As Kirstena explains about Homelessness ' You Can Never Go Back'

With all due respect to Kristena I repost this article I read which was posted by her on Portland Indy Media --> http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/345120.shtml?discuss

Thank you for sharing Kristena and bringing a side to this issue that isn't mentioned in the media much at all let alone addressed or acknowledged by the general population. You Can Never Go Back.....as well as never forget, which has brought us to this page in life.....I want to help as much as I can and how ever I can .........sometimes it doesn't seem like much ....I wish I could do more. I appreciate your efforts and writing.

In hopes that every little bit of sharing and exposure this issues deserves will transpire by spreading the stories and helping connect the dots we can someday help get attention and social Justice to our fellow brothers and sisters and erase this type of poverty forever.

This depth of poverty is beyond acceptable and a grave injustice to the basic respect for human life.

In my opinion I add this to the thought...

You Can Never Go Back

To A place Where,

No One Should Ever Of Been

To Begin With!

______

Once You’ve Been Homeless, You Can Never Go Back

author: e-mail: kirstena@resist.ca

Not a day passes, that I do not thank the gods for my housing. I have been homeless so many times this lifetime, that I do not take housing for granted, *at all.* When you realize homelessness can happen to you, it looks very different than some impersonal street scene. Because homelessness will forever be a wolf howling at my door, I am always too close to being a homeless woman, which is why I cry, most probably. I cry for me, in them. And them, in me.

Once You've Been Homeless, You Can Never Go Back By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com) August 2006 I was riding the bus today, lost in thought, when the bus pulled up to a stop and I looked out the window I was leaning against to see several women, with their baggage and small children, sitting on the pavement in a parking lot, looking weary and forlorn. I was immediately overcome with a familiarity; it reminded me horribly of my mom and me, when I was a child. I immediately realized this was a pick up spot for homeless shelters. As my bus rolled on, I saw the next block was lined with women, young and old, carrying their bags, hovering around, looking agitated, anxious, hot, worn out, and desperate, waiting outside the YWCA in downtown Seattle, to see if they will have shelter tonight (as local shelters cannot accommodate all of the women who need shelter nightly). By the time we had rolled past that block, I was in tears. I looked around me on the bus. It seemed no one even noticed what was outside our windows for the full length of the previous block.

"Once you have been homeless, you can never go back," I scribbled on a piece of scrap paper in my backpack. It occurred to me that perhaps many of the people on the bus around me did not understand what was going on out there on the street around the YWCA. It occurred to me that many, if not most, of those on the bus around me, had never been homeless and thus would not recognize that snippet of street reality that just was in our windows, for the painful scene of suffering it was. The way that scene got my attention was something outside the window triggered a very strong feeling in me, a bad feeling, a feeling of discomfort and anxiety, yet a familiar feeling, and I looked out. What I saw was me as a child, and my mom, fretting in worry, as we waited to figure out where we would sleep that night. I remember that *feeling* so much that I am still shaken hours later after feeling it again.

Outside the YWCA this evening, there were many women pacing around outside. And in the brief moments I looked at them through my bus window, I could remember the feeling of homelessness so vividly. And it is not a feeling I remember with *any* romance or sentimentality. I look at the periods I was homeless as *pure survival* and am glad I survived them. I do not look at them as adventurous times, at all. They are not fun memories, but scary, sad memories. Tonight I saw those mothers sitting out there, waiting, with those looks of surrender, those looks my mom had, like she had just given up...but I saw that look on the younger women out front of the YWCA too. Homelessness is incredibly hard work. It is a slippery slope. If you do not get out of homelessness quick enough, it becomes like quicksand, on several levels. Not only does it get hard to find somewhere to live and work without housing and clean clothing, etc., but there is this thing where you lose the will to try after a while and once that threshold is reached, all can just implode irreversibly. I feel my mom went over that threshold, and I have hovered at it, but thank god, never gone over it. I always got out of homelessness just before I gave up, is how I look at it. And when I see homeless women, frustrated, hot, weighed down with their bags, I think, "there, but by the grace of god, go I."

People's reactions to poverty and homelessness can often be linked to the way they were raised. My dad was raised in a large single parent family in poverty during the Depression. My mom, in contrast, was raised in relative class privilege until her mid-30's when she went on welfare after the divorce. My dad was always embarrassed of his poverty and hated his mother for allowing them to be poor, basically. So his way of dealing with that, was to go into the Navy, get on the G.I.Bill, and to become an engineer. He then worked on making money and made sure to *look away* whenever poverty was anywhere near. He taught me not to look at poverty and to even shun it as well. But then my mom and I became poor, due to him not paying his child support and alimony and my mom being a single mom. My mom had taught me to be friends with poor kids, and also taught me that there was nothing wrong or "lesser" in poverty, as she had never been poor, and it really had nothing to do with her directly. Unlike my dad, who made every effort to LOOK AWAY from the poor and homeless people, my mom looked and spoke about the class oppression for what it was and condemned the powers that created poverty, such as racism, sexism, etc. *before* she was poor. I think that probably helped save her some sanity later when she became the poor.

My first homeless experience was with my mom when I was about 7. After that, I went through a series of institutional and foster care situations, then I went back to my mom. We were then thrown out of two different residences when we first moved to Seattle, when I was about 9 years old. It was scary being thrown out. I remember one time, we came home, and our bags and belongings were on the lawn and we were told to leave. And we had no car. And no money. And my mom freaked out, broke down, it scared the hell out of me. And when I saw those women tonight in that parking lot, I *felt* that feeling my mom used to sweat out her pores. I could smell it through the bus' thick windowpane. That sorrow is a smell I can smell from far away.

There are many religious axioms that have stories of people who were ignorant of suffering on earth, but then they see it, smell it, touch it, and they cannot go back. They are not the same. And once this is seen, one's duties on earth and to each other change. If one did not help others when one did not know there was suffering, that is one thing. If one refuses to help others, when he does know about the suffering, and he could help alleviate it, then that is considered sinful. And due to my knowledge that women are on their last legs, lining up at shelters, in my town, every night, makes me horribly uncomfortable. The others on the bus tonight had no feelings about it at all, it seemed. But me, it still is haunting me. I have just barely achieved sustainable housing in the last two years myself, and I would lose my housing if I brought a river of homeless folks into my apt, yet, the survivor guilt is very haunting and frankly, I am not sure what to do with it either.

It is true that once you have been homeless, you can never go back. I saw those women today in the parking lot as homeless mothers, when maybe the others on the bus just thought a bunch of women were hanging around together in a parking lot. But it was the grief on their faces that I recognized. And if you do not recognize that grief, having never been near it, then you have a sort of innocence, almost an excusable ignorance.

Not a day passes, that I do not thank the gods for my housing. I am serious. I have been homeless so many times this lifetime, that I do not take housing for granted, *at all.* As a matter of fact, that is why you can never go back. I never had fears of homelessness until I had *been* homeless. Until it happens to you, you do not really understand what being homeless entails and you do not think it has to do with you. When you realize it can happen to you, it looks very different than just some street scene you can roll by. I still have a haunting feeling about those women I saw tonight, and I can still feel my tears welling up as I even think about the front of the YWCA tonight. Because homelessness will forever be a wolf howling at my door, and I am always too close to being those women, which is why I cry, most probably. I cry for me, in them. And them, in me. I just think a world this full of riches, especially in a country claiming to be the last remaining Superpower, can only be shamed for lines of homeless women on modern streets praying for a night's housing in desperation. And my survivor guilt is something I wrestle with every night, as I sleep in my bed, in my housing, that I know so many do not have.

homepage: http://www.kirstenanderberg.com/

Panhandling can be against the law in some cities

I came across a fellow blogspot article on the topic of panhandling.
It is about the recently passed law in Toronto that makes it illegal to panhandle.
Now of course that is if you are NOT a corporation as Michelle Mann (the author) points out. Interesting too is the point she makes is how this law just continues to hide the issue and encourages more poverty

I really liked this one comment and quote so much, that I repeat here to get this started:

(quote)~ In other words, open season on the poor. They may be one of the last groups in society against whom discrimination and oppression is not only tolerated, but mandated by our politicians.

As noted by the French author and Nobel literature prize winner, Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." (end quote)

In the city I live in, it is not against the law to panhandle, nor stand by the freeway offramp with a sign asking for help. The city has come up with some lame "blocking the sidewalk rightaway" and no sitting on a sidewalk in the downtown area" laws and of course "agressive" panhandling is illegal.

With much due respect to Michelle Mann, here is her article on Panhandling being Illegal.

++++ ++++

The golden rule of public spaces

Written by Michelle Mann
Monday, 28 August 2006

http://www.lawtimesnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=720&Itemid=82

Yet one cannot help but notice that citizen rights to unassailed public spaces are recognized when the alleged assailants are the poor, less so when they are wealthy corporations.It is reminiscent of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.Panhandlers and squeegee kids don't have the gold, and they don't make the rules. What they do have is the same inherent right to our public space as the rest of us, and rights to freedom of expression at least equal to those of corporate interests.




Public space belongs to all citizens, though that universality is inadequately protected by legal constructs. Laws and regulations governing our public spaces are all too frequently rooted in rights to exclude, rather than citizen rights to inclusion.

Social Justice by Michelle Mann
A case in point: the recent passage of a motion by Toronto City Council at the behest of Toronto councillor and mayoral candidate Jane Pitfield, calling for the city to consider a ban on panhandling (otherwise referred to in Orwellian doublespeak as a "quality of life" bylaw).Whose quality of life, one well might ask, for it could not be more apparent that the quality of life of some citizens is considered irrelevant when others are made to feel uncomfortable.

If we could only hide the poor and homeless, they would cease to exist, so why not ban their public presence altogether? Of course, the see-no-evil approach to poverty doesn't work, with even New York's broken windows crime philosophy now widely debunked.Pitfield's proposal to consider a new bylaw banning panhandling has deservedly earned her the anger of many anti-poverty activists, including calls for her to step down from Toronto's homeless advisory committee.

However, as noted by Pitfield, being co-chairperson of the homeless advocacy committee is completely unrelated to the panhandling issue. Much like that justification is completely unrelated to logic. That is not to say that everyone who panhandles is homeless, or that everyone who is homeless panhandles, as panhandling may keep a few more people in some sort of inadequate housing.

In fact, if Pitfield's role is to advocate for more homelessness, the proposed ban just might do the trick. Pitfield, in pitting herself pitilessly against the poor, doesn't want to look soft as a mayoral candidate. And she is of course only following precedent.

The proposed city ban on panhandling comes at an interesting time, with a constitutional challenge to the Safe Streets Act of 1999 pending in the Ontario Court of Appeal. The provincial law, brought in during Mike Harris' tenure, made roadside solicitation and "aggressive" panhandling in public places illegal across the province.

It should, however, be noted that it is the McGuinty Liberal government that continues to defend it, amidst inadequate even for subsistence rates of social assistance and shortages of affordable housing. The challengers lost at trial and at the Ontario Superior Court. They argue that the anti-panhandling provisions are an unconstitutional infringement of their Charter-protected equality, freedom of expression and life, liberty, and security of the person rights.Ontario is far from the only jurisdiction to seek to obliterate visible poverty. Calgary, Winnipeg, and Vancouver all passed municipal panhandling bylaws, with Calgary having gone so far as to attempt, unsuccessfully, to require panhandlers to wear photo identification.

In other words, open season on the poor. They may be one of the last groups in society against whom discrimination and oppression is not only tolerated, but mandated by our politicians.

As noted by the French author and Nobel literature prize winner, Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. "Fortunately, we have rejected a formal equality approach to the law and instead taken to examining its impact on substantive equality and on certain groups.

Or have we?Laws that seek to suppress the face and voice of poverty on our streets can also be contrasted with corporate free speech rights in public spaces, so amply protected.A survey of urbanites might just find that many of us are more offended by the corporate siege we face on our streets and in our public transportation systems daily, than we are by being asked for spare change.

Yet when municipalities or community groups try to fend off corporate usurpation of public spaces, they are met with the free speech and expression Charter-protected rights of corporate interests (think Vann Niagara Ltd. v. Oakville at the Supreme Court). We certainly would get onto slippery slopes were we to start demarcating which individuals and entities are entitled to their s. 2(b) Charter rights, much as I resent the branding of public spaces and my own inadvertent role as empty vessel waiting to be filled up with commercial needs.

Yet one cannot help but notice that citizen rights to unassailed public spaces are recognized when the alleged assailants are the poor, less so when they are wealthy corporations.It is reminiscent of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Panhandlers and squeegee kids don't have the gold, and they don't make the rules. What they do have is the same inherent right to our public space as the rest of us, and rights to freedom of expression at least equal to those of corporate interests.

Michelle Mann is a Toronto-based lawyer, freelance writer, and consultant.
Check out her blog at http://manndates.blogspot.com