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Health & Fitness

In Conclusion

Forty Days of Class Hatred in Livermore, CA.

Livermore is the second-most affluent community (per capita) in America. From the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2011, 130th. Edition. Citation: U.S. Census Bureau.

All the class warfare started out as a conflict between two homeless bloggers: me and Christian Holm. We posted on livermore.patch.com; our respective positions regarding need versus greed in the delivery of services to the poor drew flak in equal measure from local commenters. Whether I was for an idea or Christian was against it, the responses we got were nearly all at an angry pitch which ratcheted from surprising to sickening. Livermore has some haters, clearly. 

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Christian's blog, titled Homelessness for Stupid People, was focused on outing the "bad behavior" of persons that I described (in my comments to him) as already one-down in the community. He relied heavily on gossip garnered from public showers and his perch at Tommie's Café at the library. He published damaging stories about people he'd never even met. His posts, and his comments defending his own writing, were sometimes illuminating, very often trash-talk, silly, outrageous, and sprinkled with a few real resources such as: a listing of local food pantries.

The gist of my bog was: if I didn't like what he was writing about homeless people that he considered little more than "pampered" leaches, maybe I should start my own blog. So I did. Remember, we are both homeless according to the HUD definition: living in substandard or uninhabitable places without running water, electricity or heat. I used a screen name: Helltopay Harmon. My desire for anonymity had everything to do with trying to stay away from trouble. My position was that everyone has the right to be left alone and we all have a right to expect to sleep in a safe place.

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From there it went very, very wrong: escalating to ridicule, cyber-bullying, character assassinations, vicious outings, and the hatred expressed by a few strident citizens who were shocking in their uniform desires to ship anyone who received government assistance to the bottom of the world.

When Livermore citizens derided my efforts to get out and stay out of my houseless condition, threatened to throw me out of town, and offered me a one-way bus ticket to get out of their community, I lost track of my reasons for starting getoutnstayout. From the sampling of comments that flew around over forty days and a few uneasy nights (my phone is always on now, and synced to my email, because comments came at all hours during the blogging frenzy) I began to believe I might be in real danger.

For some reason I'd believed that I could stay neutral in my imagined elevated position as an educated liberal. I could write about the people who were fighting the good fight--working every day--even though they slept in their cars at night because they couldn't afford to pay for housing in the East Bay. I posted stories about disabled Americans, homeless veterans of foreign wars, I wrote about the people who were not stereotypical street people. I told those tales in between defending myself as a disabled senior citizen on a fixed income. I defended my right to have a telephone. And a computer. It made no difference; the rage was unilateral. It was exhausting. 

Some important conclusions that I drew from this small, unscientific sampling, underneath all the outrage and demands to "get a job!" were the more sinister, unspoken messages: Don't try to get out. Don't talk about trying to get out. Don't defend the poor. Don't ask for help. Don't expect help. And more specifically: You people don't deserve help. You're all the same; you're dirty, diseased and drug-addled. You can't have anything that anyone else considers an average part of every day. No phone. No cups of coffee. No gas for your vehicle—and no vehicle! No decent food. No children or pets. Definitely no computers.

Which means, of course, no jobs because it's nearly impossible to find work without at least a phone. Or a car. You get the picture. Homelessness for Stupid People

 

 

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