Why They Won't Make Housing and Healthcare Human Rights in the USA

A semi-fictional story rooted in non-fictional facts.

All these “human rights” that other countries have do not apply to USAmericans. Housing, food, water, and healthcare are not rights given to everyone in the United States. They are directly tied to your job, so only people who can labor in trade to the state receive it. That job can be taken from you at almost any point, for almost every reason. Even so-called “illegal” reasons can happen with no push-back because you don’t have the money to fight them in court. People who cannot labor due to disability are forced to jump through excessive amounts of paperwork and years of court dates to be rejected over and over before any kind of help might be provided. They make it so your basic existence costs money. If you lose your job or cannot work, you will eventually run out of money. If you can’t pay your bills, you’ll lose your home and your healthcare.

You don’t know anyone well enough to feel comfortable asking if you could stay with them. You’re ashamed that you didn’t “work hard enough” to have any savings or that you had to use all your savings due to a health condition or urgent emergency event or just trying to maintain your currently living situation after you lost your job. You long ago stopped talking to your family because their presence in your life does more harm than good. You finally do ask someone if you could crash on their couch or in a spare room, but it only lasts a few days…weeks…months before you are still jobless and homeless when they tell you that you have to leave.

Once you’re unhoused, people will view you as less-than. They will assume that you have done something to deserve your situation because they believe in the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” You must just not be trying hard enough. You must have done something to not have any supportive people in your life. You must be mentally ill or someone who uses drugs. You must be someone who is the worst of the worst because “good” people don’t lose their homes. And if you’re the worst of the worst, you’re not welcome in our neighborhood.

In the spirit of being a “good neighbor,” they call the cops who willingly come out to destroy the tent someone donated to you. Inside the tent is everything you own that you could save from your home. They gave you no warning before they used heavy machinery to demolish what little you’ve been able to build to try to get “back on your feet.” In the name of community safety, they have taken what shelter you had and forced you to start over in a new spot. But you don’t have a vehicle, and your bus pass was in your tent that is now in a mangled ball of debris that is being hauled to a landfill or incinerator. So was all your health paperwork that you needed for your disability hearing. Your medication was also in there, along with the only photos you still have of the people you’ve loved and lost. You have nothing but what you’re currently wearing and what few items you have in your bag.

You have to start all over trying to obtain the minimum number of items necessary to keep up with your hygiene, which becomes crucial when you don’t have any access to water or a bathroom. But you can’t acquire too many items because you can only have what you can physically carry around since you have no place to store anything that can’t fit inside a bag that could be easily transported when your next encampment gets twenty minutes notice before the police show up to gleefully remove the “riff-raff” that’s detracting from the beauty of the highway overpass. They killed a man at another encampment by crushing him to death inside his tent when no one bothered to check any tents before the bulldozer was used to “sweep” the camp. You are surprisingly grateful for the twenty-minute notice, knowing that could be the alternative.

Walking around with your bags of belongings, trying to find any shelter that will let you rest your head or get out of the weather when you don’t have any money to spend there, you come across a group of people offering free food in the park. There’s a long line of other unhoused people waiting to get the first hot meal they’ve had in days…weeks…months. Before you make it to the front to get the only sustenance you’ve had in days, law enforcement shows up to make a big scene and ticket everyone for giving away free food on public property. Some of these groups end up facing fines from hundreds to thousands of dollars. This deters other people from starting their own groups to help houseless people be able to eat warm, fresh food.

You follow some people that you were talking to in the food line to an abandoned gas station. Not only does no one use it, but the building is falling apart. The roof has a huge hole in it where you can see the sky. There is no glass in the windows. Most of them are boarded up, but a lot are just empty. There is no heat. No running water. But there is a room that people have been going to the bathroom in even though there are no doors on the stalls or any way to remove the waste from the space. You sleep in the fetal position as the big spoon to your bag of stuff as the little spoon and a rock is your pillow.

In the morning, you follow your new friends to the marketplace. At a convenience store, you steal things for maybe the first time in your life. You end up with a king-sized candy bar because it was the only thing that was shaped in a way where it wouldn’t be noticeable when you slip it into your pocket. In the other pocket, you somehow maneuver a bottle of water. It’s just a small one, but it’s better than nothing. You don’t have anywhere to go or anything to do because your cell phone has been shut off due to non-payment, it is also dead from lack of a place to charge it, and no one you know can contact you.

You follow some of the people you’ve been hanging out with to a random house. There’s a working bathroom, so you spend some time in it trying to get yourself together. But it would be weird if you ask to take a shower, so you don’t. It’s a party scene. There’s no food, but there’s alcohol and drugs. You don’t usually partake, but at this point in your life, what do you have to lose? After a decent time of socializing, the host offers you a sleeping bag to sleep in down in the basement. It is broken so you can’t sleep inside it, but you use the rug as your bed and the sleeping bag as your blanket. There are other people also sleeping in this room, so you think this is fortune smiling at you. You awaken to someone penetrating you. You say you don’t want to do that, and they stop. But then they tell you that you need to leave. Right then. Right now. In this exact moment. Grab your things and get out!

Now you’re alone, a little messed up from the party, a lot messed up from the assault. It’s the early, early morning and nowhere is open yet. You don’t have anywhere to go where you can sleep and be safe. You end up walking and walking and walking for hours because you were in a residential area and trying to find your way back to the city that has places that are open earlier and later. That day you walk through the entire center of town hitting every store slowly because you have nothing but time and you’re figuring out how to steal things without getting caught. But people are starting to look at you strangely. Probably because you’re now unkempt. You no longer pass as a “civilized” person.

Around dusk you head to the water. You don’t know if it is a lake or a river or what exactly, but at this point, it doesn’t even matter. It could be contaminated, and it wouldn’t matter because you are going in to try for a quick wash and rinse with the items you procured earlier, in as little as you can risk wearing, not only to try to avoid causing a scene but because you don’t want your entire outfit to be wet and you’re trying to wash as much of yourself as possible even while it is so cold that doing this (and without a towel!) is unadvisable.

As you’re putting your (dirty) clothes back on, people start coming over to you. Surprisingly, they are your friends. They have a tent and ask you if you want to join them while they camp in the woods near the water. You feel like your luck is changing! For several days, this tent becomes your home. The first few days, you go into town and back with the others. There is a particular way to walk to not draw any attention to us or the tent. We are all very careful to follow our created path. It is wonderful to be around friendly people who care about you. One day, instead of going into town with the others, you stay back in the tent to have some time to yourself.

Your friends roll up absolutely smashed out of their minds. At first you are upset that they have all been partying without you. Almost immediately upon their arrival though, more people show up to the tent. They have flashlights that they are shining through the tent walls. They have deep voices and bellow inside that, “This is the PO-LICE!” I realize that my friends were not careful on their journey to our safe tent, and the cops must’ve been following them to be here so quickly! There are several police officers, but there are more of us. But the cops have more authority, more power, and more weapons, so we begrudgingly comply with their demands that we exit the tent. We are rounded up and put into a transport van. You and your friends sing the most anti-police songs you know while you ride to the station together. It feels like solidarity.

Everyone is separated into their own cell. No, that’s not right. Some of your friends are released right away because they had someone to call to come get them. Tent living for them was a lark, not survival. Some of your friends must wait longer, but they eventually get released too. You don’t really have anyone you could call, and you definitely don’t know any phone numbers for people that you might even try. The police give up asking you anything after awhile because you’ve totally shut down. This may be the lowest point of your life (so far). You are kept in a solitary cell, and the jail that was once full of your friends trying to holler at each other from one cell to the next is now empty, and you are alone. Even worse, you are alone inside a cell, inside a police station, that is full of cops who think you did something “bad” and deserve to be locked up.

They charge you with trespassing. Even though you think it was public property where you were, it doesn’t matter to the police. It doesn’t matter to anyone because no one will take your word over theirs even if it was. Oh, but wait, they’ve actually made it illegal to camp or sleep in public places. They also charge you with petty theft because of the hygiene and food items you took when you had no money and no other choice. Or they don’t even notice all the goods you stole in the stuff at the tent because they were destroyed when you were arrested, but they claim you stole a backpack because you supposedly look like the suspect who did. You are now charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault.

They keep you in jail for days…weeks…months…years because they know you have no one to call to help you get out. You walk around jail talking about how you didn’t do it, but isn’t that what everyone in jail says? You’re incapable of recognizing the situation you are in because you’ve always been a “good” person who did what they were supposed to, but once you lost your job and your money and your healthcare you were unable to keep that roof over your head. Without that home to go to, your life spiraled out as you made the best decision you could with the choices you had available at the time.

One of the worst parts is that you actually know a lot of people who will say, “If they had only reached out to me directly and told me their plight, I would’ve helped them.” But in reality, these are your very neighbors who called the police to have the encampment swept because these people are an eyesore, ruining the scenery of our beloved community. They can hold these two ideas in their head because the person they knew who had a home could never be the same person who ended up without shelter or a person to turn to for help. Their dehumanization of homeless people is complete as they no longer view you as the person they used to know even when they did see you struggling, walking with your only belongings, bathing out in the open in the “public” water.

Now the state also sees you as less than because you have been arrested, you have been in jail. You are “in the system.” You get a court date for your charges faster than any of the ones you ever got trying to get help before you lost your home. You’re working with the attorney the state provided for you as you have no money for your own. They’re overworked, underpaid, and jaded, so they only have the bare minimum to give you. This is by design. They have so many people in their caseloads that they don’t even get your name or your specific details right when they speak to you. You are just another file folder in the pile that they have to work through so they can go home and self-medicate.

You try to insist on your innocence. They ask you if you have anyone you can call who would be willing to stand up for you in court, to speak on your behalf. The people you can think of that you might be able to contact are houseless or drug users or unkempt or smelly or physically disabled or whatever arbitrary standard society has determined makes them “not credible” character witnesses. By this point, it has been days…weeks…months…years since you have communicated with any of the other people who once would’ve done that for you. Some of them are dead. You can’t think of anyone that you know would support you like that (whether or not they even exist). You don’t know their numbers or how to reach them even if you thought they might.

You’re found guilty by the judge or the jury or your supposed “peers” and you’re automatically guilty in the eyes of the rest of society. You’re transferred from jail to prison. You continue to insist that you did nothing wrong. That even the things you did do wrong weren’t the things you were charged with, and you don’t belong there. You are “not adjusting” well to your new reality. You have to learn “the hard way” how to deal with your new surroundings and the people around you. You’re having the worst time of your life and you’re having to adapt to an unfamiliar environment with new people and not all of them are friendly, in fact, not many of them are. You’re in the midst of a total breakdown viewing the wreckage of your life and how you ended up here.

You are told that you will be reporting to work tomorrow in the prison. You and your fellow inmates will be doing the job you used to have before your company laid you off due to budget cuts because you were starting a union with your coworkers or using FMLA leave (legally) for your health conditions. They can do that because it’s “layoffs” and not you being fired for consolidating worker power or having health problems that “interfered” with your job responsibilities. In between shifts at your new (old) gig, in prison, you get to watch the news on the TV in the common room. They run a story about how much money your company earned by switching from the average worker to prison labor. Their profits are soaring!

People start protesting outside the prison. They have clever signs with witty slogans that point out the hypocrisy of paying to house, feed, and “care” for prisoners who make up the prison workforce even though they refused to pay to help them before they went to prison. With the exorbitant costs of maintaining the police forces used to uphold this system, the money spent on acquiring humans to put inside the prisons to work for unprecedented company profits costs way more than it would cost to house and care for people before they’re forced into laboring in prison. You learn if they took all the money they use to get laborers into these prisons and instead invested into communities, it would solve the upstream problems, but they would lose the laborers that they can use, abuse, and pay the bare minimum wages in order to maximize their profits. The protestors get accosted by the police. They are rounded up into vans to be processed into the very system that they abhor.

Some of the protestors get higher charges against them like RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), money laundering, or terrorism. They say that because of how organized the people have become they are now a criminal enterprise and/or terrorist organization. They say that because their actions threaten the state’s interests and they’re trying to influence the government that they are enemies of the state. They say that the wooden stick holding their sign was a weapon. They say that they didn’t disperse when asked and were “resisting” arrest. Some of the protestors end up working in the prison with you. They’re “good” people who used what privilege they had to try to bring attention to the travesties of the system and now they are learning firsthand how awful things are on the inside.

You continue to work in the same occupation you used to have on the outside while you serve your time inside. When you are about to get released, they set you up with a group home to stay in while you try to line up a job. You have to share a room with other people and don’t have any privacy. It has been years since you’ve had “alone time” and wouldn’t even know what to do with yourself if you had any. You feel grateful to be out of prison.

You’re leaving the home every day to try to find someplace to work. Over and over, you are rejected due to your criminal record. You decide to lie and leave it off your application. You get the job that you don’t divulge your criminal history on the application. It is going well the first few days, but then your background check comes through. The “have you ever been convicted of a crime” question that you answered “No” to is in direct opposition to what your background check shows. They “let you go” even though “you’re a good worker” because it’s just “policy” that they don’t employ people who have committed crimes, even if they’ve served their time and have been released back into society. They don’t care about redemption. They don’t care about you.

You don’t have a job now and the home where you stay has that as a requirement to continue staying there. You’re going to meetings with your PO and getting drug tested (even though you didn’t have any drug offenses) because that’s just what they do to ensure you’re staying on track. Your PO can’t help you find a job because they are overworked, underpaid, and jaded. They have so many people in their caseloads that they don’t even get your name or your specific details right when they speak to you. You are just another file folder in the pile that they have to work through so they can go home and self-medicate.

You don’t have a job or any money. You’re about to get kicked out of the home where you currently stay. But one of the conditions of your release from prison is that you are working somewhere as a “contributing member of society” and that you have a physical address where you are staying. No one you used to know will let you stay with them because you are a convicted criminal who clearly did something “wrong” and can’t be trusted.

The choices you have all ultimately circle back to the same conclusion. You could try running, leaving the area, skipping out on your PO, and starting over somewhere else. But with the surveillance state’s deep tentacles, this would require you to avoid using your real name and you don’t have any other identification that you could use instead. You could start doing “illegal” things to make ends meet. Things you never thought you would ever do because you never thought you’d be in a situation where that was one of the few choices you have to stay fed and sheltered. After all, you’re a “hard worker” with a great “work ethic.” You don’t know if you can continually be looking over your shoulder to be one step ahead of the people who might come after you. They may be too overworked, underpaid, and jaded to actively seek you out, but on a day when you drop your guard and let your face be seen by the public cameras that are everywhere, they’re looking through the video footage of the train station for someone else and come across who they believe to be you (a person with a warrant out for not showing up for a PO appointment) through their facial recognition database.

You don’t know that they’ve clocked you on the video tape, so you show up to the train station again. It’s where you’ve been sleeping, on the train, as it travels the same route every day and back. Some days the people using this public transportation leave you alone. Other days riders harass you and/or complain to the train driver about your presence. The cops make a big scene when they capture you, and because they are not in uniform and do not identify themselves until after your flight/fight response kicked in, they are more aggressive while arresting you. You’re physically hurt and mentally blindsided by the event because the train station had been a safe space of public anonymity for so long. But they are in the news as “heroes” because they have cleaned up the streets of the “criminals.”

You’re back in jail. You’re back in court. But this time around you know that it would’ve been cheaper for everyone if the state paid for your housing and healthcare while you got “back on your feet.” They talk about the “poor life choices” you’ve made to get to this stage. They point to your “previous criminal history” to show you are a “danger to society.” The judge/jury/peers cannot see you as a human being like them. You are other. You are unclean. You are in an unflattering jumpsuit. You must’ve done something to deserve this. You’re back in prison.

You’re not working the job you used to have this time. You’re working in a field where you have no previous knowledge. You don’t understand how to accomplish what goals they’ve set in the time you have with your current ability and skill level. You are penalized because you are making errors. They are garnishing your already minimal wages. You are punished. You feel hopeless because no matter what you tried to do to avoid this fate, you have ended up here again. They did more layoffs in the corporation to shift more production into the prison. They don’t have to pay prisoners as much as “free” people. They don’t have to deal with unions or workers’ rights in prison. Their profits are soaring!

~The Overstimulated

P.S. I sat down to write one thing, and this flowed out instead. At any point in this hypothetical example, if one person had left their comfort zone to reach out to help “you,” it could’ve drastically changed the trajectory of the outcome. We have all been so conditioned to “keep to ourselves” and “mind our own business” and “don’t get involved” to maintain our own levels of comfort, safety, and security. I am hoping to provide specific examples of how you can counteract that societal brainwashing to help your fellow human in one of my (if not my very next) upcoming posts.

As much as our USAmerican belief has tried to reinforce that we can succeed on our own merits, the truth is that we are all interconnected. As soon as our support system, otherwise known as access to money (because that’s what is required currently to fulfill our basic human needs) fails, it is obvious that there is nothing there to save us if there are no human beings willing to help when we are “down and out.” If you want to take direct action to “build community” and create the future you wish to see, sign up now to see some of my suggestions on how to deal with where we find ourselves currently.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash