About Being Homeless

I have been fortune in life never to have experienced homelessness. It’s amazing what people can survive when they have to. And many don’t survive. Sometimes their circumstances have changed, for any number of reasons, some preventable and many beyond one’s control .Fire, flood wind, regime change, illness, loss of employment! Addiction! Being targeted with malice and bigotry out of misguided tribalism! Far too much of this is going on in our own country right now. We can’t control the weather; climate change is well underway, and this has happened in ancient history, far earlier than we human beings had the capacity to mess with it. But we can do something about the “regime change” that has come about with the present administration. We can protest, object, make our voices heard, and vote for a different point of view in government.

I can’t imagine the level of fear that immigrants, documented and undocumented, are living with today. And ordinary citizens are seeing their cities invaded by ill-trained, aggressive young men who have been allowed or encouraged to be brutal and disrespectful of their fellow citizens. They look on video like Gestapo or Brown Shirts from World War II, masked, scary and dangerous. It’s reminiscent of the murder of college students at Kent State University in the 1960’s. It’s like the attacks on the Civil Rights workers during the same era. And now journalists are being arrested for documenting the events that are taking place. This is crazy!

I am not saying anything new or startling in these reflections. But the more of us say these things, the better. Being silenced is one of the hallmarks of countries that are ruled by dictators. I have never been a marcher, even when I was young. My parents coached my brother and I to stay away from difficult or dangerous situations, even when the cause is just. Added to that is that I hate being in crowds, no matter what the focus. I am cheering on my dear friends who feel energized and mutually supported by being in a large group with protest signs. The more the better.

All that being said, this is, after all a music blog. Some years ago I wrote a song about homelessness. I recorded it in a studio, and it’s called “Nowhere to Go”. Immigration was not on my mind then. I was writing about people who ended up on the streets for different reasons, not because they had to flee their home countries and now have to flee the ICE thugs. I would sing this song a little differently now, because I am a firm believer in growth and improvement, and I think I would do a better job now. But isn’t that like life? How many things can we think back on, and wish we had done something a little differently, or even a lot differently? So here it is, as it was then.