Tick Tock Sheptock

PART 1: DC Mayor Muriel Bowser's 30,000-strong(?) Administration Can't Defeat One Homeless Advocate in 3.5 Years -- and Counting. (The court case and what can be learned from it by other DC homeless advocates) With me having advocated for DC's homeless people since mid-June 2006, I just received my first jail sentence related to advocacy on July 11th, 2018, following a nine-month long court case that began on October 13th, 2017 -- shortly after my August 26th social media post indicating my intention to run for mayor in 2018 . For reasons that I won't explain in this post (but might in a later post), I was arrested on May 21st, 2018 and released on July 11th -- after serving 52 days, with the remainder of my 360-day sentence having been suspended. As if it were even possible, DC's homeless people now have even more respect for me. I have enough street cred to purchase grounds for a homeless tent city to replace those which the current administration has sp...

1 -- Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, just killed 10 people at a Texas high school -- the state being no stranger to mass shootings or the threat of massive armed resistance. 2 - Poverty and homelessness affect Black Americans in equally bad or even worse ways than they did when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Movement began its Poor People's Campaign in January of 1968. 3 -- Regular church attendance is dwindling, though I suspect that those who tend to keep their pews full do so by attributing popular contemporary thinking to God and/or Christ -- whether or not there is any Biblical or historical basis for their claims. ( People don't know how to self-validate and they want to be told a nice fairy tale or bedtime story about a god who supports what they already choose to do -- not to be told that God demands that they change their ways. They should learn to self-validate -- to say, "I am so-and-so; and I choose to live this way, no matter who doesn't like it.....u...

It struck me this morning that this e-mail constitutes a blog post that should go out to many more than the 40 people I sent it to originally. It speaks to the many actions that are taking place over the next several weeks to bring attention to the issue of poverty and to change the narrative that government uses to justify ignoring the issue: All, Washington, DC has begun its "PERFECT STORM OF EVENTS THAT CENTER AROUND HOMELESSNESS AND POVERTY". Many people are coming through Washington, DC to speak truth to power between May 13th and June 23rd. Get in on the action!!!!! 1 of 5 -- May 13th through June 23rd: Poor People's Campaign. By now, pretty much anyone who works on poverty-related issues has heard about the new PPC which takes its name from one of MLK, Jr's last efforts in early 1968. HERE is the PPC website that is specifically for DC. Each week has a theme. Though we care about multiple issues, I've...

On May 12th, 2018 Ryan Cooper of the People's Policy Project (founded in 2017) addressed the DC Grassroots Planning Coalition which also has been meeting since 2017 to develop a broad public response to the city government's "master plan for finalizing it's 20-year-and-counting effort toward gentrifying those who make less than $60K annually out of the city" -- an effort known simply as the " Comprehensive Plan " but for which many advocates and activists have alternative names such as the "Comprehensive Scam" or the "Incomprehensible Plan". Mr. Cooper spoke about "SOCIAL HOUSING" : an international phrase used to describe various forms of government-controlled or -subsidized housing (Public Housing in the U.S., Council Housing in the U.K., etc.). He made what were, to myself anyway, convincing arguments for why a form of social housing that differs starkly from this country's Public Housing model can work well and a...