It’s hard to imagine that the country that controls so much nuclear
firepower and drops so many bombs every day is unwilling to educate its
children and house its own people.
The poor have been with us since there was an “us.” And, as
much as I would like to see zero poverty in the United States, a country
that spends trillions on its domestic and international security
apparatuses, I know that the political will for such policies is just
not there today. This, despite the efforts of thousands of people just
like me all over the country to alleviate the unnecessary suffering of
the poor in the US. Instead, it has become clear from the rhetoric of
the 2016 Presidential campaigns, that it is easier to preen oneself by
boasting of increasing such security spending, and almost never to
decrease it. Not even Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie
Sanders discusses cutting back on military spending and cutting weapons
systems. Thus, we can have a presidential election and not one word is
uttered about the criminalization of the poor and now the crisis of
homelessness that afflicts a growing number of cities on the west coast
of the US.
It is hard to estimate the number of homeless people in the US, but
one indicator is the number of school children who do not have an
address. According to the Child Trends Databank,
at the start of the 2013 – 2014 academic year, there were approximately
1.4 million children in the United States who reported to school and
did not have an address to give to school authorities. Child Trends
asserts that while reporting has improved and can provide some
background for the increased numbers, the sad fact is that the instance
of homelessness among children is increasing.
-- Cynthia McKinney, "America, We Have a Problem: Homelessness is Out of Control" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).