Plan For The Worst. Expect The Best

We just found out that city council will be holding a public hearing for our homeless community on September 10.
We are crafting our plan for the day. So please keep an eye out for what that day will likely entail.
Government, I’ve learned, is this strange body of law keepers who rarely can see the forest through the trees. The details of the law becomes an obsessive abstraction and obfuscation of the reason the laws were put in place in the first place.
In one of our hearings with the planning commission, a commissioner made an impassioned speech that he stood with us morally. But he had to vote against us legally.
These are the dangerous conundrums governing bodies find themselves at precarious points in history.
My son is studying the Salem Witch Trials where 19 people were hanged for supposedly being witches.
At what point does someone stand up and say, “this is insanity!”
Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted.
But not until 200 people were convicted and 19 killed.
When morality and law are at conflict with one another is when society falls into retrograde.
The trail of tears. Slavery. Japanese Internment Camps. Separating children from families at our border.
We do it over and over again.
Our morality can tell us very clearly we are moving in the wrong direction. But the law says that is the direction we must go. So we plod on as unthinking zombies with a myopic, single view of the way things are supposed to be no matter how blatantly wrong that way is.
It’s exactly like that moment when Michael, from the show “The Office” drives into the lake because his GPS told him to do so.
If you aren’t able to make corrections because you are so obsessed with looking at the map you are, without fail, going to find yourself driving into a lake.
In what world are we able to make any logical, moral or religious rational sense in the idea that it is OK for people to be living alone and isolated on the street?
“They want to live there.”
“They choose to live there.”
“They need to follow the rules.”
These are the age old fall backs of society where we right our moral wrongs by blaming the victims of a broken system.
Martin Luther King Jr. fought this rationale over and over again with the Civil Right Movement. The white clergy called him an outside agitator. They deplored the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.
African Americans standing up for their rights as equal citizens was seen as causing too many problems.
We have this blind habit of assuming the system is fine. But it is the people who the system abuses that are the problem.
Very clearly, Akron leaders deplore the community the homeless have made out of tents. They come up with new and random reasons why this community is terrible, gross, deplorable and inhumane.
Yet they never talk about from where these people came. Starving and unsheltered under bushes, under bridges, in ditches.
They somehow gloss over the grotesque existence the system has created by decades of politicians who slowly but surely starved our country of services desperately needed by this population.
That system is fine.
The community these people built for themselves is terrible and must be torn down.
Not only do they conveniently forget the days, weeks and months of desperation before they came to this self-run community, they also conveniently forget the days, weeks and months of desperation after they tear down this terrible community.
Before and after do not matter. All that matters is that this must end now.
Standing up for yourself and demanding dignity and respect from the very society that failed you so badly is completely unacceptable.
This is the story of the witches of Salem, the native Americans, the African Americans and the Japanese Americans during World War II.
Every single time government wakes up and says “Oops. We probably shouldn’t have done that.”
But every single time they force the victims of these atrocities to fight and claw and die for what was theirs to begin with: Equal rights.
The law of the land has never been “equal rights as long as you are white men with money.” It is EQUAL RIGHTS FOR EVERYONE.
And yet we have to have these civil rights revolutions where these rights must be demanded and taken.
Each and every time we say to ourselves, “well, this time is different. This isn’t about equal rights. This is about something else.”
But each and every time our government wakes up from it’s trance and sees that they were indeed causing undo hardship for a group of people they didn’t care much about.
I titled this post “Plan For The Worst. Expect The Best”
All that you have read so far in this post is planning for the worst. I have no evidence from our history that our government is going to do the right thing. There is no reason whatsoever for me to think that this time they will wake up and realize that the zoning laws of their city are causing great pain and suffering for the most poor of our population.
But yet I have faith.
I know, without a doubt, that we are on the right side of history. That we are the ones seeing this clearly for what it is and they are the ones that are seeing shadows and false realities.
It is only a matter of time before they wake up and see the errors in their ways. Mark these words in your memory. America, sooner or later, will come to a great awakening that we are abusing our homeless population. That they are the product of a national government that has been repeatedly pulling the rug out from underneath these people since the 1980s.
We will come around to taking care of the hundreds of thousands of American-born refugees that have been swept up in an economic tsunami.
This is a tree that is mostly cut through. It is only going to take a few more pushes before it falls and we right this tragic wrong of our society.