“The physical environment unremittingly offers us possibilities of experience, or curtails them. The fundamental human significant of architecture stems from this. The glory of Athens…and the horror of so many features of the modern megalopolis is that the former enhances and the latter constricts man’s consciousness”
- RD. Laing [citation: politics of experience p. 16]
It is no doubt true that most modern cities are held together not by a grand aesthetic vision designed to nurture possibilities of consciousness but by an eclectic cluster of impersonal values: management of population growth, support for commerce, and the like. And what focus on form does exist more often than not is expressed as monstrous monoliths designed to project financial prowess and political power. However within the horrors of the modern megalopolis there generally can be found, even in the most poorly planned and power-dominant urban spaces, features here and there within the physical environment that offer possibilities of experience — a tranquil atrium within a library or museum, a thoughtfully considered public park, and of course actual “sanctuary” spaces in religious institutions (mosques, synagogues, churches, etc), to name a few examples.
For even the most unburdened individual, however, it can be a challenge to feel contained by such spaces given the myriad ways in which attention is fragmented by the predominant urban environment. For the Zarim, the challenge can be that much harder, not only because they are likely trying to manage a greater level of stress by virtue of circumstance, but because they also must manage the prejudices of the public and the generally intolerant attitude of law enforcement who see their role not as protecting the vulnerable Zarim but as protecting “the space” from the Zarim even when the only threat they pose are to the sensibilities of those who are irrationally offended by them. And sadly, in more and more cities, merely being homeless is now illegal, thus codifying (and formally validating) the irrational fears and prejudices of the majority housed population, and giving law enforcement an official green light to chase off, or even arrest, the Zarim merely for existing even though the Zarim are, in fact, unlikely to commit crime and are four times more likely to be the victims of violent attacks, not the perpetrators. As is so often tragically the case, those who are the subject of irrational fears are the ones most victimized by violence.
Even when the Zarim enter spaces where they are nominally welcome (religious sanctuaries, for example) in reality many of those institutions harbor the same prejudices and intolerances of the general public, and see their sanctuary spaces as being for their “members” only (a definition that can be loosely defined as anyone who isn’t dirty, doesn’t smell, isn’t “strange,” etc). There are, of course, more tolerant spaces such as the Catholic Worker’s Mary House, my mother’s stomping ground on the lower east side of New York City. But they are the great exception, not the rule, and even those such spaces usually come with the condition of a strongly present (even if not actively preached) religious ideology.
The “mobile sanctuary” is intended to mitigate these issues on a number of fronts. Though on a much more humble scale than Athens, it has been thoughtfully designed in conjunction with a professional architect to offer “possibilities of experience” within a non-hierarchical non ideological aesthetic framework. Visually, this translates (in its current iteration) into a predominantly dome-shaped structure with a warm wood interior. A skylight will fill the space with sunlight and allow for nature to be additionally present in the form of sun, sky and clouds (as well as stars and moonlight at night), with the dome walls acting as a shield against the intrusion of the urban landscape. For more intense inner experiences and rituals, the skylight can be closed to create a pitch black interior. The mobile sanctuary will, in fact, be equipped with a retractable pit in the center of the space to facilitate formal and informal “sweats” (sauna, temazcal, etc.) for cleansing, community building, and healing.
At least as important as the design of the mobile sanctuary will be the intention of the space, which will be to fully and unconditionally (within reasonable parameters of safety) welcome the Zarim. No longer will they be subject, without respite, to the chronic hostilities of an intolerant majority culture. [On a subtler, more esoteric, level, the mobile sanctuary, in its unrooted nature, will mirror the unrooted condition of the Asarim, and in this way be “in solidarity” with their experience]. On a more straightforward level, the service will not only be FOR the Zarim, but ultimately BY the Zarim, in that it is intended to eventually be run and / or managed (at least in part) by the Zarim themselves.
…
“At the root of every injustice is an imbalance of power”— Rep. Ilhan Omar
The Mobile Sanctuary is not intended to be a panacea for all the systemic and cultural ills that contribute to, and in many aspects cause, the crisis of homelessness. Rather, it should be thought of as triage in a time of war. The war is age-old, and is in essence the story of civilization [citation: Nikiforuk, Andrew (2012). The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the new servitude. Greystone Books]. It is the war of those with power against those denied it, and despite our storied aspirations for democracy the history of the United States is no exception.
Mohandas Gandhi once famously said “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” By that measure, we shall be judged quite harshly by history. While there are pockets of formal expressions of mercy and compassion in our country in the forms of humanitarian organizations and a minimal social safety net, mercy and compassion are not the principles around which our nation is organized. The accumulation of wealth and the acquisition, and protection, of power have been our core dogmas since our inception, and all human experience gets processed through this coarse, abrasive mill.
There were, certainly, multiple principles codified into the US constitution that were enlightened for the day, and still hold up as core principles for any healthy democracy; the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, multiple branches of government, to name a few. Other principles that got stitched early on into the intellectual and mythological fabric of our country were, however, decidedly less than progressive and seem, by today’s standards, to be shockingly archaic. Key among those oppressive principles was the idea that only white male property owners were qualified to helm the branches of government. Despite the fact that the elites of the day owed their privilege largely to the incessant and horrific pillaging and plundering of the New World, including the enslavement of millions of Africans and Native Americans by the Europeans since their arrival in the 15th century [citation: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism / The History of Capitalism], they maintained the delusion (still commonly held today) that power was an indication of divine providence [citation: The History of Capitalism].
This isn’t to say that the issue of race wasn’t a topic of discussion, even heated debate, when the constitution was being drafted at the first Constitutional Convention. Many of the delegates present were in fact Abolitionist, believing that the institution of slavery was immoral, should be ended, and should not be sanctified in the laws of the new republic. The President of the Constitutional Convention John Jay, for example, believed slaves should not only be free but equal members of society:
“I wish to see all unjust and all unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished, and that the time may soon come when all our inhabitants of every colour and denomination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberty” [citation: https://bit.ly/35SP7GK]
How tragic that the Abolitionists didn’t win the day at the Convention. We can only imagine how different US history might have looked had the principles of racial equality been interwoven into the democratic framework of the Constitution. For sure bigotry and terrorism towards racial minorities on the continent would not have ended in 1787 (as it obviously didn’t end after emancipation), but it is a reasonable assumption to make that had proactive measures been taken at the nation’s onset to promote racial equality, not only would emancipation have transpired a hundred years sooner, but many of the subsequent racist horrors inflicted upon people of color (lynchings, old and new Jim Crow, etc) may have been minimized, if not completely abated.
About class, there was no debate. The framers were ideologically unified in their certainty that the poor masses should never get their hands on the levers of power [citation: Chomsky]. Contrary to our modern populist notion of what a democratic government should represent, Madison and his cohorts believed the primary responsibility of government was not to extend as much power to as many as possible, but rather:
“…to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” [citation: https://bit.ly/2OFDnBm time mark: 7:37]
Put more directly by Jay:
“Those who own the country ought to govern it” [citation: Monaghan, F. (1972). John Jay. New York: AMS Press. p. 323]
While that would seem like a Trump-ian faux pas today, Jay was in fact expressing the mainstream sentiment of the delegates at the Convention. Clearly Jay and the other so-called advocates of liberty had an Orwellian understanding of what “equal partakers of political liberty” would look like…nominally equal, perhaps, but property owners should be, as they saw it, “more equal than others.” [citation: Orwell, G. (1964). Animal farm. London: Samuel French]
There were, in truth, more tempered and enlightened voices, such as Madison’s mentor Thomas Jefferson, who participated in the initial pre-Convention debate regarding what principles should govern this new democratic nation. Jefferson believed, for example, that it was education of the masses, not elitism, that should lead to a more just and pluralistic society:
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." [citation: https://bit.ly/2LbHaEy]
Jefferson, however, was not present at the Convention, and as such his more enlightened minority view, beyond the Declaration of Independence, was ultimately not formally represented in the structure of the US Constitution.
The potential danger of the masses thirsting for more rights of governance was not lost on Madison (which he described as “symptoms of a leveling spirit” [citation: https://bit.ly/2OEtxjf time mark: 8:58]) and the other intellectuals of his day, and it was recognized as well that it would be antithetical to the values of a free society to suppress the masses by use of force [citation: Chomsky]. As such, the US government was constructed with the specific intention of keeping power in the hands of the wealthy elites. In other words, the protection of power would be enforced by the institutional structure of our government, rather than by the barrel of a gun.
In Madison’s defense, he believed (as many elites do) that the wealthy and powerful, being “the more capable set of men,” would make wise and just decisions on behalf of everyone, including the poor masses [citation: Chomsky]. He was rather distressed and disillusioned to see, a few years into the grand experiment of American democracy, that those wealthy elites in whom he had put his trust to do right by the majority had, in fact (shocker), been corrupted by power and decided instead to selfishly enrich their own coffers and expand their power at the expense of the majority [citation: Chomsky].
There is a Groundhog Day-esque nature to this “disillusionment of the elites” dynamic. There were echoes of it, for example, 200 years later, following the subprime mortgage scandal, when then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who had heretofore been a staunch advocate of deregulation of the financial markets, confessed the following while being grilled by Congress regarding what precipitated the crisis:
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self interest of organizations, presumably banks and others, were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and the equity in the firms.” [citation: https://bit.ly/2sCodVj]
While couched in abstract economic language, Greenspan’s underlying ideology that the wealthy and powerful were best suited to make decisions on behalf of the masses (despite 200 years of evidence to the contrary, including the Great Depression, the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, to name a few abundantly obvious examples) was, in essence, the same as Madison’s and, by extension, the framers of our Constitution. And Greenspan was as shocked as Madison that the wealthy elites at the top of the financial pyramid acted from a place of greedy self-interest at the expense of the American people. There is, evidently, something so deeply impactful about the nature of ideology, (especially, it seems, that of the moral and intellectual superiority of power [citation: Montada, L.; Lerner, M. J. (eds.). Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World. Critical Issues in Social Justice. New York: Plenum. pp. 1–7], that facts, even in the hands of supposed intellectuals, frequently fail to override belief.
Greenspan was, of course, not alone on an island with his ideas. He was, in fact, a prototypical representative of the ideology of the ruling class of his era, during which time there were unprecedented tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as deregulation of banks and other industries, and consolidation of the media, coinciding with a draconian dismantling of the social welfare safety net (policies implemented, by and large, by both Republican and Democratic administrations [citation: LA Review of Books. (2013, March 9). When neoliberalism exploded. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2RaXaue]), all in the name of establishing an elite-driven private sector meritocracy, in which the spoils produced by capitalist wisdom would (naturally) “trickle down” to the masses. Suffice it to say, that utopia never materialized (as Greenspan begrudgingly acknowledged), and in fact we have had unprecedented wealth and income inequality over the past 40 years as a result [citation: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality. (2019, August 21). Retrieved from https://bit.ly/35W9S43].
I think it’s safe to say that the consensus Madisonian notion that the purpose of government is to protect the wealthy minority from the poor majority stands in stark contrast with the current popular (and misinformed) understanding of what the framers believed, and what our country supposedly stands for. If polled, I would venture to guess that most Americans would believe that it was Jefferson’s more populist ideology that drove the zeal of the revolutionaries. In other words, our national mythology stands in stark contrast with the hard cold elitist truth of what the founders believed, and by extension the government (and country) they ultimately created.
There is, to be clear, a broad populist rage against “coastal elites,” and this is certainly a long-standing aspect of the American character [citation: ?]. However most would consider elitism to be a corruption of our system, rather than what is in truth: the full expression of a system working as it was intended (aka, rule by elites is not a bug of the American system, it is a feature).
This cognitive dissonance is, actually, by design. As with Madison, future proponents of an elitist-driven government recognized that it was antithetical to a so-called free and democratic society to control dissent by force, so they turned to another particularly pernicious tool, in addition to structural oppression, to suppress discontent: propaganda.
While efforts by the powerful to control the national narrative, in order to serve their own interests, goes back to ancient times, the advent of modern tools of communication amplified, so to speak, the technique and exponentially expanded its reach into our lives and, by extension, its toxic impact. Beginning in the 1920s, the US government began to invest heavily into propaganda as a core feature of governance [citation: Chomsky]. The trigger for this investment were the writings of Edward Bernays, the “father” of public relations, whose 1923 tome “Crystalizing Public Opinion” and sequel “Propaganda” (a term which did not take on negative connotations until after its use by the Nazis) successfully convinced many in the corridors of power that the public and private sectors needed to use tools of psychological manipulation on the masses for the country to thrive. Bernays argued, for example:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” [citation: Bernays, E. L. (1933). Propaganda, By Edward L. Bernays. New York, Liveright., p 37]
As with Madison before him (and Greenspan after), Bernays believed in the wisdom of the elites. He believed propaganda would be used not to manipulate the populace into acting against their own interests, but rather to grease the wheels of progress by allowing those entrusted elites to govern without a mass resistance born of their so-called natural ignorance:
“The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities…the minority which uses this power is increasingly intelligent, and works more and more on behalf of ideas that are socially constructive…It has been found possible so to mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction. In the present structure of society, this practice is inevitable.” [citation: Bernays, E. L., & Miller, M. C. (2018). Propaganda. Place of publication not identified: Desert Books, p 19]
Despite the manipulative use of propaganda for clearly evil intent by the Nazis, Bernays didn’t seem to question his theories during his lifetime. It is hard for me to imagine, however, given our current state of affairs, that were he alive today he wouldn’t join the ranks of those disillusioned by their blind faith in the supposed moral and intellectual superiority of the elites (although if the horrors of Nazism couldn’t sway him against the systemic use of propaganda, perhaps nothing could).
While less sensationally horrific than how the Nazi’s used propaganda, the political and private sector powers in the United States have, since the advent of modern 20th Century media, systemically and repeatedly used influence campaigns in a variety of arenas to sell a corporate-capitalist empire agenda to the American people and to crush dissent against inequities and injustices. There was deep concern, specifically, by the leaders of the public relations industry regarding the post-WWII trend toward more socialist ideas, and they felt they had a limited amount of time (3-5 years, according to Noam Chomsky) to quell the trend and win the “everlasting battle for the minds of men” [citation: Chomsky]. What ensued, following their panic, was a broad-spectrum PR campaign that reached deep into the fabric of American culture and society. About a third of the material in American elementary schools, for example, was coming from the upper echelons of the corporate PR sector. Sports leagues, churches, and universities were likewise targeted for the purposes of indoctrinating the citizenry into this far-right agenda. Labor was also mercilessly targeted by a propaganda strategy known now as the Mohawk Valley Formula, a practice in which business owners undermine labor discontent by using influence campaigns to discredit union activists.
Over the past several decades the corporate news outlets have become major weapons in the propaganda war. In the seminal work Manufacturing Consent, authors Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argue, powerfully, that multiple structural components of corporate media in effect serve a propaganda purpose on behalf of power even with no obvious, channels of direct, intentional, ideologically driven influence between the state the the media outlets. They argue, for example, that the need to generate profit creates a bias towards news stories that will appeal to a more affluent viewership, thus manufacturing a news agenda that will naturally lean capitalist and conservative. They also illustrate how news outlets cut costs (and by extension increase profits) by relying on the state to produce and provide content on their own behalf, a service the state is, naturally, quite happy to provide. While not driven by ideology, this profit-driven approach to news content distribution effectively serves the same purpose as formal state-run propaganda media outlets like Pravda.
Beyond the kind of “soft” propaganda that Chomsky and Herman describe, the CIA has employed varied strategies over the decades to infiltrate the news and more directly influence the public, and by extension political, agenda. Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist Carl Bernstein reported, in a 2007 exposé, that over 400 American journalists carried out covert assignments on behalf of the CIA for over 25 years, from the 50s through the mid 70s, and, more chillingly, the CIA managed to secure tacit cooperation coming from all the major news outlets including CBS, Time, and The New York Times, on behalf of their agenda during that time. As Bernstein explains:
“The traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner, publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.”
Despite these kinds of formal relationships between the CIA and the press having supposedly ended in the mid 70s [citation: Chomsky], there is significant evidence that the CIA continued to seed influence campaigns through the media, including the fabrication of information, provided to the press in 1982, suggesting a Soviet military presence in Nicaragua in order to justify actions aimed to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, which the US government viewed as pro-USSR / Cuba following the successful insurgency of a Marxist rebel group known as the Sandinistas [citation https://bit.ly/2Ldct1H time mark: 8:20].
There is also mounting evidence that there remains a cozy relationship between the state and the press to this day. There were many significant revelations resulting from the Wikileaks release of the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s then Campaign Chairman during the 2016 election, which seemed to suggest fairly direct, coordinated, contact between the Clinton campaign and the corporate press, including the now infamous email in which then CNN commentator (and former DNC co-chair) Donna Brazile stated, prior to the first Democratic debate, “from time to time I get the questions in advance.” [citation: https://politi.co/2PfjvED] CNN denied any knowledge of the situation, but additional released emails more directly implicate the corporate press in apparent coordination efforts with the Clinton campaign, including one email in which they describe New York Times and Politico journalist Maggie Habelman as a “friendly journalist” who they had recruited to “tee up” stories on their behalf for the purpose of “shaping a public narrative.” [citation: https://bit.ly/35PepW4]
The advent of the internet era ostensibly represents a challenge to the hegemony of the corporate press. With new tools enabling even those with extremely limited budgets to produce and distribute content, it is far more difficult for a narrative to be shaped by the usual media power players. Power, of course, cedes nothing without a demand, and there were a handful of media watchers (including myself) who saw in the propagation of the “Russia-gate” narrative (wherein it was alleged that Trump’s election was aided and abetted by the distribution of Russian “fake news” via social media) a possible ulterior motive to try to silence independent media voices who challenged the establishment narrative. Sure enough, there were a number of indicators shortly thereafter that, indeed, that was the case. Many indie outlets, for example, whose popularity had exploded through social distribution, saw their numbers decline precipitously following the launch of Russia-gate [citation: https://bit.ly/2OEIwd4]. Ad-based revenue for indie news outlets, likewise, declined dramatically in what is known colloquially as “Adpocalypse” [citation: https://bit.ly/33IUsit]. Noble prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald also noted several factual errors in the reporting of the Russia-gate narrative in the mainstream media, all of which incorrectly reported information that suggested stronger Russia-gate evidence than was factually true. It was Greenwald’s contention (and I agree) that had the factual errors been accidentally, they wouldn’t ALL reinforce the Russia-gate narrative. The fact that they do, however, suggests a more nefarious intentional effort to misinform the public [citation: https://bit.ly/2Y9TpXE].
Even more sinister, in blatantly transparent acts of cold-war style McCarthy-esque red-bating, several efforts have been made by government officials and their allies in the corporate media to tar and feather any challengers to the state’s official dogma (and by extension the hegemony of the corporate press) as “Putin puppets,” “allies of the Kremlin,” and other such heinous ad hominem smears. The Washington Post, for example, posted an article in which it claimed that several independent media outlets were responsible for spreading fake news stories on behalf of the Russians. The article claimed that these outlets were part of an “overall Russian effort [that] is at least semi-centralized, with multiple Russian projects and influence operations working in parallel to manage the direct and outsourced production of propaganda across a wide range of outlets” [citation: https://bit.ly/37Pm4Wl].
Many of the outlets implicated are in fact highly reputable with excellent track records of accuracy (including The Intercept, TruthDig and CounterPunch), and there was, of course, no evidence provided that any of the singled out outlets were in cahoots with the Kremlin. Putting it succinctly, the article that aimed to point out fake new within the independent media was, in fact, a powerful and clear-cut example of the corporate media itself being propagators of fake news.
During this century-long semi-covert effort by the state to bend the will of the people to acquiesce to its hegemonic goals using the modern tools of propaganda, the general public has willfully acquiesced to private-sector propaganda, aka advertising, even going so far as to celebrate the “creativity” of certain ads and ad campaigns. Water-cooler chatter following the Super Bowl, for example, has become at least as much about the halftime ads as the game itself. Given the power and preponderance of the myth-making propaganda machinery in both the public and private sector, I think it’s fair to say that never before in the history of humankind has such a mind control endeavor been conducted on such a massive scale. The consequences are difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure. But its hard to imagine that the deliberate subversion of innate human myth making and storytelling for the sake of greed, violence, and the concentration of power, wouldn’t have deleterious effects on the psyche.
I would argue, for example, that so-called “Post Traumatic-Stress Disorder” has its roots, at least in part, in the harsh whiplash-like confrontation between glorifying myth and horrifying reality that the soldier experiences in modern war. Young soldiers are primed, more or less from birth, via the multi-pronged propaganda machinery, to believe in American righteousness. Church and state, while constitutionally separate, are socially conflated in the mainstream American church, effectively turning our war efforts into Christian Jihads. Idealistic young men and women whose brains have not yet fully developed are seduced by slick “The Few, The Proud, The Marines” ad campaigns that sell military service as a mythical black and white “hero’s journey” of good fighting against evil for the sake of “liberty,” “democracy” and the “American way of life” (presumed to be morally superior).
Once in the actual theater of war, however, the soldier gets a harsh reality-check. The “evil” they are confronting are often poor and powerless, with the desperation of the invaded often leading to such unfathomable tactics as strapping bombs to children, a lesson American soldiers often learn the hard way; with the violent loss of life and limb from a roadside explosion, including of course death of the child. The next time any surviving soldier winds up part of a caravan, they are confronted by a “Sophie’s Choice” when encountering another civilian…child or otherwise…along the side of the road. Leave them be and risk another deadly explosion. Kill them, however, and risk murdering innocent civilians (the ones you were told you were there to protect), including possibly a child.
As their frontal lobe continues to develop, and they continue to experience more of war’s harsh and cruel realities, it is likely the soldier will begin to ask questions — why am I here? What is the purpose of this mission? And, perhaps most disturbingly, what have I done? The true answers to those questions will shatter the myth that they have been sold, a myth they actively embraced, and will likely be unpleasant, even unbearable, to many soldiers. When the disillusionment, and betrayal, begin to sink in, it is hard to imagine not being consumed by rage, remorse, and guilt. It is also hard to imagine, as well, not being overwhelmed by a profound identity crisis.
As George Carlin brilliantly argued, this harsh reality has been buried under jargon by the mainstream framing of the experience as Post Traumatic-Stress Disorder (aka PTSD). Even worse than burying the experience under jargon is the complete stripping away of war from the description of the experience. Trauma, after all, can be almost anything, even events lacking the moral morass of modern war. Seeing a dog get hit by a car, for example, can be traumatic, and can (according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the American Psychiatric Association’s “bible” of so-called clinical disorders) trigger PTSD.
Likewise, the soldier’s natural, complex, and completely understandable emotional response to their mythological whiplash has been pathologized by the psychiatry establishment as a “disorder,” thus abdicating the perpetrators of the soldier’s betrayal (the elites pulling the levers of power) of all responsibility for the infliction of such suffering, and adding the stigma of mental illness to the soldier’s already considerable burdens. It likewise begs the question, wouldn’t being undisturbed by the experience of war be more of a disorder? It is perhaps a bridge too far (so to speak) to suggest some kind of conscious, deliberate propaganda campaign at the heart of the psychiatric model of illness (an infiltration by the CIA perhaps?). But it is challenging to escape the observation that the paradigm winds up further victimizing those most victimized by our social and structural inequities and injustices, and scapegoats them at the service of the elite establishment (as well, of course, as the pharmaceutical industry which, perhaps not coincidentally, funds the campaigns of many of those in power). This is no doubt a decidedly Orwellian interpretation of the psychiatric establishment, but given the monstrous historical and ongoing behavior of the political and media establishments, and how intertwined power tends to be, I don’t think such a cynical interpretation can be summarily dismissed. Even if the psychiatric establishment is not, conspiratorially, in cahoots with the political and media establishment as part of their propagandistic war on our minds, they appear to at least be subject to similar “soft propaganda” institutional dynamics that Chomsky observed in relation to the corporate news industry — group think, identification with power, etc. — which, in combo with the undeniable political and corporate news propaganda machinery, combine to create a multi-pronged institutional war on our welfare.
And, of course, efforts to suppress the will of the people institutionally did not cease once the Constitution was drafted. While hard-fought populist campaigns to expand suffrage beyond white, male, property owners have been successful, these expansions of non-elite empowerment have coincided with multiple endeavors by the powers that be to control the popular will by many nefarious means (aided and abetted, of course, by propaganda campaigns). Voter suppression, for example, has taken many forms including the requirement of the use of IDs, the shutting down of polling places in strategic (aka, poor and minority) communities [citation: https://n.pr/33CCYE8], and (most insidiously) mass incarceration (primarily of African Americans) via the bogus “war on drugs” campaign [citation https://bit.ly/2Y4oD2a]. Likewise, in recent elections, a database called “Cross Check” has wiped millions of legal, law-abiding citizens (mainly, you guessed it, minorities) off of the voter rolls [citation: https://bit.ly/2Rcvllh]. Then there is the blatant out in the open Democratic Party tool known as the Super Delegate, wherein one elite party insider is granted the voting power of 10,000 US citizens [citation: https://bit.ly/35QCtba].
It is this centuries-long full-scale systemic and psychological war by the powerful against the powerless that has resulted in many casualties, including the Zarim. We must advocate, and fight, for fair and compassionate housing policies, but such endeavors will be incomplete solutions without a massive counter-assault against not only the toxic myths to which we are all subjected to through the various ongoing IV drips of propaganda dispensation, but also against the elites’ myth making machinery itself. We must also push for non-hierarchical structures of power so as to minimize power’s ability to seduce and oppress.
We must also recognize that there is another kind of injustice, one that does not have a basis in systems or cultures, that can play a causative role in homelessness. This kind of injustice has its roots in chance and the murky quagmire of the human conscience, when someone is confronted with the extreme, incomprehensible misfortune of a moment of human imperfection leading to disproportionately tragic consequences. It is what I call “existential injustice.”
A good example of “existential injustice” is depicted in the 2016 film “Manchester by the Sea” wherein a young father’s youthful indiscretion leads to the death of his three young children. The father, played by Casey Affleck, had a bender in his home one night and left in a drunken stupor to get more beer, leaving a fireplace fire unattended. When he returned from his beer run his house was ablaze from his negligence. The film track’s the fall of Affleck’s life as he spirals into dark guilt-ridden despair. While he never winds up living on the streets, he gets right to the edge of homelessness, barely surviving on low-wage jobs as he isolates himself more and more from friends and family.
What makes “existential injustice” so significant, with regard to the issue of homelessness, is that there is no way to prevent it. As long as there are humans there will always be foibles, and there will always be disproportionately tragic consequences resulting from our human imperfections. Such is the nature of kismet. And we will always struggle to reconcile the consequences of our actions, leading inevitably to varying degrees of despair. Such is the nature of the human conscience. In fact, the nature and force of our conscience is such that we may even feel responsible for the tragic consequence of events for which we could not logically have been culpable. A tsunami wipes out a village, for example, sparing only one man who may torture himself for not having done enough to save the other villagers, even though, rationally, there was nothing he could have done. This is a phenomena known as “survivor’s guilt.”
What this speaks to is that we are, in fact, quite fragile and there are myriad ways that despair can be triggered. Which, sadly, means there will always be all manners of despair’s manifestations, including homelessness. We have within our power the capacity to create the most just and humane society, but we are, ultimately, powerless to eradicate foibles and fate. For those of us working to end systemic and cultural injustice (which should be all of us), it is critical that we don’t shoot the moon and blame human-made injustice for all homelessness. It is only by accepting the truth of our condition that we will be able to make an accurate diagnosis of our social ills, and by extension work towards reasonable ways to address them, including coming to terms with the fact that “addressing” is not the same as “solving.”
The Mobile Sanctuary is not intended to “solve” homelessness. It is one small way in which the Zarim can experience the dignity of personal and community space immediately in a social milieu that otherwise denies them that basic, and essential, human experience. We can, and should, fight for a more just and humane tomorrow. But it is cruel, and inhumane, to do so while ignoring the pain of those who are suffering today.