It’s hard to write a humor column when something like the Orlando shooting happens. The fact that I tend toward rage rather than grief compounds the problem. So I will stick to lesser news today.
Each week volunteers meet at Real Change to talk about what the paper might talk about. Last week we considered tiny houses.
One great thing about tiny houses is they’re tiny. Tiny things can be inherently amusing. Trump’s hands, for example. Tiny little monkeys. Yappy micro dogs. When someone walks a yappy little dog by me on the sidewalk, I like to confront the dog and demand, in English, that it justify its existence. Then I laugh and laugh, because the tiny dog doesn’t get it.
Our group discussion concerning tiny houses had to do with what it would take to ensure that every homeless person got to live in a tiny house — at least — rather than have to live in a tent, or sleep on a sidewalk, or sleep on a mat in a crowded shelter, or in the front seat of a Subaru.
I realized in the midst of the discussion that it would probably take a revolution.
The problem with all these kinds of ideas is that no one wants to put a permanent solution in front of anyone to snatch up and hold forever, because we live in a world that runs on instability. Things of weight have to always be falling so as to drive the economic turbine. Nothing and no one can be allowed to just sit quietly on a shelf out of the juggernaut’s way. There is no such thing as out of the juggernaut’s way.
Think about it. There was a guy a few weeks ago who had been found to be living in a shack he’d built in the woods. One man found him and reported him. No one else cared. But because someone had found him he couldn’t live there any more. Why? Because he was bothering people?
No. Because of the opposite. He wasn’t in anyone’s way, so he wasn’t fueling the juggernaut. The rule is you have to be in view, and we have to know what you’re doing, and you’d better be making money for someone.
Here’s how I think it works. Say you’re an unemployed homeless person who can’t pay rent. There will be a program set up that will put a tiny house somewhere that you can move into. For free. But only for a while.
After some time has passed, say on the order of six months, if nothing changes and you’re still living in the tiny house for free, you will have not had a positive outcome.
A positive outcome means being restored to a state of being that serves as fuel for the juggernaut. You will not have achieved a state of being that enables anyone to profit off your existence.
Therefore only one of two things can happen. You can get a job and start paying rent on your tiny little house, thus having some positive outcome, or you can go back to sleeping on a mat, so that someone else can live in the tiny little house and have a shot at having a positive outcome.
But supposing you get a job and pay the rent on the tiny house, will that end it and let you live forever in the tiny little house unmolested? No! Because tiny little houses are valuable tools for lifting homeless people out of poverty and into the way of the juggernaut, so you have to have more positive outcomes to justify your continued existence in the tiny little house. So there will be a time limit, probably just one more half year. And if you don’t improve during that time out, you go anyway. We need positive outcomes!
Eventually, everyone has to get out of the tiny houses because they are valuable real estate that serve as places to grow positive outcomes.
Either you’re going to be one of the positive outcomes they’re trying to grow, or you’re going to be a weed.
Everyone says that the problem with homeless encampments is they become littered. So the people living in them say, OK, provide dumpsters and garbage collection.
“What, for free? Where are your positive outcomes?”