Good ideas about helping our nation's homeless population are hard to find. There are so many people without any resources, especially in our major cities. America has become accustomed to seeing them, as we have become accustomed to so many other of our society's failures.
Ken's idea is to grant them land where they can build small homes for themselves and create functioning communities. It is worth a try, of course. Like Occupy however, these communities will have some basic problems. The homeless are often mentally ill, and not able to function in a working system. Many times homeless people are also addicted, further complicating life in such an encampment.
Perhaps Occupy would have run its course, if it hadn't been violently dismantled by Obama and the fascist police he unleashed. We just don't know how resistance communities do over the long haul.
Maybe the problem isn't just a lack of buildable land. The distribution of wealth within our society is the most unequal of any developed country in the world. Perhaps the fault lies in the fact that marginalized people are often the ones fighting the empire's wars. When they return home, they don't have the skills or the contacts to keep them off the streets. In addition, vets are often traumatized by their experiences killing civilians in the Third World to protect US profits. Depression and addiction often follow.
So is it the $700 billion we spend on war each year that puts tens of thousands of vets on the street? If our country gave them what it did returning vets in 1945, homelessness would be much less on an issue. Moreover, if our country decided to return to being a democracy, perhaps the rest would follow. We have an empire, controlled by greedy billionaires who have learned how to squeeze the last bit of money from those in our country who are not filth rich. Maybe homeless vets are the canaries in the coal mine.
