For a while now a good friend of mine in Seattle has been sending me photographic portraits of homeless men and women he encounters around his small office in the Ballard area of the city. While the imagery cannot hide the dreariness of their situation, what my friend tries to convey in the portraits is a sense of commonality, a shared humanity. Most of us will cross the street in order to avoid confronting a homeless person. We certainly almost never wish to make eye contact with such a person, whose circumstances of life, for whatever reason, terrifies us. But my friend is an unusual individual, selfless and sensitive to the plights of others. He is not afraid to engage with the homeless, to inquire about their life, where they come from, and what might have been the circumstances that brought them such desolation, hunger, and an abject sense of being. For surely to look deeply into the eyes on any of us we find a bit of all of us. We cannot escape ourselves.

Photograph by Rex Hohlbein

Like my friend, there are many who are well aware that such a preponderance of privation in our country represents a societal illness becoming more and more difficult to ignore. In a way, the great ‘State of Homeless’ represents a completely separate state; think of it as the fifty-first state, the boundaries of which extend westward beyond the State of California, eastward beyond the shores of the Atlantic ocean, as far north as the Arctic circle, and as far south as the earth’s equator. It is a landless state, seamlessly woven throughout all states; one of desperation, poverty, and hunger with a population estimated roughly the same as the state of Connecticut’s 3.5 million people. At any given time, slightly over ten percent of our population is homeless. And it grows. It is difficult, of course, to know exactly what the real numbers are or how many children go to bed hungry each night in this country.

Funding for programs specifically designed to help America’s poor and hungry are being cut at a time when we are simultaneously pouring money into a country with a population nearly identical with our ‘State of Homeless’. Since the onset of the Libyan conflict, we have spent over half a billion dollars with an expected continuation of 40 million a month without any guarantee of an outcome other than it feeds enormously the military-industrial complex and global corporate interests. This figure pales compared to the money we’ve spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, billions of that unaccounted for. It has been estimated that the money spent in these uncertain wars could have eradicated poverty and homelessness in the United States for the next century.

We would all do well to read, again and again, President’s Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech. Equally important as his warning about the danger of allowing the military-industrial complex (corporatism) to grow too large, are those words found in his closing paragraph. “We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

He also wrote, “In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.” Today we can hardly imagine such cooperation for the greater good of the American people.

We would be foolishly in denial to believe there is no direct correlation between our wars and our homeless. Nor should we ignore the enormous percentage of US veterans who find themselves bereft and discarded, living in poverty on the streets.

There was a time, not so long ago, in this country and in others, those afflicted by poverty and hunger could come to a home in search of charity-a barn or back porch in which to sleep, a hot meal, kind words, and perhaps a day or two of work. Today most of us believe homeless people are nothing more than derelicts, alcoholics, mentally unstable, human debris.

The truth is quite different; the leading cause of homelessness is unaffordable shelter. The absence of jobs and low wages are other contributors of homelessness. Within the ‘State of Homeless’, there is also a high rate of mental illness and alcoholism. However with better education, social services and the availability of decent and affordable health care much of these contributing factors are treatable and the consequences of homelessness and anti-social behavior could be better prevented. In a way, it is an ongoing social conundrum. For thousands of families living on the edge, stress is a crippling factor disintegrating the bonds that are necessary for healthy family cohesion; studies have shown that stress alone can trigger the on-set of devastating psychoses in children. Many men and women, living on the streets today, diagnosed with mental illness, could have been treated at an early age and still could be.

Photograph by Rex Hohlbein

We blame one another to such an extent that the concept of ‘government’ has become an alien and negative separate entity. But ultimately is there anyone to blame but us? A man who falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a tree, should not blame the car or the tree.

If government is less or more than the common rulebook agreed upon by the majority, the pages sewn together by democratic principals to protect the commonality of all, we have failed. When millions of our children suffer hunger and poverty in a country as wealthy as the United States, we have failed.

Rather than fighting foreign wars, which ultimately serve the already full coffers of the rich, our focus should be on wars against homelessness, poverty, and hunger in our own country. Our most effective weapon is our voice and our vote and we must fight for those who can’t.

Photograph by Rex Hohlbein

* The three photographic portraits in this blog were taken by my friend Rex Hohlbein. As part of his Seattle’s Homeless Project, ‘Homeless In Seattle’ he’s developing an idea of posting specific jobs that need to be done in the neighborhood that will benefit the homeless, such as fixing the drinking fountain where  they often wash up and get a drink. Bids will be gotten from general contractors to implement the work;  a PayPal account will be established to allow people to donate  toward the project. This is a remarkably positive idea because it allows all of us not only to help those in need but to be responsible, in part, for the maintenance of our city. PLease visit his site where Rex invites you to make comments and suggestions and to essentially ‘get involved’ in issues that affect all of us.    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Homeless-in-Seattle/172003812844870.

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