As California Governor Gavin Newsom directs cities to attack and destroy homeless encampments, people are asking “Where do we go?”
People on the street know what this means: the confiscation and destruction of their tents and the loss of what little they own, including bedding, medicines, ID and precious memorabilia. Incarceration, isolation, exposure and death.
These sweeps, which have been systematically ramped up in the past few years, have done nothing but run people from alley to corner, broken up people’s attempts in these encampments to help each other and share, a more humane way of living from the ground up.
The corporate class in this country has had over forty years to solve the problem of unaffordable housing and an economics of inequality, but instead they beat up on the most vulnerable victims of their failure, while reaping immense profits buying up housing, charging exorbitant rents, and creating more homelessness .
But these victims – men, women, families , young and old – aren’t silent and passive. They are organizing to resist and demand real solutions, joined by people of good will, many of us a vulnerable paycheck away from being out there ourselves, especially now that what we depend on to keep us alive is under brutal attack.
The voices of those who are organizing and resisting are rising everywhere, talking not just about resisting these attacks, but about their experience building community from the bottom up, about mutual aid, sharing and hands-on cooperation – not just for survival but as a practical vision of how the bigger picture should look.
And it doesn’t look like a prison camp or an overcrowded ‘shelter’. It looks like a society built on mutual support, equality – and love.
The People’s Tribune continues to report from this necessary front of struggle and social transformation. Please send us your stories and photos, meditations, art and poems. The future is up to us!
San Francisco poet and organizer Sarah Menefee is a long-time homeless rights activist. She is the Homeless Desk on the People’s Tribune Editorial Board, and a founding member of such organizations as the San Francisco Union of the Homeless, Homes Not Jails and 'First they came for the homeless’. Known for her poetry about the streets, her latest collections are Winter Rose, Sign and Holy Eel.
