So, Tonto. You'd like to make some changes around here, would you? Getting bored with all the picket fences? Want to break out and grow tomatoes, yams, and strawberries in the parking strip, do you, Tonto? Want to raise goats? Want to be the one who wears the mask instead of the one who has to talk to it? Well, get in line, take an application form, and get ready to fill it out, and we'll get back to you in six months if we feel like it.
Sometimes when I get bored I like to multiply and divide numbers to see how big or little things are. Like the other day when nothing was on the TV except Jerry Springer and infomercials for the Psychic Hotline, I got to wondering how big this country really is.
I mean, everyone knows the US is 3,615,211 or so square miles, but what is that in square dog feet? I still don't know, but I found out another cool fact. I found out that if you divide that by the number of people they say we have, and if you know there are 640 acres in a square mile, you get more than eight acres.
Not having grown up on a farm, I immediately converted that answer to football fields, and got almost eight. The US is so big that if you divided it up equally among all its adults and children, everyone would get almost eight football fields worth.
That tells me two things. First, that this country is a lot more crowded than it was in 1864. Back then General Sherman thought there was so much spare space that the freed slaves could all be given 38.72 football fields and a mule and nobody would hardly have to move over to make room. (The trick was to give them land covered with sand that nobody else wanted, and then take it back when nothing grew on it.)
The other thing it tells me is that the problem of homelessness is not that we've run out of places to put people.
No, it comes down to the same thing it came down to in 1864. Power.
People who have power saying that people who don't have power shouldn't be allowed it; it would upset the whole Natural Order of the Universe.
"You can't allow freed slaves to have land." "They never had any land before, they wouldn't know what to do with it." "How can people who only know how to steal chickens raise them?" "It wouldn't look right, have you seen the houses they live in? They're positively eyesores!" "Next thing is, they'll be wanting their children to be able to go to normal schools."
Et cetera. Every possible excuse except the one that gets to the point: "If you give them power, it's less power for me."
Let's see how this works on a smaller scale.
At first glance you would think that if El Centro de la Raza said that 100 or so homeless people could pitch tents on their land until Jan. 16, 2001, that'd be the end of it, wouldn't it?
You'd be right, if El Centro de la Raza had the right to say what happens on El Centro de la Raza land. But in reality, nobody has the right to say what happens on their own land, because power isn't distributed that way.
Go ahead, try painting your house neon mauve, and see what happens.
Or try growing bamboo in your front yard. Or kudzu. That would be interesting, wouldn't it?
Interesting, but not within your power, Tonto. Your Neighborhood Association has some interesting ideas of its own, as does the Department of Construction and Land Use. Their interesting ideas usually involve something called Don't Rock the Boat.
Now if you'd just come in the middle of the night and put up something appealing, like a monolith reminiscent of the monoliths in Stanley Kubrick's "2001, a Space Odyssey," that would be different. That would be art, and this is a forward-looking, artistically sensitive community, which cares about not looking like a bunch of Philistines to the Rest of the World.
What does the Rest of the World have to do with it? Well, they have the power, not us. Didn't you know that, Tonto?
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