Punishment on top of punishment
All trying their best
I shared this short story on Blusky (which you should join and follow me on!) and it got a great response so I'm putting it back up here too. Not enough of you nice people read the book anyway so I'm never going to shut the fuck up about it until the next one is out.
Luke O’Neil
My parents are getting older now and sometimes I get very angry about that and it makes it difficult for me to be around them in a way. Like I’m constantly on edge. I’m not angry at them of course it’s not their fault but I do selfishly find their aging to be an affront to me personally. Even though the inevitability of their passing someday hopefully at least twenty years from now is the most natural thing in the world the one single predictable thing we all have in common the fact that I have to watch it happen step by step like this until it finally arrives seems indecent. Like watching them undress.
Andreina Kniss joins us today to write once again about homelessness in Los Angeles and the cruelty and hostility with which they are treated by Democrat and Republican alike.
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Punishment on top of punishment
by Andreina Kniss
In the immediate aftermath of the shit show presidential election, speculation began about California governor Gavin Newsom’s will he/won’t he (he will) 2028 national run. At the same time, another somber story hit California that dragged us all back to the very dark reality we’re already living in. It’s a story that symbolizes everything wrong with the state that California “progressives” like Newsom, London Breed, Karen Bass, Scott Weiner, and other heavy hitters have handcrafted. A 14 year old boy in Santa Clara named Jose Emiliano Zamora died by suicide after relentless bullying by his classmates and football teammates for being homeless.
“They were spitting on him, hitting him on the back of the helmet,” the boy’s father Jose Bautista told KTVU.
"He was trying to make me happy. He was trying to be a better child."
"It's kind of hard," he said. "I just don't want this to happen to other people like it happened to me."
If Newsome and company have their way it very well could.
Like tens of thousands of families across the Golden State, Jose’s family had been evicted from their home after Covid eviction moratoriums expired. With no social housing or safety net to hold the family up, that eviction led him to seek refuge in a youth shelter. His family’s GoFundMe for his burial costs is currently funded at nearly $150,000. I wonder what life would be like for Jose if that community action and empathy had been put into action a week ago? Jose and his family might have had a home to call their own. He might still be alive.
We know now about his life because it ended in tragedy, but for so many others in his position it’s a story of a more routine daily suffering.
I have met hundreds of children like Jose on the streets of Los Angeles while handing out supplies with the volunteer group KtownForAll. Children whose parents were sick or injured, and so couldn’t pay rent for a month or two, that have been evicted more times in their short lives than they’ve seen a doctor. Young children who have run away from abusive foster home “care” that many youth on the street deem worse than homelessness. Babies sweltering in tents with mothers who fled domestic violence. All of them with nowhere to go. All denied shelter beds because there aren’t enough. All trying their best to go to school. All on wait lists for housing or vouchers that are ten to twenty years out. All destined to be thoroughly judged by society and the courts for what they’ll have to do to survive. On top of something so simple for most students, like finding a pencil for the day, they’re also facing the ever militarizing boot of the Progressive™ government of Los Angeles on their necks. With the passage of municipal code 41.18, the city has banned all tents and car dwelling 500 feet from schools, clinics, libraries, fire departments etc., with zero thought to the fact that there are currently 17,245 homeless children enrolled in LAUSD schools. Children that might need to live in a tent or car close to their schools. Children that might want to stay close to a library to access homework help and social services.
Jose’s tragic death is not an individual aberration, it’s the natural culmination of the well-funded campaign of dehumanization supported and exalted by the aforementioned California Progressive™ government, a complicit media, and the supposed liberal voters of the state (who among other things just rejected a measure that would have banned forced prison labor, aka slavery). It’s a campaign to redirect fault from where it belongs, the real estate investors dripping in blood money, to people that for a million common reasons cannot keep up with their sky high rents.
It works like this: The adults teach the youth to worship wealth as a sign of intelligence and goodness. Parents talk about people with no housing as a terrifying plague to be dealt with, not as loved ones, neighbors and friends to be helped, all in the name of “protecting children.” Local news runs article after article reporting on homelessness as a threat to public health and safety, implicitly and explicitly blaming them for everything. (In stories like these a person’s lack of housing is always announced in bold before any alleged crime.) And to top if all off, mayors, and even the governor, the champion fighter of the Democratic cause, use their bully pulpit to further harm those that don’t have a place to live. On Newsom’s official website he proudly shares pictures of himself front and center personally throwing away the belongings of people during a sweep in Los Angeles as part of his announcement of almost $200 million dollars to directly fund more sweeps.
Much to the surprise of anyone who works in schools, social services, public housing, or any industry helping the poor, he made it clear that cities do in fact have plenty of money to address homelessness, just by hurting people instead of helping them. Meanwhile officials deny the reality that there are not enough shelter beds or other social housing options for all of those who find themselves without a home each night in our state. To house the sick, vulnerable and poor is overall unprofitable. (As Luke wrote recently in Hell World, killing people is easy and saving them is hard). Instead, they reinforce the false narrative that a majority of these people without a place to live choose to be there, and that the housed people who have to look at them are the ones suffering the real harm.
This rampant radicalization and demonization of the poor is not a surprise to anyone following the rightward slide of the Democratic party at large in the last five years, particularly when it comes to people who don’t have anywhere to live. A few months ago the ghouls on the Supreme Court decided in the case Grants Pass V. Johnson that it was no longer cruel and unusual punishment to jail and cite people simply for being homeless, even when cities had no shelter beds available, as long as the law was applied fairly to everyone, both housed and unhoused alike. Gavin Newsom proudly submitted an amicus brief to support the city of Grant Pass, Oregon, as did mayors across California like London Breed. They won, and now they have the conditions in place that they have always dreamed of – and frankly have always had, just with less paperwork now – which is the ability to sweep people up, trash their belongings, and cite or jail them if they don’t move. Punishment on top of punishment.
On top of that California recently voted to pass the “tough on crime” proposition 36, which lowered the felony threshold for shoplifting. This followed a multi-million dollar campaign from big box stores to convince the public that homeless people stealing items was the reason why prices were high.
All of this is leading California right back into the mass incarceration of the 1990s. And all of this, to be clear, occurred under a Democratic supermajority. Under the leadership of a man who Democrats may well line up behind in four years to save us from the fascism of Donald Trump.
So how do we get to a place where children terrorize others for not having a place to live to the point of suicide? By having adults, politicians, media, and celebrities who terrorize adults and children alike for the crime of not being able to afford to be exploited by a landlord.
It’s not just California either, although we’re certainly leading the way in the war on the nation’s most vulnerable. Here’s another very timely example from Utah: last week hundreds of self identified homeowners showed up to oppose the opening of a warming center. Not a shelter, not affordable housing, just a single emergency room that opens when it gets under 18 degrees and closes back up once it gets warmer than that. Even this bottom of the barrel lifesaving endeavor was an affront to the homeowners who screamed about the warming center being a threat to the safety of their children. Children who are presumably going to sleep soundly inside of a warm house and be driven to and from everywhere else because, again, it is under 18 degrees. And these children will sadly absorb their parents' rants and raves about people without homes.
Some homeowners in attendance at the hearing claimed that all of the people living on the street were “illegals,” while others said they’d “bring drugs.” Some said that the people on the street were not from there, that they were all from California, and that they needed to be “shipped back to where they came from.” That’s a comment I find particularly interesting because politicians here in California say all the people on the streets are not from here either and need to be sent back to where they come from.
It seems like across the entire United States all cities claim the unhoused people in their communities are a problem coming from outside rather than from within. If no one is ever “from here,” then that means the policies of a particular place couldn’t possibly need fixing. It’s the people who have no place to live themselves who are inherently flawed, or of low character and so on, not us. As if homelessness was a permanent and ineffable characteristic and not the simple and temporary condition of not having a home. And their presence is the reason for literally anything bad that is happening at all times. (This thinking also applies to migrants and other scapegoats of course.) When you don’t think of unhoused people as part of your community, community safety becomes about protecting everyone except them. Often from them. Even if that means leaving them outside to freeze to death.
The amount of change that has to occur to prevent the next tragedy is immense, and it will have come too late for many, including Jose Emiliano Zamora. But it’s a challenge we must refuse to back away from. Because we all deserve a safe place to call home. Because the way we treat our fellow human beings is self-evidently horrifying and morally wrong. Because no child deserves to go through what Jose went through. We need a society built on solidarity and empathy, one focused on long term solutions and not slapstick bandages that at best shield the housed from our neighbors' suffering. We need to tear away the power of capital and big real estate and build a world that values people over profits. We need parents and schools that foster kindness and compassion. Every single one of us deserve a loving community who will catch us, not turn on us when we need them the most. I don’t know exactly how we’ll get there, but I know Gruesome Newsom and his sweeps won’t help.
Andreina Kniss is an organizer at KtownForAll, an all volunteer unhoused rights and outreach organization that supports and advocates for the unhoused community in the Koreatown Los Angeles neighborhood.
Kniss previously wrote about homelessness and Los Angeles for Hell World here:
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
I wrote about the Grants Pass decision myself back in June:
Luke O’Neil
It's hard to overstate the abject cruelty of the Grants Pass decision and how perfectly it distills the soul of this country down to its ugly punitive essence. Instead of using our vast wealth to help those in need we will use it instead to punish them. And hey if it ushers thousands more into the warehouses then all the better right?
I know it sounds like a bit but in their decision they actually used the old Anatole France quote about how “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
In Neil Gorsuch's words:
"Grants Pass’s public-camping ordinances do not criminalize status. The public-camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, regardless of status. It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building."
What a fucking joke.
There is one solution to the problem of people without homes and that is to give them homes. We cannot arrest our way out of homelessness just as we cannot arrest our way out of addiction. And yet incarceration remains our one single solution to everything.
We've tried one idea and hasn't worked but maybe this time it will.
I've said this before but people without homes are not some sub-class of human and they are not monsters they are you and me after a couple of bad breaks. Each of us reading this are so much closer to finding ourselves impoverished than we are to becoming rich.
There's a sword hanging over all of our heads it's just a matter of degree in how close it is and how quickly it is lowering.
Ok I'll be back in a couple days with a piece from another great contributor which will probably be paid-subscriber only.
Before I go here's a quick detour into Luke's Movie Corner:
I really liked Red Rooms the horrifying courtroom thriller about what a lady's deal is.
We also finally caught Lamb the melancholy and pensive Icelandic film about what a lady's deal is. Recommend both!
And here are your songs of the week.