Tick Tock Sheptock

Homelessness seems to be quite the intractable problem in the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth – having increased from 5,757 in January 2007 to 7,748 in January 2014 and having decreased by 450 the following year to 7,298. Washington, DC had a 10-year plan that was supposed to end homelessness in the city by the end of 2014. It didn't. The news, in recent years, has been full of reports about the city tearing down homeless encampments, about synthetic drug use near shelters, about deplorable conditions and food-for-sex scams being perpetrated by shelter staff and most memorably about an 8-year old girl who went missing from the family shelter in early 2014. Homelessness is Hell. There's just no other way to put it. However, there is at least one organization that is working hard to give some of the many children who experience it in Washington a brief respite from the troubles of homelessness which current DC Mayor Muriel Bowser promises to make “rare, brief...

As I watch events in Ferguson, MO play out in the media, I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., during an interview with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” in which he said, “A riot is the language of the unheard. The U.S. Government has failed to hear that the economic plight of the American Negro has worsened over the past few years”. It's crystal clear to the socially and politically conscious that governments in the U.S. are defending the interests of corporations, not defending or enriching the lives of all American citizens. On the contrary, poor people who want a better life often become capitalist cannon fodder. (Just think for a moment about the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling.) Once a group is socioeconomically deprived, American governments add insult to injury and compound their suffering. They treat poor people as if their poverty is the result of a character flaw, as opposed to a set of systemic flaws in American governance. They aim to pu...