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In 1660, Boston opened America’s first workhouse. Full of rats, meager food, and thin bedding, the workhouses were designed for “dissolute and vagrant persons” and they were, unbelievably, preferable to the alternatives: banishment, or being auctioned off to the lowest bidder. This auction system expanded to many cities across the country, as well as a poorhouse policy of forcing residents to follow a draconian set of rules and regulations in order to stay. Many of these rules still exist today, which we’ll get to in another newsletter.
If it were up to the Grants Pass city council, and many, many people like them, we would still be able to force poor and unhoused people to live in poorhouses or work for free (there’s a word for that) after stepping off the auction block.
Seeing the unhoused and unemployed as problems themselves rather than people with problems that need solving is nothing new. While poorhouses may have ended during the New Deal, we haven’t learned to see the people who need a little help as true members of our society. I have never understood this, both from a human perspective, but also an economic one. Clearly, if all of the unhoused and unemployed people in this country had jobs and housing, we would all be better off.
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Of course, I think about this in terms of IDs. If all 26 million American adults without IDs had jobs, that’s more money going to taxes, to small business and restaurants, to Target and Walmart. That’s more people buying cars and plane tickets and going to the movies. That’s more money flowing into the economy. That benefits all of us. Why wouldn’t we just spend the $40 on an ID to boost the economy by millions? Why wouldn’t we just subsidize $1000 a month for an apartment to generate multiple times that amount in taxes and revenue? Shouldn’t the billionaires, the ones who own all of the businesses we spend money on, want everyone to be housed and employed? Isn’t that better for them? I’ll never understand it.
Instead, we get cities like Grants Pass [ [link removed] ]- cities that shut of water in public parks and close public restrooms, that throw ice water on documents and break tent poles in half, cities that say get out of our parks, go sleep in the forest.
There’s a quote from The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix that I think about often:
One of my favorite things about human beings.
Starvation, poverty, disease, you could fix all that, just with money.
And you don’t.
I mean, if you took just a little bit of time off the vanity voyages,
pleasure cruising, billionaire space race,
hell, you stopped making movies and TV for one year
and you spent that money on what you really need,
you could solve it all. With some to spare.
We could solve everything, if we really wanted to. I truly believe that most of us do, and who knows, maybe we will. It won’t be all at once, but we can take small steps every day. That’s what we tell ourselves at Project ID. One ID at a time. When I first started this organization, a lot of people laughed at me, refused to donate, even hung up on me. They said that I could never do enough, never help enough people, just getting one person an ID at a time. But now we’ve helped over 12,000 people, one by one, and we’ll keep doing more. I don’t know which way this decision will go, but I know that if those of us who see the humanity in everyone keep working, then we’ll keep moving forward.
Sending good vibes to SCOTUS,
Kat
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