Homelessness in America

The evening of May 4, 2009 I received a request from YES! magazine board member activist, actor Danny Glover for a comment on homelessness. This was my response.

So long as GDP is rising, we are supposed to celebrate the splendid success of our economic system. Yet GDP can be rising in the face of disintegrating families and a vanishing middle class, increasing rates of homelessness and incarceration, rising unemployment, the disruption of community, collapsing environmental systems, the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing capabilities, failing schools, growing trade deficits, and costly but senseless foreign wars. All of these are indicators of dramatic system failure.

Rather than acknowledge that our economic system designed to assure that most people live in poverty and dependence—desperate to accept whatever work at whatever wage the ruling financial class chooses to offer, our culture encourages the poor and the homeless to believe that their condition is a consequence of their own failing, sin, or karma—not the fault of a pathological social system.

---- David Korten