What is homelessness?

The word homeless is a noun and the definition is: Without a home.

To me that definition is black and white. The definition "Without a home" has no emotion to it, it is just a dull colorless sentence put together. If we were to put color into this, we could see that there is so much more than the definition given. We could see the injustice we have been dealing out to the homeless community.

Image from Linkedin

On any given night, 564,708 people in the U.S are experiencing homelessness. From that 564,708, nearly 37 thousand are homeless youth in the U.S, 47,725 are homeless veterans and 269,991 are disabled or unable to work. These are just the statistics on homelessness.

Injustice to me is when you don't get what you deserve or need. Injustice can also means that justice is not served to you as a person, that the injustice that is being done is not being shown to the public. That is happening because it is easy to forget the people that aren't on the same level as you. The people on the bottom of the totem pole.

You don’t even have to be homeless to be at the bottom. You could be on the verge of homelessness. The verge of losing everything you ever worked for. If you really stop to think, if they are at the bottom of the pole, doesn’t that mean that they are holding the weight? What would happen if the lower class stopped working? Would people finally realize that we can't live or function our materialized world without the sweat shops or the factory workers that make only 15-20k a year?

Many homeless people work jobs like that or don't even have a job. Many people at the bottom work out of temp agencies. What would happen if those jobs never got filled? I think that the economy will slowly decline without the bottom people. The bottom people are stuck doing the jobs no one wants, the low-paying jobs.

This is giving them no justice, because if we give the low jobs then they have to work twice as hard to get a better job.If we are giving them a bad job so that we don't have to do them ourselves then what type of person are we? People might respond to this like "who else would do it" or "at least they have a job". My response to this would be "who else would do your job?" I think just because you are homeless doesn't mean you are less capable of doing some jobs.

If you have a low-paying job, how can you live? How do you pay for your food, let alone other essentials such as a shelter? If you can barley afford McDonald's, how can you even afford a hotel to stay in at night? Is this giving justice to these people? I think it is not giving them what they deserve or what they need. So does this mean we are giving injustice to the lower people?

Image from Propaganda Times

For every one homeless person, there are 24 empty houses in America. That means 1 in every 7 houses are empty, and if 1 in 402 Americans are homeless, can't we find someone to fill the houses? I think we could put them in the house and have them get a job (if they don't have one) and work it off. A home is a fundamental thing for human beings. We need a stable place to live. We need an apartment not a box. People need a house not a street corner.

We can do so much for these people at the bottom. We can help and give hope to these people that have never been excepted. If we don't realize what homelessness really means, then we can never fully understand the topic. If we never open our minds to the people below us then we will never help them. We will all just get stuck in this vicious cycle we are in. Please if you are still reading this, don't let America's low get lower.

Cover photo https://www.pexels.com/