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My “Structural Objection to Society”

posted by Tim Harris on Sunday, February 7 at 11:04am

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It’s that time of year again. About a thousand people last week in King County hit the bricks in the pre-dawn hours for the federally mandated one-night count.

It’s become a bit of a ritual. Bil Block, the head of the Committee to End Homelessness, will say we are succeeding. Should actual count numbers not support that statement, he will complain that the count is inaccurate. Alison Eisinger, the head of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, will say the number, regardless of up or down, finds way too many people and is, by its nature, an under-count. She will express faith in the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness because she heads a coalition of service providers and they expect that of her. It’s probably safer to say it than not.

And then there will be me, the Man From the Moon, saying that homelessness is an expression of our nation’s relentless descent into deepening inequality, and that the 10YP stops far short of addressing root problems, and therefore cannot on its own succeed.

This year, CR Douglas convened us all on City Inside/Out for the post-count conversation.

Bill was unusually keen this year to steer the discussion from vexing problems of supply and demand to individual successes. An article by NYT columnist Nicholas Kristoff on selling African aid one successful uplifting face at a time has become the new 10YP media strategy du jour. He made a few attempts to go there, but CR kept bringing him back to his core competencies: fudging the numbers to look like progress and sounding optimistic.

Linda Rasmussen from the YWCA sat between us to offer the service provider’s middle ground of “yes there are successes” and “no it is not enough.” To my left sat Paul Guppy of the Washington Policy Center, who seasoned the mix with his anti-tax, “government-solutions-to-poverty-will-always-fail, there is no society, there are only individuals, and we should fear them” message.

For my part, “Is the Ten Year Plan Working?” just sounded like a dumb question. The plan, I said, can only solve homelessness to an extent that is acceptable to those in power, meaning those who don’t exactly love the poor. My job, my mission, is to fire photon torpedoes until the Plan’s system-salving invisibility cloak is finally disabled.

Alison was no help at all. Her interview in the 8 minute set-up piece, was all about the optimism. If she’s heard of pre-count sweeps activity, she didn’t say. Team player.

I was clearly on my own here.

My Man On the Moon standing was clarified when CR Douglas raised the issue of my “structural objection to society” and stole what is usually Bill’s rap: the odds of my revolution happening are pretty much nil. Our stand then must be with the tinkerers and mitigators, for they may not inherit the earth, but at least they shall receive the funding.

Here’s what I think. When people preemptively surrender the possibility of system change as a solution, they pretty much give up the whole game. I’m always astonished by the tendency of mainstream “homeless advocacy” to begin from there. That’s not fighting homelessness, That’s accommodation to radical inequality and social dehumanization. We have to do better.