re: #232 jaunte

How disconnected from reality are you when you think homeless people can get a home any time they want to?

That’s a logical extension from the average American’s understanding that if you work hard you’ll be compensated.

It’s not that everyone condemning the unhoused are wingnuts, it’s that American culture has a series of base assumptions about how the world works, and one of the big ones is that there’s a moral and meritocratic quality to earning money such that if you’re struggling to make money so much that you have to use a support system you’re a bad person.

Homelessness has to be explained in ways that circumvent systemic analysis: this cannot represent a failure of the status quo*, it can only be an individual-centered anomaly, and thus criminalization—punishing the quality of being unhoused because it arises from other defects of personhood—is acceptable. America’s has a lot of zones of unpersonhood before you ever get to wingnuts that actively want to police caste distinctions, and the ones that involve uncritically-held ideas about the meaning of work and money are the ones that the most Americans will sign on for, or at least banally accept.

“Welfare queen” worked because it hit upon a deeply-held Amercian fear that somewhere, someone was getting something they don’t deserve.

*and somewhere in here you get into how the US primarily creates rules and mores to protect private property owners, which is why the “solution” to homelessness is making public spaces more hostile in general. Strategies to disincentivize existing as an unhoused person also wound anyone dependent on public spaces and facilities, but those people matter less than folks with houses and cars.