The homeless have been living in perpetual crisis for years, but solving homelessness is no mystery. Housing, health care and employment are the three basic necessities that are crucial and necessary for moral public policy.
But we live in a profoundly amoral time: housing, health care and employment are not in the interest of those who own us. Here’s the first clarity: The owners, the 1 percent who throw parties for Obama and Romney, for Inslee and McKenna, are not us. The owners don’t care about us. The owners wish we’d all just shut up and go away. And the us I’m talking about is anybody who actually has a shred of moral decency and can still feel responsible for a neighbor in need.
The owners don’t feel responsible. All the owners feel is their fear of losing out on potential benefit to themselves. All they feel is their own insatiable desire to piggy up to the table and pork out on more and more.
For the owners the problem of homelessness comes down to one thing: How to get rid of the homeless with no effort on their part?
Here is the second clarity: The owners are disassociated from the rest of us. We are objects of little value.
We cannot look to the owners to save us or even to help us, and because the owners own both political parties, we cannot hope that the political process will save or help us either.
We cannot realistically expect government or business to suddenly care about a roof over every head, free medical care for every person or a job for all who need to work — such basic humanity is no longer possible given the atrophied hearts and minds of the owners.
We are left to ourselves.
What we need is a revolution rooted in the morality that every person is sacred and that the land upon which we live is sacred.
This is not merely a revolution of the heart but also of our public and political behavior.
The owners don’t understand anything until what they own is threatened. What is needed is a complete moral, revolutionary movement that pulls the 1 percent off their thrones so that we the people can become sovereign again.
A roof over every head must become a right, not a request. Health care for all must become a reality, not a vision. A job — a way to make a living and contribute to the commonwealth of a moral society — must become commonplace, not a fierce competition.
Until these simple, basic freedoms are embraced by the owners, we the people have the responsibility to disturb the owners, to disrupt their plans, to unsettle their mechanisms of control, to expose them as frauds, to frustrate their agendas of domination. We the people have the moral responsibility to withdraw our consent from their governance.