LOS ANGELES, CA — I am as influenced by the Rastafarians as I am by the Christians. I follow Christ. But I don’t resonate with Western Christian Culture. It’s not my culture. I can appreciate the culture, but my culture is mainly from the Caribbean. I established the Church Without Walls to approach everything as a Church Without Walls to avoid barriers that separate people for no good reason.
I’ve been on Skid Row for 12 years. Part of that is chance and part is not looking at people as if they were unfit to live. I’m no different. We’re all the same. I’m just one paycheck, or half away from living on the streets myself, as are a lot of folks who’ve went through this financial crisis we’re in.
Usually when Christians approach this work they say, “We’re going to get you out of Skid Row, we’re going to get you out of this situation.” We’re like no, we want to be in this thing and be a part of the community. I want to elevate people within the community not help them out of the community. We want to approach the homeless as it’s not as if you’ve done something wrong. Homelessness is a racial justice issue. We look at it for what it is, learn from the people, hear from the people, and so we do church in that context.
These communities (like Skid Row) didn’t just come from anywhere, but from the policies that shaped our society. In 2008 people lost their homes and instead of giving the money to the people to save their homes we gave the money to the banks, we saved the capitalistic system. Now we have people coming out of the woodwork and acting like homelessness just happened yesterday. It was systematically brought to this point. Now I work with CLU, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. We work with Unite Here and some of the unions. One of the things that we’re working on is that the private equity firms purchased all the homes of the people who lost their homes and turned them into rental property.
So, when you think about these private equity firms and how people don’t make enough money, yet we want to raise prices on everything, but we don’t want to pay people a living wage. Homelessness rose, what, 20% last year? In one year. So, people are losing their homes and you’re fighting with them about a $15 minimum wage. They can’t survive on it anyway.
So, if we don’t create a society where we protect people it’s going to get worse. Homelessness, like all our problems, is dealt with by law enforcement. There’s 100 million dollars allocated to homelessness and 85% of it goes to law enforcement. You got to watch that, how they spend their money
Note from the author: “The Blackstone Group is one of the world’s largest private equity firms, with $333 billion in assets. They specialize in leveraged buyouts and since the financial crisis has spent nearly $7.5 billion to purchase the 40,000 single-family homes to manage as rentals across the United States.” Hedge Funds: The Ultimate Absentee Landlords. (From The American Prospect.)
I read some articles in English in Tribuno del Pueblo website, available on this website. It says that by 2060 all jobs will be technology, robotics. Deportations forcing farmers in California to get tech help, same for retail, hotels, etc. People winning prizes for writing book about the guillotine, the hangings because of the unrest that is sure to come with millions of jobs lost to technology which can solve society’s problems if in control of a government of the people, for the people, by the people as Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address.