Learning about the ways in which society ignores and shuffles the homeless population has made me think a lot about how homeless people are made into an underclass. The movie we watched last Wednesday, Taylor\u2019s Campaign, detailed very well the ways in which homeless people are disenfranchised, dehumanized, and pressured by political institutions. What struck me about the movie was the idea of a man running explicitly as an advocate for the homeless, and how there are simply no spaces for the voice of homelessness in the political sphere. Taylor\u2019s Campaign is an effective depiction of how capitalism and American society targets homeless people and makes them subhuman. The truth is that large and powerful forces are invested in sweeping homeless people under the rug, so to speak. Policemen routinely mistreat homeless people, city governments renege on promises, and political forces slowly attack the livelihoods of homeless people. This seems to be by design. Homeless people have no economic means by which they can petition the government, and I would imagine very few homeless people vote. Additionally, society is individualistic and people have little empathy for the plight of others. Towards the end of the movie a series of people spoke about how homeless people are responsible for their own problems, how they don\u2019t belong in public spaces, how they ruin the view. One man even said that homeless people should starve. People don\u2019t want to be bothered by the sight of homelessness but they don\u2019t want to deal with the root causes or subsequent issues that persist because of homelessness. People hold an image of what America should look like, and homeless people are not involved in that. Such sentiments are reflected in public policy that specifically targets the resources of homeless people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Learning about the ways in which society ignores and shuffles the homeless population has made me think a lot about how homeless people are made into an underclass. The movie we watched last Wednesday, Taylor\u2019s Campaign, detailed very well the ways in which homeless people are disenfranchised, dehumanized, and pressured by political institutions. What struck … Continue reading Homelessness in Society<\/span>