Please read the whole thing (and if capitalists and conservatives were consistent, they’d be livid, too, at the idea homeless people’s property can be stolen and thrown away under the euphemism of “cleaning” - aren’t property rights sacred to them?), but here is the conclusion:
This is what we give up — always so much more than we think — in agreeing to scapegoat, to sacrifice the homeless everyone else gives up public space. An ordinance that says no camping or sleeping in public quickly becomes no loitering in public. Stories are already emerging in the wake of the Grants Pass ruling of random people being told that they cannot sit, cannot eat, cannot exist in public space. Often these people aren’t homeless, but how can they prove that? This ruling furthers the trend, one which is not new, of the privatization of public space and the need to be a consumer to exist out in the world. And this is just one way that abandoning the unhoused hurts us all. Equally significant is that in abandoning those who cannot afford housing we agree to frame shelter as something you must earn, rather than a basic need that we all must be granted in this world. That cannot stand.
What we need, now more than ever, is solidarity across all forms of division. We cannot allow the dehuamnization or that criminalization of homelessness, of poverty, of those struggling to get by in this system, both because it is unjust and because it hurts each and every one of us. Anything that targets struggling individuals instead of the system they struggle under reinforces the oppressive mechanisms of the system and takes us a step further from liberation, from freedom, and from the world we need.
There’s no need to attack conservatives here. I’m just as concerned about the safety and prosperity of my unhoused neighbors as you are.
This is a bad and anticonservative law. Everyone who loves liberty should be fighting it.
I agree, everyone who loves liberty should oppose this law.
Unfortunately, if you are conservative and you oppose this law, in my experience you are damn near a unicorn. I’m in California and these kind of brutal crackdowns are wildly popular among conservatives - and moderates, and even wealthy white liberals. Like the article says, blaming the victims of homelessness for the homeless crisis has been incredibly effective. And most people don’t understand how corrupt the homeless industrial complex is, how little government funding actually gets to the homeless to help them, and how incompetent, abusive, and poorly run those aid programs actually are, so it’s easy to look at all the money and programs that exist on paper and blame homeless people for “refusing help”.
You can call this ‘anticonservative’ all you want, but the hard truth is the ruling was only made possible because of who conservatives voted for in the first place.
The current Republican Party is anti conservative in a lot of ways, but those terms have become roughly synonymous
I wholeheartedly agree with the first part and must reluctantly concede the second.
Conservatism isn’t what you think it is. Conservatives not only are, in fact, the enemies of liberty, they always have been.
Anything worth saying is worth saying in plaintext.