them in a few cities like Houston where there's just a huge amount of housing available for a variety of reasons Dawn and he Section 8 certificates. So it's not surprising that here we would have one Community with a few dollars available on a monthly basis but no affordable housing in another Community with affordable housing and no few dollars available to go along with it. Matter of fact, if you're homeless generally Catch-22 is is what you live with all the time just one after another but it's fairly obvious at least to those of us who've been dealing with this for quite some time that homelessness in America has reached epidemic proportions. That's why you're here and that's why I'm here and that's why this group of people called the National Coalition for the homeless has been meeting here for two days. And it's why lots of television shows dedicate some time to the issue. It's because the issue is a real one and the numbers of people on the streets are huge and the numbers of people threatening to join them are equally huge and growing rapidly to the point where experts tell us that within the next 12 or 14 years. If there's no major change at the federal level regarding the creation of affordable housing, we're liable to have another 19 million Americans who are either destitute or in imminent danger of being destitute or living with friends and relatives are doubled or tripled or quadrupled up. So we legitimately have a national concern and the concern is that there are large numbers of people out on the street and there are literally tens of millions of others who are living in either overpriced or overcrowded or substandard housing. In terms of homelessness where the prevalent estimate is about 3 million, although no one can say with any degree of certainty how many people are on the streets? Because it's a population that has to hide in order to survive because if somebody who's out there counting can find you so can somebody who's out there representing the law or somebody who's out there to beat you over the head and take whatever change you might have in your pocket or if you're a woman who's looking for somebody to rape and so it's a group of people that has to hide that has to maintain a very low level of visibility in order to survive which is another Catch-22. How do you count a population of people that wants to remain hidden and the answer is you don't but most experts based on the studies that have been done a local communities and the first hand experience of Advocates and providers estimate that there's at least 3 million people living out on the street. Who are they? Well an honest, but glib answer is that there everybody and anybody and wouldn't surprise me to one day bump into one of Out on the street. And I mean that there are people who I know out there who are college students or college graduates. There are all kinds of people there's a reporter who used to work for a Washington news paper. We used to write stories about homelessness and one day knocked on the door and said guess what he was now one of them so conceivably it can happen to anyone and everyone and there are enough people out there who are not your stereotypical predictable kind of person who you'd find on the street to make all stereotypes outmoded and simplistic but there are certain well travel paths to destitution and I think that we can and many people already have identified what some of those paths are anyone would be would be unemployment and as well as underemployment. As well as a minimum wage that's remained unchanged for about seven years while the dollar has decreased by about 30 percent during the same period of time and what that means is we've got a shelter full of people about half of whom are working. Most of those people are making so little money that they simply cannot afford to get out of the shelter. You can't make 335 or 340 503 55 an hour in Washington DC and live anywhere. You can't do that in most parts of the country. I don't know if you could hear but I was told by somebody earlier that if you had a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars a month to spend on a room, they will probably two places that you could look for housing here. And so I would say that probably people who are on minimum wage here who are earning very little money would find themselves in a similar State although in cities like Washington and New Yorker or other major urban areas where the cost of housing is just phenomenal minimum income or close to minimum income guarantees you that you will never ever have a place to live and you will either reside in a If you're lucky enough to find a bed or you'll live out on the street, which makes it impossible to maintain employment long-term mean you just can't work day after day week after week. If you're living out on a heat greater in an alley somewhere is just to debilitating. And so those those combination of things either unemployment or underemployment or the low minimum wage results in a great many people being destitute the cutback of Services Under the Reagan Administration has been devastated. I mean in the first couple of years after he was elected everybody kept saying well, where's the rush, you know, we expected to see millions of people thrown out of their homes. Give him what Advocates were saying was going to be effective all of those cuts. But what everybody discovered was that the effects of those budget cuts at the federal level accumulative. It takes a little while before cutting here cutting they are cutting everywhere begins to put someone in the position of ultimately having to choose between a bowl of food or a visit to a doctor or clothing in a place to live but those cuts have put many many people in that position. And so this Administration President Reagan is directly responsible with the concurrence of Congress in putting huge numbers of people out on the street the the efforts to deinstitutionalize Mental Hospitals, which were good and right things to do. I mean we shouldn't lock people up whose only crime or sin is to talk to themselves or to talk to trees or to talk to God if they were doing that two or three thousand years ago, then virtually every Old Testament Prophet would have been in an asylum. Because they were in fact considered to be mentally disabled by many prophets by those that knew but they also had a tendency to talk to objects that most people didn't hold conversations with and so locking people up. is not constitutional the courts acknowledge that that coupled with the fact that drugs were produced which allowed people who before would be completely dysfunctional to become functional again resulted in the emptying out of Mental Hospitals Phase 2 was the creation of community-based facilities to take the place of the mental hospital, but that never happened you see because that cost money and because mentally disabled poor people don't have a lot of power and clout mean they're not first on every politicians list of groups of people that you have to placate and provide things for and the Mental Health Community essentially turned its back after they achieved the institutionalization and they didn't want to or never really looked at what that meant for large numbers of low-income mentally disabled people the breakdown of the family structure in our society, which lots of people have been giving a lot of lip service to but nobody is really trying to do much about has also resulted in many people winding up out on the streets when I was a kid a few If you had a mother a father who was living on the street, you would be ostracized. Your neighbors wouldn't talk to you that would be considered a barbaric thing to do now. Nobody would give any thought to that. You have people living very comfortably and in the suburbs or nice expensive Apartments who have mothers and fathers eating out of garbage pails and sleeping on benches and under bridges and when somebody calls up and suggest that because that's their parent. They might have some responsibility towards them. They generally feel none and that's a frightening thing to encounter because it means that those relationships within the family that were for many decades and many centuries in our country able to support and sustain people who found themselves in positions of needed just disappeared as have the more institutional kinds of options. The church is essentially you're responsible and and not present to people who are destitute people who are homeless. And so there's been all kinds of institutional breakdowns and that too is led to Large numbers of people out on the street, but ultimately all of those folks are out there because they share one thing in common and that is that they don't have a place to live that they can afford and ultimately that's the result of the federal government cutting Housing Programs by somewhere around 75 to 77 percent over the last seven years and that very predictably has resulted in huge numbers of people winding up with no place to live because if the federal government doesn't build affordable housing, nobody builds affordable housing developers don't go into the business as a way of getting into heaven. They go into the business as a way of making money and since you make money in condos coops and offices, but not in affordable housing nobody builds affordable housing and if you cut the federal housing budget by 70% or 80% then the consequence is going to be predictable and is going to be disastrous and the consequence is that for increasing numbers of people that will either be no housing or housing their cost 50 or 60 or 70 percent of your income or housing even though it's familiar. Justly expensive that is substandard or that's uninhabitable, but it's directly a result of this administration's gutting Federal housing budgets. now homelessness is predictable. It's extremely logical makes absolute sense. It has to happen in our society because we've created a society that is composed of winners and losers and if you're going to have winners you're going to have losers in the losers are going to be the people that wind up out on the streets or the people that wind up doing the jobs that nobody else wants to do for wages that nobody can live on we built a society on competition and individualism and greed and it shouldn't be at all surprising that what we managed to produce is one of the most heinous cultures the world has ever seen where those who have are essentially Do you mean eyes? Because of the process they have to go through to ignore the injustices that surround them those who were victims of that Injustice of broken materially physically emotionally. And so we've created a situation in which large and growing numbers of people are going to wind up out on our streets while increasing numbers of people scramble around to find those little niches and those little Corners that are relatively safe at least for the not very distant future where people can make a moderate amount of money and have a nice little place to live and can do so without being too heavily impinged on by all of those Cosmic concerns that surround them like all of those people who are out there without a place to live and the fact that we destroy the ecology and it we spend so much money on nuclear weaponry that it's almost guaranteed at some point that we use those little toys and blow ourselves into Oblivion. We've all managed to erect very effective and efficient defense mechanisms to keep those kind of harsh realities at Bay, but there's absolutely nothing nothing outrageous about what is happening across the country and there's nothing unpredictable about it. It's inexorable mean if you're going to have a society in which Which we measure each other by that which we own and that which we have if you're going to create situation which people are scrambling for those decreasing resources that are available to them. So as not to wind up in that group at the bottom that's growing larger daily. All of that is inexorable and none of that's going to change easily or painlessly. But it's going to have to change because you can just look around our own borders within our own borders and see all kinds of horror going on homelessness is just one manifestation of that. Then you gets outside of our borders. We're about 45 people per minute or starving to death most of them children under five, you know, where people are running around poking holes in the ozone layer is though, you know, that might be good for the sunglass industry and its really no long-term problem. There's all kinds of horrible horrendous things going on and they go on with our concurrence in our active participation because it's somebody said not too long ago either part of the problem or part of the solution because there ain't no middle ground not in a situation like this. And so systemically we have a value system that demands the existence of poor people and destitute people in growing numbers and carried to its logical conclusion, which of course it could never get to because it can't just can't go on that long ago that far but carried to its logical conclusion. Would have one person in America only virtually everything and everybody else poppers mean that's the direction. It's moving in and of course it takes a little while to get there but it's moving there. You just take a look at how large the middle class is and what percentage they have of the wealth of the nation and the poorest 10% and the richest 10% after a while it begins to become clear that what's happening is is that everything is moving in One Direction. It's moving towards centralization and it's moving toward the acquisition of stupendous sums of money on the part of a very small number of Corporations or individuals all of which are interconnected very neatly at the top. But the community that I come out of tends not to view things in economic terms, although we do understand that economics is of course, it worked but we see the economics of our nation is simply a manifestation of our values. We worship all the wrong Gods we worship. No God that's real mean we worship wealth and power and we strive for things that don't make us better human beings and we put our faith in our trust in all the wrong places. And that's where we find our heart as well. And so we find that we don't have much of a heart and we can go through life stepping over human beings as though they weren't there acting as though everything is essentially. Okay, and when the numbers get so large that they are no longer avoidable. Then we entertain ourselves with little discussions about what to do in the face of armies of beggar's do you give them a quarter of do you not mean the Morality In the ethics of giving the Beggars that is the stupidest discussion I have ever heard and had the displeasure of being involved in In the last two weeks. I've done three national television shows about whether it's it's morally and ethically proper or demanded that we give to Beggars and you have to almost beat people over the head with a stick to get them to even listen to the question of why do we have all of those Beggars? Why are they out there not should we be passing regulations and laws making it a crime to Panhandle, which is the Raging debate in many cities, which is reminiscent to me of when I was a kid in the Raging debate was whether it was morally acceptable to shoot someone who was attempting to get into your bomb shelter. That was the Raging debate for a number of years, you know, you dug this little hole in the ground like like some kind of gopher and you stocked it with all kinds of goodies. That would be absolutely useless because the Earth would be polluted for thousands of years to come but people created these little holes in the ground and they fortify them and then the question was what do we do if our neighbors don't have one and Get in the question was and how do we get rid of these weapons that are forcing us to burrow underground like little furry creatures. The question was what do we do if somebody tries to force their way in and that's exactly the same kind of situation that you find out across the country you find cities like New York and Portland and Seattle and Columbus, Ohio having these raging debates about whether they should make it a crime to aggressively Panhandle. You have Santa Barbara California, and now I understand Bakersfield and a few other places out west that have either passed laws making it a crime to sleep Outdoors at night, which they said we're done in a very egalitarian way because when they passed the laws, they said that those laws applied equally to rich and poor life. They said nobody can sleep under the bridges here in Santa Barbara not rich people and not poor people but the homeless had an idea of who was directed towards mean they had a pretty good understanding of what was going on. But that was the response. The response was will make it a crime to sleep Outdoors at night. Well, that's a very clever political thing to do because what you do is you respond to the existence of lodging growing numbers of homeless people in your community. You make it a crime to sleep Outdoors at night and don't provide them a place to sleep indoors at night. The alternative is to leave and that was the message and that is the message in every city where there's a discussion or a debate about whether to make panhandling the crime or not the real message. The underlying message is going out of town. We don't want you here. Your presence makes us uncomfortable. We can't go to sleep quite as quite as joyfully at night knowing that you're out there and so go away you're making us nervous. We don't want to see you anymore. And that's not a good response because that you can stick your head in the ground all you want but it doesn't make things get better generally things get worse and every time you pull your head out your look, Round and you get even more nervous and you stick your head even deeper in that's a very very bad situation to be in because it's self-perpetuating and with each passing day. It takes more and more effort and energy to get people to pull their heads out of the sand and begin to come to grips with the real problems. The real underlying causes that are confronting them and making them exceedingly nervous. Now for those of us who work in. Advocacy. We Face a real dilemma now, we faced a real dilemma for a number of years, but now we Face a different kind of dilemma everybody in Congress and most people across the country understand Russian that there's a housing crisis. There's a shortage of affordable housing means hard not to understand it the Republicans send out a questionnaire to their key block 25 to 35 year olds, and they asked what are your domestic and international concerns list them in order of priority and they get back housing is number one and that's not because the people that they're sending the questionnaires to can't afford. Place to live that's because the kids of the people they're sending questionnaires to or the brothers and sisters the mothers and fathers of those kids. They see a whole generation that can't afford to place to live who were essentially up-and-coming young white people. It cuts across a lot of lines and it's affecting a great many people the absence of affordable housing is and it goes beyond just the fact that we're growing increasingly increasingly uncomfortable with the existence of huge numbers of homeless people on the streets. It's beginning to affect people where they live because they can't afford the place they live in many instances. And so that is the political framework within folks like this like us operate. We know that we have a lot of support very broad base of support and that most Americans are very concerned about homelessness / before double housing, but we also face an economic construct that is absolutely devastated seven years ago a group of people got together and they decided that they were going to basically bankrupt But the nation and reduce any and all possibilities and the way they would do that would be to reduce the revenue coming into the federal government primarily through tax breaks to primarily wealthy people and corporations. They would inflate the deficit blow it up to use proportions and have this thing hanging over our head threatening to come down and crush us at any moment in time and they would shovel an increasing percentage of those resources into defense. And so anytime you talk to somebody in Congress or presidential candidate on either side of the aisle about the desperate need for infusions of large sums of money into Housing Programs. They will say to you We can do it. There's no money out there. We got this big deficit any money that we come up with we're going to have to apply to the deficit. We can't cut the defense budget too much because you know, the last seven years people have been convinced that it cost this much money for peace and National Defense and you know, besides politicians are always beholding to the corporations that make a lot of money out of out of the Pentagon. There's lots of them out there and they spread it around pretty thick among the politicians. And so everybody knows that they're not going to alienate the defense industry not by slicing the the defense budget plus politically it's untenable and so a situation has been created in which it's impossible to do anything. You've got yuge numbers of people out on the street. You've got tens of millions of others that are liable to join him in the next 10 to 12 years and you got politicians telling you that their hands are tied in is absolutely nothing that they can do in addition to that. You've got a lot of people feeling really defeated people in Congress over the last seven years those at least two tried and who are relatively Progressive been beaten down so much that they look like little pancakes. I mean, they're really flat they No fight left in them many Advocates across the country are equally flat mean they don't believe anything is possible because in order to make things possible you either have to slash the defense budget and or you have to raise taxes neither of which are particularly appealing but that's the scenario that's been created and passed on to us and it's a very clever one very clever and it even goes beyond that. There are many people who in the right wing of both parties in our country who would not feel at all badly if Bush would lose partly because they don't think bush is conservative enough partly because they understand that the president the next president is going to be taking the reins of government at a time when it's not good to do. So, that's why a number of Democrats who probably could have had the nomination chose not to run they are not anxious to be the new captain of the new Titanic. We already have Hoover we can all talk about. What a great deer man. He was and how he brought on the depression and now with the next president that follows this President is going to be in a world of trouble because the economy is in very very bad shape. And so whether it's a Democrat or Republican that selected the folks who now are in the White House believe that it makes no difference at all except that if a Democrat gets elected they can blame the Democrat for all the stuff that's happening and that it may be the last democratic. I didn't think we would say for the next 20 or 30 years and that is an active consideration on the part of many many conservative people in this country who are more than willing to sacrifice George Bush realizing that in so doing and in getting a Democratic president for four years, they can live with that in exchange for the four years that get the next 20 or 30 and that scenario is not outrageous at all. Because if Dukakis walks into office in January Bound by the economic situation this Administration is created he has got nowhere to go absolutely nowhere and he's not saying anything now that would indicate that he intends to go anywhere whether he's building the kind of foundation in the kind of the kind of broad base of support that would allow him to go anywhere and so we've got the promise of another four years of the same regardless of who's in the white house, which is a fairly depressing thought when you take a look out over the economic terrain and you see what's being done to people and what's being done to programs and what's being done to policies that that are very important. To us as a nation. So that's the Dilemma that we find ourselves in how we get out of that of course is to just fight. I mean, we all going to have to fight real hard and we're going to have to communicate to people in our nation the urgency of the situation the pain of the people that we represent the enormity of the evil in the Injustice that's being done to huge numbers of people in our country who were desperately and legitimately in need of help. And so that's why some of the people that are here now as a matter of fact are going to be traveling to Washington starting September 26th to commit Civil Disobedience at the capital the US Capitol people are going to be coming from different cities and different days as a way of trying to bring pressure to bear on people in that institution and help them to understand that not only can they do something but they have to do something. That's why people are going to there's a number of people that are going to begin fasting on September 22nd, which is this coming Thursday. Will Fast for 48 days gathering in Washington to do so as a way of trying to community communicate? The the urgency is seriousness of it because words have essentially no meaning absolutely none spite of the fact that I just stood here and spent I don't know how long throwing them out. They have no meaning not in our culture at least not anymore. I mean you can go to any church in America On Any Sunday and listen to almost any Minister and one way or another tell you to give away everything you own and follow Christ or follow somebody else and they're all standing there and Gucci shoes driving better cars than you are and nobody pays any attention to what they say because they don't mean what they say because their lives and their actions are not a reflection of their words. And so we have to find ways to communicate in proportionate fashion the kind of urgency that is attached to the kind of pain that we encounter and you do that by fasting you do that by committing Civil Disobedience you do that in any way you can in the hope that if you women beings And understand and begin to think a little bit about what is going on around them that they will react and respond in a good way. So our hope is not in either the people running for the White House or the people in Congress. Now our hope rests in people in Americans who in spite of the fact that there's little reason to presume that any of us will respond rationally because we've been given very little reason to do so and very little preparation in there. Our belief is that human beings are essentially decent and good and given half a chance and given some some decent information will act on it. But we're also not naive about the kind of pressure that the kind of forces that people live within and under that make it nearly impossible to be a human being in our society every institution the church educational institution. All of them are geared essentially towards making us good Americans and right now being a good American being means being a rotten human being and the institutions are doing an And job of molding us and shaping Us in that form and they're destroying us and we continue to live and work within them and to look for Hope inside of them and they continue to destroy us and so it's a very dangerous and very difficult situation that we find ourselves in but we tend to be very optimistic people and believe that there that there is a basic sanity that is operating somewhere out there and if we can just act in reasonable fashion and can try and communicate what is really happening then people will begin to understand and generally they have in the past whether it's the Civil Rights struggle or the struggle of women for the right to vote in some degree of parity in our society, whether it's the treatment of the mentally disabled or the retarded people used to stuff up in closets and basements because they were thought to be possessed and demonic when people begin to understand they generally begin to do good things, but it's very very important to understand the magnitude of the problem. The seriousness of the situation of one is going to have any hope of changing it in any predictable positive ways and almost no one in our society seems to have any real understanding of what is surrounding them. We should be acting as though we're in a burning building. I mean that's that's what we should be doing. We're surrounded by death and destruction in every shape and form possible. And he the nation is being surrounded by garbage mean increasingly were dumping trash off the coast and now it's coming back in and people go swimming up and down the New Jersey New York coast and they discover a hypodermic needles and other medical paraphernalia and feces floating in on the tide and that's because our garbage is piling up out there and it's got nowhere to go and he were violating the Earth were violating the are worse putting all of our wealth and our resources into death and destruction little babies are starving to death all over the place for absolutely no reason and we act as though everything is just fine. I mean, we may pay lip service to the fact that Singing just fine, but you take a good look at the way everybody's living in their living as though everything is okay. And we got plenty of time to work this out when in fact, we don't have plenty of time to work this out. We have a very short time in which to work this out and we may in fact have no time at all because we're right on the brink and we're not acting that way and the question of course comes down to what what does it mean to respond and react to a situation in proportionate and in rational fashion and the answer is that that's not happening now, but the answer also is at least from our experience that those kinds of responses that kind of action that is proportionate to what it is addressing never never happens. Unless it flows out of proximity unless you are living very proximate to those people who are most most abused and most victimized by the Injustice that surround us there is no way on Earth it is possible to feel the sense of urgency that will enable you to Respond properly and so the message that we bring is always the same message and it's not a new one at all. And the message is get out of the nice comfortable essentially white middle-class Pockets that you live in and most of you and start acting as though there's a whole other world out there and start acting as though that world is people by your sisters and brothers which in fact it is reduce the distance between them and you and all of us and as that distance diminishes and as those people begin to take on names and faces and history is and identities and as we start to treat them as human beings and feel about them as though they're human beings then you and we will become more empowered to do what needs to be done without that. Nothing happens. Now, I think we can sit in our pristine little environments and we can throw out the most intriguing and and wise platitudes and they have absolutely no meaning because nobody can eat them and nobody I can cover up with them and nobody can wrap themselves with them and keep warm at night. And so what we all need to do is I think is to be with those people who are in great pain and who are in great pain through no fault of their own but simply because they live in a society that is not just and is not Equitable and as we spend more time with those people and as we cast our lot with them increasingly, then we will know better. What is really happening and what it takes to make it better now, that's the basis on which we formed this Society was called participatory democracy and the idea on the part of the people that got together and put all of this together was that this Society could only work if people were deeply embedded in the lives of their Community if they were involved that they participated and if they stop participating then they would get in Desperate trouble because then they would wind up with officials like those in Washington who are completely out of touch with reality who would make the decisions for the citizenry. And whose decisions would be the wrong ones and that's exactly what we've got. I mean anybody who complains about what's coming out of Washington what comes out of the state house or the local government shouldn't complain because they are a reflection of us all of us. I mean, they're not doing what they're doing because they decided it was a good idea and they doing it against our wishes and will we allow people to do all those terrible things every time there's a discussion about somebody in the Pentagon spending about $400 for an ashtray or you know $600 for the toilet seat. I mean how many people would spend $600 for a toilet seat? Well, who the hell you think is paying (00:35:19) for him? I'm not. (00:35:22) I wouldn't give $600 for a toilet seat but taxes that you pay are being used in that way. Why because people can get away with it because you don't care because you figure well, that's my contribution. I pay my taxes grudgingly and I'll give as little as I have to but I'll do that and maybe if I feel inclined I'll pull a lever every couple of years and that's it. That's citizenship. And that's not it at all human beings need to be should be are supposed to be deeply involved in the problems that surround them whether it's the poor people in their communities or the people who are elderly and have nobody who cares about them or can help them get through their final years or people who are disabled in one way or another that's not the government's problem. It shouldn't be it should be everybody's concern and if everybody was involved and nobody out of Washington and nobody out of The state capital or nobody in any level of government could tell you lies or could fool you but now they can because you don't know I could tell you almost anything. I want to tell you about homelessness and you wouldn't have any frame of reference. You wouldn't know except those of you who are involved in the minority. So and if we want to find out what's really going on then we have to get involved and getting involved isn't easy and it doesn't mean just volunteering one day a week. Although sometimes that's how it starts. It means getting involved and it means acting as though the fate of our neighbors and the fate of our community and the fate of our planet is some consequence to us and that we are going to do something about it and out of that involvement flows. Hope The lack of involvement signifies something very dangerous very hurtful. So the question that we always buy we again, I mean the community of which I'm a part which extends Beyond Washington, it's all of those people across the country that are struggling for some semblance of sanity and Justice the question that we always find ourselves addressing is what are we called on to do? What is it mean to do our share what is our part because that's essentially all any of us are asked to do which is nice. We just have to do our little part and I'm reminded of that I have been reminded of that many many times in many ways when Michael and I were living out on the streets of Washington two years ago. There were two huge well for us huge snowstorms back-to-back 20 22 inches of peace and we set out there in the capital and it was not very It's not very heavily traffic at that time. There were not very many people out there. We sat under a sheet of plastic and watched as the snow came down and had many hours to watch the snow come down and during that during the second storm. I remember just focusing on a tree it wasn't very far away and watching the snow buildup on the tree and watching One limb in particular where the snow built up and then at some point the limb dropped because the accumulated weight of all of that snow had brought it down and it took hours and hours and God knows how many snowflakes that were on the thing probably Millions, but in watching all of that, I realized that all any one of those little snowflakes that was gathering up there had to do was to just it's just do it. You're just be a snowflake just kind of fall down and lay there in concert with a couple of million others and at some point the limb would drop and it did and old Gandhi used to be fond of saying that all we ever have to do is just The little atoms do they just do what they're supposed to do in the universe works real well and nobody has to sit down none of us have to sit down and plot it out and calculate it and make it all work. They just it works because everything is where it's supposed to be and everything is doing what it's supposed to be doing. And so the basic question the question that we are consistently faced with is what we call to one of my call to do as an individual as a human being in the face of what what is happening and for me the answer to that question came clearest when some years back a couple of years back the shelter that we operate wasn't renovated. It was a horrible place to be I mean, how could tell you we had two three toilets for a thousand people a couple of showers holes in the walls large enough to walk through is just a horrendous place to be and still eight nine hundred thousand people would troop in and out of their everyday because it beat what they had which was nothing and often. I Harold and others would stand out on the front steps and just kind of stand there and watch as people came into the building in the early evening large numbers of people would flow in you stand there and you watch people without legs people who lost their limbs and Vietnam coming in on crutches blind people and I can never understand how anyone can be on the streets blind. That's beyond me there. I know people who are blind and who live on the streets but to be blind and destitute is almost beyond my vote is beyond my comprehension young people old folks and I obviously Santa just kind of staring blankly had carrying all their belongings in little plastic bags every night you stand there and you watch this going on and it's kind of hard to watch after a while. And for me there was always this internal dialogue and debate that went on actually was more screaming session outside. I would say nothing because there's nothing to say you just stand there and you watch but inside I would be I would be Aging and I would be saying hey God are you doing why don't you do something about this? Look at all these people innocent human beings. They never done anything wrong. I mean most of them they've just gotten older they've gotten they've gotten disabled or the poor or the black they never had much of a chance. Why don't you do something? Why don't you do whatever you have to do in order to make it better because this is insane. This is this is wrong. You can't let this go on and each night. I would be the same kind of one-sided dialogue and finally it occurred to me and what occurred to me was that it was and in fact is in the existence of all of those people that flooded our shelter that come into the shelters in this area that are living in substandard or no housing that are old and aren't quite sure how they're going to live out the rest of their lives and feel really frightened and alone that's in the existence of all of those people that God is in fact saying to me Exactly what I was saying to God, which is why don't you stop everything that you're doing? Why don't you do whatever is necessary to make it better for these folks because these are your brothers and your sisters and your mother and your father and these are your neighbors. These are these are your human creatures that you share this planet with and their your community and nothing that you're doing is enough and anything and everything that it takes in order to make it better as what you should be doing. And so for me the answer to the question of what does it mean for me to do my share is that it means that I have to do anything and everything that I can and I have to let the agenda get set by those people who are out there eating out of garbage bills and living and dying on the streets and not let the agenda get set by some essentially middle class group of people sitting in a room somewhere deciding what's Best in necessary and right and so I would strongly encourage all of you in whatever way you can to begin to reduce the distance further between yourselves and people who are in great. Pain and people who are suffering great Injustice to begin to make increasing portions of your time and your cells available because the stakes are real high and it's not one-sided. It's not as though the salvation of those people rests on your intervention in their lives the truth. Is that both of your salvations rest in that because human beings do not live their lives as though everything was just fine when other human beings are freezing and dying out on the street and eating out of garbage Bales when little old ladies are getting raped repeatedly because they have no roof over their head because nobody cares enough to make sure that they have one when you judge numbers of children are growing up and empty cars and Welfare motels and under bridges you did we can't do that. We can't allow that to go on that's not right. It's wrong and nothing that we're doing is enough because nothing is happening. The numbers are growing every day every month every year. The numbers are growing and nothing seems to be Being at because the only thing that can stop it is us and most of us just don't care enough because we haven't gotten close enough to understand not only what's going on. But what it's what's going to take to make it better. So if you just find ways to get more involved no matter who you are no matter what you're presently doing, even if you are involved now just get more involved just get closer to those folks and let them tell you who they are and then you'll understand what you need to (00:44:15) be doing. So (00:44:17) having said that I understand that they're a little white pieces of paper supposed to be floating around. I might add that the part for me that's most fun is what's coming up because I really enjoy talking with people rather than Adam and for the last 45 minutes I've been talking at you. So this is our time to talk to each (00:44:36) other. I think many of us have become more and more aware of how important self-esteem is and what that does for people in their potential and what they can do in the future and would you just share a little bit what happened to you and even one week of being on the street with self-esteem. (00:44:54) Sure, although it should be said that living on the streets by choice. There's absolutely no relationship to being destitute any more than living simply Bears any relationship poverty poverty is so debilitating because it's inflicted when it's chosen it cannot be poverty and it becomes Simplicity. And so I lived on the streets for five months one time four months another time in a couple of weeks at third time both as a way of trying to get closer to the people that we serve and for other reasons. It's an amazing experience to be out there with huge numbers of people walking by you daily and you can tell just by looking in their eyes that either they don't see you and that's an amazing thing to experience to be a non-person. There's a reason why the word excommunicated carries a lot of power and a lot of weight because to be cast out of the human Community as a horrible thing, but when you're out on the street you are and you can see it in people's eyes either. They don't see you at all. You don't register as a human being Or if you do it's only for a second and then you see this glaze come down and people just kind of Zone you out. It's as though you're not out there and and I think that the reason for that is that that the existence of those folks is just too disturbing. I mean it raises questions. Why are they out there? And what is my responsibility in all of this? And those questions are so difficult particularly in the culture that we live in which is so fast moving that just getting through the day is a stupendous feet for most people that we just can't deal with those kinds of questions. And so we rid ourselves of the questions by ridding ourselves of the messenger and to live in a world where you are not recognized as a human being is to lose all sense of worth and value and I think I wrote in that book that after being out there just a week. I discovered that when members of the community might stop by that I couldn't look them in the eye and to this day. I have a great deal of difficulty looking people in the eye or looking at camera. Lens and that's because so many people walked by me and look through me that even though I was out there by choice it was debilitating for me. And so, can you imagine what it would do to someone who's out there because they have to be out there and the answer is that it destroys you just destroyed his human being and it's very quick. It doesn't take long at all. It's like walking into a into a an area of quicksand. You just start sinking and you're gone and the more you wiggle in the more you struggle the deeper in the quicker you go and at some point it's up to here and there's no way out and that point does not take very long (00:47:29) to reach. Could you give us a rundown on what the state of homelessness is in other countries that you would know any kind of data on Europe or Soviet (00:47:42) Union? Well in Western and Eastern Europe, there is not very much homelessness. There's more in Western Europe and there is an Eastern Europe. There's very little in the Soviet Union. And the funny thing is that most of the people in Eastern Europe don't believe that we really have this kind of problem in America. They think it's propaganda. They just don't believe that a country as wealthy as ours can have millions of human beings out on the street. It's just inconceivable to them and probably the only place you could find comparable situations is in third world Nations, but then we have people we have in the last couple of months. We had some officials from India come and visit us and tell us how shocked they were by what they found on our city streets and these are people come from Calcutta and you know part of the country where we're used to seeing you two numbers of people out on the streets, but they're shocked at the magnitude of the problem here. So there is no place else in the developed World. It has a problem comparable to ours. There's no place in the Underdeveloped World there are many places where you could find huge numbers of people living out on the street. But again, this isn't the underdeveloped world and this country is the richest that the Earth has ever seen. You could take Roman Greece at their height and put them together and they still be Paupers compared to us. We control fifty percent of the wealth of the world. So there is no place that compares with us when it comes to the numbers of people who are destitute. (00:49:11) This one, I think probably you've already answered but we'll ask it again. Are you implying that the capitalistic system should be changed? (00:49:19) Hi scrap it probably. I'm a Christian Christianity and capitalism are antithetical to each other. No one can call themselves a Christian and support his system that does the kind of things that this one does that is not possible. Never has been never will be. Anyone who lays claims to blaze claim to both is a (00:49:52) hypocrite. You imply that our educational system retired Zoar deteriorates our ability to be more and become more Humane. What are we doing wrong in our system? It must be fixed because education is the essence of our humanness. Is it fixable? (00:50:11) All of the institutions flow out of a certain kind of bedrock in the Bedrock is the value system on which we build our world and the values that we cling to in the values that we Embrace is positive ones are in fact not their destructive ones in competition is not a good thing. I realized that we've been brought up to believe it's a wonderful thing, but it's not a good thing at all some necessary for people to be at each other's throats to be better than somebody else in order to get by that's not good. That's not right greed is not a healthy thing greed drives people crazy, you know, what was the name of that book? Somebody wrote their love of possessions is a disease with them. It would talk about us. I mean it is a disease. We are a disease people. We we have we pursue we pursue things that give us a little joy little satisfaction. We pursue never ending wealth and and material Goods. Those aren't those aren't good things to be pursuing an education. The last place you find real education is in the University real education, you know, you get some of those Eastern Mystics up here with talk to you about the difference between true knowledge and empty knowledge. I mean empty knowledge is knowledge that's disconnected from existence from reality from experience. That's disconnected knowledge. It's dysfunctional. I mean, it's got very little value true knowledge true education does not occur in any kind of ghetto. It's hard to become educated in the ghetto and whether you're living in a poor red or brown or black neighborhood or whether you're in a place like this, which is another kind of ghetto real education doesn't occur real education occurs, when people are in touch with reality when they're struggling with its implications when they're attempting to make the world a better place to live and when they're doing it now rather than later and again the values that are imparted in a place like this or the same values that are communicated by every other institution and if the values are not good then students coming out of these places for the most part aren't going to be coming out in the right direction and moving the right way, but it's very hard to understand that when everyone around you is doing exactly the same thing, you know, if everyone is going in the wrong direction It's kind of hard to figure out that it's the wrong direction and there's really nothing to make you figure that out. As a matter of fact, those things that would indicate that you're going in the wrong direction. Most people would say are completely irrational or insane because in a crazy world anything same would appear to be irrational and that's the Dilemma in this institution institutions like this the church the other the other manifestations of institutional life in our society. They all come out of the same values and those values are not human and so nothing that grows out of those values can be human either none of the institutions and if people do come out of places like this better, it's in spite of them, which is what Malcolm X used to say about prison when people would say, well, you know, how come you don't like prisons Malcolm you were you came out of better person than you went in and he would say it's in spite of that institution not because of it that I came out of better. You mean most people come out of Prisons less Yeoman and most people come out of universities less human. (00:53:13) Mitch this question that hits real local issues in the sense that there's been a lot of discussion on people about people that live on the street by choice or live underneath the bridge by choice. Would you respond to that? (00:53:27) Yeah. I've never known anyone who has been homeless by choice, except me and Michael Stoops for the five months that he's been out there a few other people that have done similar kinds of things. It's just not something that anyone does by choice. It's it gets wet and cold and uncomfortable and you're incredibly vulnerable out there without four walls and a roof. It is a horrible way to live but most people tend to defend their existence and justify it. I mean, I'm willing to bet that if most of you and me were to sit down one-on-one and talk about whether there was any value in being in this place. You would have to defend it because you're here. You can't say what was it? Incredibly stupid place to be I'll be here for another three or four years. But you know, I think it's an inane spot, but I'll stake here. It's just not human nature. It's not the way it works. We come up with all of these justifications and all of these explanations for why we do what we do when in most instances we don't have the slightest idea why we're doing what we're doing except that. It's acculturated Behavior. I mean, somebody has convinced us. There's some groups of people have convinced us since we're old enough to breathe that this is the way things are done and so we can to justify and rationalize our existence whether it's in a place like this with out on the street. And so it's very easy to find somebody that you can shove a microphone in the face of will tell you well. I'm out here because I don't like working. Well, I don't like struggling with a kind of things that you got to struggle with on these jobs and I'm a free spirit. I just don't want to be this way. That's just not the way it is and a lot of people that that would rely on the belief that people are out there by choice to enable them to not do what they should be doing. You know, it becomes our defense mechanism to believe that people are out there because their bums or because they don't want to work because they're not willing to to assume the responsibilities that we are and why should we pay for them? You know, we work hard and they don't why should they get a free ride? We don't get a free ride. It's just easier to accept their existence if we believe that but there's no truth in it there really isn't it's absolute nonsense.