This week on a popular website there was a person who was around our age who shared his experience of hitch hiking the around the US with no money, phone, or ID. He slept outside and ate for free.

This struck me so much because he shares the views that so many of the “hobos” did in the 1890 to 1920s, the idea of just traveling around the United States and making it an adventure. He really did look at it as an adventure, he in essence didn’t do it because he had to, but because he wanted to. It’s just a striking resemblance to the vagabonds and the way they acted, care free, just enjoying traveling around with no job. He really was a modern-day. When he was asked what made him decide to do it his response was “I was 20, I wanted to radically change the direction of my life, and what better way to do so? I learned about things I could never have imagined existed and I’ll tell you it was one HELL of an education.”

You would think that this whole vagabond mentality wouldn’t come up again, that people would be happy with how they live now and you just wouldn’t expect someone to willing go through something like this in our modern age where the idea of being without a home and job is looked so down upon.

Here is a link to the full reddit discussion.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/20wx5g/i_spent_almost_2_years_hitchhiking_throughout_the/

And here is a tabled view of all the questions he responded to and his answers to them.

http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/20xrb2/

The book I received for my second group presentation was about the history of homelessness. There were a lot of connections in there that i’ve never made. I guess the most striking one to me is that I never considered vagabonds or hobos to be homeless in a sense, I almost always viewed them as a Gypsy type person who travels around and that is there thing, and not that they dont have a home so they have to wonder. There is also a really big distinction from how they were displayed as homeless to what we have now. Looking through the book, back in the times of vagabonds and hobos, the people were treated almost as subhuman. They were looked at incredibly cruelly, especially in the 1870s, with people wanting them beaten or killed because of what they did and how they were, and even before that they were looked at as incredibly immoral people. I’m glad most of shave empathy now towards them, you still hear some social Darwinist comments about homeless, but at least its not comments about flogging them or killing them.

Coming from a background of studying International Relations, I know what this feeling of despair and being overloaded with negativity means. At the beginning of the semester in my international security class we watched a movie about how a US citizen helped with intense planning of a series of terrorist attacks in India, the movie showed us everything leading up to it, how people were used, real footage of people being shot, real footage of dead bodies, mangled bodies, the destruction, the blood on the walls. Its a terrible thing that we have to see so we know exactly what we are studying in the class. The same goes for hunger and homelessness. We have to see all these things, read about how hard daily life is for someone in the street, how even with these services, daily life is still hard. One of the most striking things from the course that i’ve read is from the very first page of Tell Them Who I Am by Liewbow, “one wonders why more homeless people do not kill themselves.” Its something that really makes you sit back and look, here we are looking at just how little they have to live for, how hard they have to work to get by day-to-day, it really makes you wonder why taking your life isn’t an option when you’re down and out. I guess for them its the same answer to why we don’t give up trying to help with the overall problem of homelessness, its hope. Hope, just like so many other people keeps them alive, hope for a home, hope for a meal, hope for even just a simpler day with fewer worries. We keep the hope that we can make a difference, no matter how small it is, even if its to one person we can make an impact to them, even if it is for a moment. I guess just for me when I’m reading all these things and looking at these daunting numbers of homeless people even in my city, I just have to sit back, take a deep sigh, and really keep hope. It’s the same with politics, my motherland of Mexico is ravaged by drug trade, slayings, corruption, and death, and sometimes I feel like things will never change, that we will forever be the country of drug cartels, that it will never be the beautiful place it once was, but I just keep hoping that it can change. Just like I can keep hope that we can change things, even if its something small, we can all make a difference, no matter how small or big, its something. So don’t lose hope and keep on trucking.