Chance Martin: How to Fight Back -- ORGANIZE!
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Local fights give us myriad opportunities to identify national trends and issues. Also, as our local fights become more connected to a national campaign, the more support our local organizing garners from experienced advocates and organizations nationwide, resulting in more power to the individual homeless person. Further, solutions stemming from nationally advised local fights are more examined, and more adequately address the core causes of homelessness.
Homeless people tend to be more directly involved on a day-to-day basis in the fight for their own rights when they see that their efforts are effective and their opinions are heard. While large-scale campaigns often turn people off, people can relate to a national campaign that reflects who they are, directly takes on their issues, and affords them meaningful participation in the fight. Homeless people's buy-in and participation is imperative if efforts are to be successful, and this should be remembered when initiating local as well as national campaigns.
Homelessness is a national crisis -- a crisis that we can no longer permit our nation's highest officials to ignore. We must create a national response that does not replace our local fights, but strengthens them by connecting our common struggles and common demands for change. Society can no longer be allowed to quietly strip us of our humanity and our rights. Homeless people must not continue to die on America’s streets alone and ignored.
As poor people, if we are going to organize a national campaign to confront the police and the power structure they work for, then we’d better be organized. We expect we will lose some battles along the way. We are not so naïve to think that, just because we have banded together, we will automatically have power. The governmental and corporate structures created over the last twelve years to eliminate our presence and strip us of our dignity are too well-funded and too well-supported by a privatized "criminal justice" system that cannot seem to fulfill its own insatiable greed. They will not initially recognize us as a threat.
But we will be a threat. We will build from the work of local groups around the country who have been so creatively and fiercely battling against our oppressors, be they corporate or governmental. We will spread the word on campaigns that have been successful, just as we will with training models, funding strategies, and technical support.
We will coordinate a public information campaign that is geared towards: a) alerting homeless and poor people that a new civil rights movement is building, and; b) alerting the general public that rights lost to any segment of our society are rights lost to all of our society.
Many thousands have died homeless since America’s surrender in the "War on Poverty." Today, it is not rhetoric to say that a War is going on. Only no longer is it a War on Poverty, it is now a War on the Poor.
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