Material Values

Every week I work the Real Change vendor desk for 6 hours. Usually it's elementary, if not easy, work. Vendors pay 35 cents for each paper. If I can't work out in my head that at that rate 83 papers is $25.05, no problem, a computer does the math for me. Occasionally a vendor comes in a plunks down $25, and says, "I want what that will get me," and the computer isn't set up to do it that way, and I have to think very hard to figure out that they should get 82.857 papers. But even that's just memorizing your basic times sevenths table.

Then there are times it's neither elementary nor easy, like the other week when a vendor came in with a swollen jaw who'd just been robbed of all his belongings. He said he gave everything up freely to the creeps who jumped him, but they roughed him up anyway.

The police are reportedly stepping up their presence downtown and working harder to stop violent crime, but the issue I see coming up over and over again is that there is no recourse for homeless victims of theft. The injuries are treated in emergency rooms. But if a homeless person has everything he owns taken away, there is nothing done about it.

Amazingly, people think there's nothing that needs to be done. They didn't have anything to begin with. Now they still have nothing, right? They're homeless! That's the way they're supposed to be, right?

No, they didn't have nothing to begin with. They had little. There's a huge difference between having little and having nothing. Let me give some examples, based on my own experiences.

When I was homeless I had little. One of the little things I had was a Radio Shack knockoff of a Walkman, and six cassette tapes. I remember distinctly that for many months there were precisely six tapes. I counted them often to make sure they were all there. I won't bore you with the titles. The important thing is that with those 6 tapes I had a home entertainment system. That's pretty good for someone without a home.

During one bout of homelessness I had a freak Bic pen. It somehow lasted an entire 8 months. It was like the Loaves and Fishes that fed the multitudes. It was like the oil in the lamps that wouldn't burn up. It had the added quality that if you touched it to paper and pulled it away, it released a long filament of ink that could be laid down anywhere. It was priceless.

Another little thing I had was a family album. There were pictures in it from before I was born, going back to 1917, of parents and other family. Honestly, I'm not too fond of my family, but I'm fond of having had one. Having a family, and having evidence of it, enables me to prove to strangers that I am as human as they are. I was born of a woman just like them. I was once very small and am now larger, just like them. This sort of thing is invaluable especially to someone who has no home.

When I was homeless I had more than my memory of who I am, I had documents to prove it. I had Washington State ID, a birth certificate, even a military dependent's card left over from childhood, and a slew of old school IDs I've never tossed.

It turns out that all wage-earning employment and most assisted housing in this country require, by law, proof of identity. Heaven forbid that the poor homeless person you're lifting out of poverty isn't the poor homeless person he says he is.

If I had lost everything, I would have been left without music, magic, proof of humanity, and a way out.

Unreal Estate

As I've said repeatedly, most homeless people don't want to be.

It turns out, though, that some do. The fact that I don't come right out and say so annoys some of my very favorite friends, so I want to make up for that and talk about the tradition of being homeless on purpose, saying where it comes from, and why it needs to be celebrated. Let's begin with a real life situation.

Last June a man died near Medford, in southern Oregon. Authorities have accused another man of manslaughter. There were three homeless witnesses, including a married couple. For the past 11 weeks all three innocent witnesses have been held in jail with miserly compensations of $7.50 per day, and the married couple separated, not because they are flight risks, but, in the words of the judge who ordered the jailing, "When they weren't incarcerated, they weren't easy to find."

I guess to appear to save a little trouble and expense it's OK to treat people like animals, in Medford, Oregon, notwithstanding the fact that these days hotel rooms cost less than properly staffed jail space.

The story touches on one reason why people prefer to be homeless. If you have a permanent home, your next door neighbor could be anybody. You could end up being stuck next door to an sickeningly inhumane judge for example. There would be no way out but to move.

Now, if you move away from idiots or monsters once every three years, you're an American. But if you're moving away from idiots and monsters every two or three days, you're a nomad.

Nomad is the technical scientific term for "person who chooses to be homeless." There are three kinds of nomad, the Hunter-Gatherer, the Pastoral, and the Peripatetic.

Fellow Real Change editor Artis has been a Peripatetic Nomad, and a good one. The term refers to people who travel about to sell their skills from place to place. You can only be a Peripatetic Nomad if you are really good at something, enough to be paid for it.


[Above: Nomadic Kazakhs on the Steppe.]

The Hunter-Gatherer Nomads were also called "humans" at one time. That one time lasted, oh, a few million years. Winter in the Levant, Summer in Greece. Good times.

Human beings evolved to be Hunter-Gatherers. Hunter-Gatherers were the first-born number-one sons-of-righteousness for eons and eons. How dare anyone say that it isn't a proper lifestyle? It's like saying sex was meant to happen in a test tube. No, it was meant to happen the other way, the way it's been happening. When it comes to lifestyles Hunter-Gatherer is the way it's been, longer and before any other.

The Pastoral Nomads are the guys herding the sheep and the horses and the goats and the chickens and the roosters all around the country-side. The Bible records the exact moment that these people got the upper hand over the Hunter-Gatherers, when pastoral Jacob cheated hunter-gatherer twin brother Esau out of his heritage. To this day, Pastoral Nomads are considered tricksy, but are in reality no tricksier than the people who stole their heritage from them.


[Above: Vincent van Gogh: The Caravans - Gypsy Camp near Arles (1888, Oil on canvas).]

Those who stole the heritage of the Pastoral Nomads were, of course, the biggest thieves in all human history, the thieves known as Settlers. Everyone knows that Settlers stole America from the Hunter-Gatherer and Pastoral Natives, but did you know that the word Settler is just another word for someone who chooses a housed lifestyle?

Settlers claim land that used to belong to everyone. That amounts to stealing from all the rest of humanity. For each parcel of land in the world, the first deed ever written up for that parcel marked its initial theft. All real estate is stolen property.

Whereas, being a nomad means not participating in that kind of thievery. That's respectable.

[Above: Jeune fille nomade (16 ans) devant la tente familiale à Matamoulane, dans la région du Trarza (Mauritanie)]