Just a great Phil Collins song to listen to while you read my post.
I read Jack London's "Call of the Wild when i was about 13. Great book for an adolescent boy to read if you want him to strike out with a pack on his back for the Yukon. Hence the quote i ended "Grandma, Hobos, Handouts, and Rhubarb Pie" with. As an anonymous person told me about the quote "True on too many levels". I couldn't have said it better. This is one of my favorite London quotes because it is "True on too many levels."
"It began to look as if I should be compelled to go to the very poor for my food. The very poor constitute the last sure recourse of the hungry tramp. The very poor can always be depended upon. They never turn away the hungry. Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused food by the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor. Oh, you charity-mongers! Go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the charitable. They neither give nor withhold from their excess. They have no excess They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for themselves, and very often from what they cruelly need for themselves. A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog."
Jack London 'The Road'
Nothing makes my blood boil like the "Haves" of our society kicking the "Have nots" when they are already down. There homeless population in the US is growing by numbers we haven't seen since the great depression of the 1930's. Tent Cities are springing up and growing across the country. My posts titled "Homeless Numbers Increasing, Tent Cities Abound", Criminalization of the Poverty Stricken Homeless", and "Homeless in St. Louis, Mo Lose Everything" are aimed at helping shed some light on this phenomenon.
This trend shows no signs of letting up anytime soon. Here's a quote from an article in The Gazette in Colorado Springs that indicates they don't have enough laws on the books to harass the homeless so they are going to make some more.
The scores of homeless people camping along creeks, trails, parks and other public property in Colorado Springs may have to find another place to live soon.
The Colorado Springs Police Department, which suffered a public relations nightmare earlier this year for its role in city-sponsored sweeps of homeless camps, is proposing a new law that would prohibit camping on public property.
The proposal was met with scorn and anguish from some of the many homeless people living in tents and under tarps along the snowy banks of Fountain Creek on Friday.
“Where do you want us to go? Out of town?” asked Chris, a 44-year-old man huddled underneath nothing more than two old sleeping bags. “Everybody hates the homeless.”
The proposed law makes it illegal for “any person to camp or to set up or occupy a tent, shack or other temporary shelter that could be used for camping on any public property.” The city also amended an existing law that bans camping “on any park property.”
http://www.gazette.com/articles/public-90297-camping-springs.html
For every person residing in a tent city it would be my guesstamation that there are about another 5 living in vehicles or more obscure areas trying to remain "out of sight" and "under the radar" of local authorities. Many of these people live in cars, vans, and campers. There is a growing segment of the population that have begun to refer to themselves as vandwellers.
One of my favorite characters from the counter culture spent many of the later years of his life as a vandweller. My post on "Nature Boy, eden ahbez" ,or ahbe as his friends called him, was one of my personal favorite posts. We will be looking at more vandwellers, rubber tramps, and vagabonds ( a positive term in my definition ) in general this month.
