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Homeless protest for the right to sleep and survive

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Two young homeless men are arrested for sleeping (“lodging”) at the Liberty City2 homeless rights protest at Berkeley City Hall. PHOTO/SARAH MENEFEE
Two young homeless men are arrested for sleeping (“lodging”) at the Liberty City2 homeless rights protest at Berkeley City Hall.
PHOTO/SARAH MENEFEE

 
BERKELEY CA — They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I can only come up with one. And that word is torture. When a life sustaining activity like sleep is not permitted, torture is the result. Suffering is increased. Hopelessness overwhelms. And when we stand against it?
Enter Liberty City 2, weekend vigil for equal rights and protections for the homeless. Starting July 2, ‘First They Came for the Homeless’ called a vigil to seek justice for the participants of Liberty City last November, when the city of Berkeley illegally destroyed four truckloads of gear confiscated from our protest. Instead of allowing this latest vigil, the city spent thousands trying to prevent it.
We show up to a completely fenced-off City Hall. The city’s raid on July 2 confiscated our pop up tent and info table, saying City Hall was private property. We are not allowed to protest. The assistant city manager was on hand supervising this unconstitutional act.
We were informed by police that if we slept we would be arrested. Sleep deprivation is torture. Two of our homeless protesters were arrested at midnight and taken to jail for sleeping [‘lodging’], others given citations.
We continued, sitting on cardboard for the entire time. We still had music and art. We chalked the sidewalks. We had community. We had sharing. And we had fun.
We never had a large group.  Our numbers dwindled after the arrests and citations. But we were not going to quit. By Sunday, we had a small group of homeless coming to talk. They came for food and they came for hope. We had plenty of food. But we could not offer them hope. There is none.
There will be no hope until the people in charge recognize that people in need will not disappear because we are inconvenient. The problem is only getting worse. Cities are doing nothing but giving money to groups who rely on homelessness to stay in business. They will not solve homelessness if they are profiting from it. This is the same as all encampments. Shelter, stability, and storage are the attraction. These are what the homeless are looking for. Some of them use drugs. And drug use and crime are used by the city as an excuse to torture ALL homeless. These encampments form out of desperation. And they will continue to develop in nooks everywhere. The city is wasting money and effort fighting a losing battle. The truth is the homeless in this country are people who can’t go away. They have no place to go.
But it is not over. It will never be over until there are equal rights, justice, and compassion for those in need. By cooperating and taking care of each other, the homeless show the housed what humanity is all about.

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6 COMMENTS

  1. Sorry! If you force people out of their homes due to high cost of living, there is NO RIGHT to make it ILLEGAL to live on the streets…..that is all

  3. This whole piece is excellent. The last paragraph shines on actual intelligent & solution based thinking. Seems like our people (we all know ‘they’ don’t see us as ‘their’ people even though were from the same planet, I think) would have found a way to resolve such a simple issue. The money we spend on other things could easily be allocated to working this out. Alot of people are healthy enough to work, why not offer jobs that would also ‘generate’ money to help out. That would also be an investment into each person. There’s no shortage of ideas on how to implement something of this nature. I’m all about feeding the world, but shouldn’t we put all our homeless brothers and sisters indoors first. Sure, there would still be folks who’s D&A issues would still be an obstacle for that individual, even then, there are ways to keep our people off the streets. Absolutely no compassion what so ever. Real cold, bitter, spiteful, angry, and no idea of what pieces fell together for people to be where they are. It’s sickening the homeless bro and sis’ are being profited from.

  5. City Hall is NOT private property. Whoever declared that is was needs to be arrested for fraud and theft (from the public)

  6. If cities won’t even recognize the basic right to sleep, and also won’t provide shelter for everybody that needs it, then there is only one option left: War. With guns and bombs. This is the whole reason for the second amendment, incase a government in this country turns tyrant

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