Am I Not Human?: The Case for Homelessness

Earlier this week I posted humor­ously about home­less peo­ple, but now I want to address this seri­ously. Have you ever just sat back and thought about what it would be like to not have a home. Well, I have. I imag­ined what it would be like for my chil­dren and I to have to live on the streets and have noth­ing. No food, no place to lay our heads, and no money. None of the com­forts that we have now. A nice warm bed, a refrig­er­a­tor full of food, clean cloth­ing as well as the abil­ity to bathe and all the nec­es­sary things that we do every day. Now just imag­ine that being home­less is the real­ity for some peo­ple.

In Los Angeles alone I recently heard a sta­tis­tic that said there are some 90,000 home­less peo­ple. Could you imag­ine? LA is just one place. All over this coun­try and fur­ther yet all over this world there are peo­ple who are home­less. While most pic­ture home­less peo­ple as vagrants, drug­gies and low lifes who due to some vice put them­selves in their own predica­ment and don’t deserve a thought that is not always the case. And even when it is the case there is absolutely no rea­son that in a world that boasts of one per­son hav­ing an eigh­teen room man­sion any­one should be with­out a home.

In some areas there are apart­ments that barely have any occu­pants why couldn’t some­one allow home­less peo­ple to live there? When home­less peo­ple are found stay­ing in aban­doned homes, these are homes that are dilap­i­dated and falling down, deemed unin­hab­it­able, but they are forced to leave. What kind of world is this? What kind of peo­ple are we? We don’t care about other humans beyond what money can pro­vide. In a post enti­tled Am I Not Human?: World Hunger over at the blog Electronic Village it com­mented that “…the world’s poor­est peo­ple could be met for an addi­tional $13 bil­lion a year. Animal lovers in the United States and Europe spend more than that on pet food each year.” Doesn’t that speak to you about the fact that some peo­ple appear to be lower than a domes­tic ani­mal that their most basic needs can­not be cared for.

While I per­son­ally am not in a posi­tion to help home­less peo­ple mon­e­tar­ily and I truly truly wish I was I do try to give them the com­fort that God cares about their plight and he does. Some humans are self­ish and those in posi­tions of power fight to keep home­less peo­ple oppressed through laws that will no doubt only make the sta­tis­tic of home­less­ness con­tinue to rise. God does see. He see’s and has promised to bring a solu­tion to this prob­lem. So let us not turn a blind eye to the prob­lems that plague other peo­ple who may seem insignif­i­cant in our own eyes. We are all humans. We are all fight­ing under the same con­di­tions. And regard­less of our state whether home­less or wealthy we all have the same des­tiny so let us always remem­ber and show empa­thy to those who are less for­tu­nate than we are.

Roots of Humanity feels that each of us can fight against human rights abuses in the world. We sim­ply need to do some­thing. Protest. Meditate. Pray. In the case of blog­gers … we want you to blog on the 27^th of each month. Just share infor­ma­tion on behalf of our human sib­lings in all suf­fer­ing areas who are either barred from com­mu­ni­ca­tion by their gov­ern­ments, or lack­ing in tech­nol­ogy to ask: Am I Not Human?