Submitted by FearandLoathinginBTV t3_10sk9y8 in vermont
headgasketidiot t1_j758nnh wrote
Reply to comment by Outrageous-Outside61 in As homelessness crisis deepens, rural children pay the price by FearandLoathinginBTV
I fundamentally disagree with you that those people aren't part of our communities. They're living here. To actively reject them from our community for the sole purpose of denying them housing is cruel.
To put it another way, if those same people moved here and didn't need housing, we wouldn't be saying they're not members of our community. I don't want to be part of a state that specifically defines community to exclude people for their poverty. That's gross.
As for your suggestions to work with relevant organizations, that is what I do. I work mostly with human rights nonprofits. My experience there taught me that until we learn to organize our society around the things that actually matter -- camaraderie, friendship, mutual aid, etc -- this problem and those like it will always plague us. If we continue to organize ourselves around money and violence, like we do now, we'll always be able to think of the things that matter as being someone else's job, like a charity's (which everyone knows will never have the resources they need to really fix problems), therefore absolving us of guilt while we callously argue that some of the homeless who are in our community do not deserve shelter because they're not really members of our community.
Outrageous-Outside61 t1_j75e8z5 wrote
Well let’s agree to disagree.
And idk, takes quite a few years for me to accept someone as part of the community regardless. Shit, I moved from Chelsea to Marshfield 2 years ago and I’m an outsider here, 30 minutes away from my home town 😂
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