The news from Wall St. this week was not encouraging. The financial institutions upon which we depend are faltering under a great deal of stress. Even before this, the nation's unemployment rate had soared to over 6 percent of the labor force. When it reaches 8 percent, the nation will know itself firmly in the grip of a painful recession. If it edges up above that all bets are off. As you know the national economic scene is a bit scary at the moment.
This is, of course, no news to the poor, particularly the homeless. They are quite used to hard times, troubling times, economic worry, and anxiety. They already know what it's like to lose it all, one's house, one's spouse, one's kids, one's dignity, one's self respect. Think of it this way: no matter how good looking you are, if you had to walk around naked all the time you'd get self-conscious, you'd get embarrassed after a while. Being homeless is like walking around naked all the time. You always feel that someone is looking at you, that you're being judged, that you're being talked about. Being homeless does a number on your inner spiritual strength. Being homeless burdens your mind, it weakens your resolve, it dries up your hope, it can turn your heart bitter, or even worse, it can make your heart stop feeling altogether.
When you're homeless you feel like your life is a journey into solitude every day, every hour, every minute. True spirituality is breaking into this solitude with the offer of shelter, food, companionship and advocacy. True spirituality sides with the last and the least, until they are also able to taste what the first and best have.
This current economic crisis is no news to the economic refugees that we call the homeless. What they intimately know is this: The institutions that have plundered our national treasury will get away with it, the middle class will pay for it, the working class will suffer for it, the poor and homeless will be structurally readjusted by it. The economic shock to our nation's financial system will be an opportunity for the wealthy to further grind the face of the poor into cultural death.
I have no doubt that the Bush administration will seek to exploit this situation to their advantage and the further erosion of the common good. I have little doubt that the Democrats will spinelessly crumble. Until we the people get fired up and fed up with this perverted system of military-corporate globalism, all that we can expect on the other side of this crisis is more Nickelsvilles, more police surveillance, more jails, and a continued tightening of the Strong Man's fingers around our throats. Follow the money, watch who benefits, observe who is protected, and decide whose side you are on in the revolution that is coming.