Perspective becomes a mental exercise in regard to the homeless issue. Let us close our eyes and try it. Try to imagine what 300 people look like. Imagine yourself in the center of a football field. There are now people all around you, shoulder to shoulder. No room to move inside this football field.
All of these people for certain have two things in common, they are financially broke to the point of being broken and have run out of means to sustain themselves. All of these people will need something to do with their time, their hands and their minds to acquire the means to pay for any quality of life.
Therefore we must enable these people by creating work, and productive labor can be used to sustain normality and housing. We all will need sleep, food, and water and in modern society money. Otherwise (imagine if you will) these 300 people are going to be stuck in that football field with you indefinitely. And the problem is two fold, all these people need to pitch tents, or build shacks. Somewhere. Or sleep right out on the ground because humans have the biological requirement to sleep. And it is a fact that if these people sleep outside that football field, they are stepping on a property that doesn’t belong to them, therefore they are trespassing and subject to this type of persecution anywhere they try to go, to try to sleep. So proper land space must be provided initially in order to be able to pitch a tent to sleep without being subject to trespass. Closed schools, military houses and abandoned factories and warehouse buildings should be used for the purpose of immediate shelter. At which point we need to determine who is in need of care. I mean in terms of being able to fend for themselves, and at what level. We have people living outdoors because they can’t fend for themselves normally for some innocent reason. And in 2024 we have the medical and psychiatric science to help these people be as healthy and productive as possible. We have nursing protocol and medical ethics that require us to help these people. And it becomes in the interest of human science that we do so. We must learn better ways of helping and treating the ailments that these people suffer from. Johnson vs. Grants Pass being overturned has allowed only cruelty and punishment for those simply needing a place to sleep. Taking people’s possessions and throwing them in a dumpster is not going to help them.
My grandmother taught me that if someone needs a place to sleep, you give it to them. If someone needs something to eat, you feed them, and anyone who does not live that way is a heathen. And when we allow our elected governments, city, county, state, federal, to treat our country’s citizens in a cruel and inhumane manner, have we then become heathens?
From 2020 to 2024, 620 Americans have died, homeless in the city of Nashville. And look at the money that has been spent. Now open your eyes, and try to understand that we have 1200 homeless in the city of Nashville. How many will die this year? Where will they go? When the city tears down all the encampments where do they have to go? Remember 300 x 4 = 1200, that’s a lot of people.