Salon: Down and out and on the move (Homeless march to RNC)

[kskiska]

Leading a feisty army of homeless people, fiery activist Cheri Honkala is about to descend on the Republican Convention.

By Michelle Goldberg

On August 30, the first day of the Republican National Convention in New York City, Cheri Honkala is going to march from the United Nations to Madison Square Garden with or without a protest permit. Behind her will be homeless women and their children, men furloughed from rehab centers, public housing tenants, wheelchair-bound people without health care and poor people hanging on to life by their fingernails. Arrayed against them will be walls of police in riot gear, armed with the latest in high-tech crowd-control devices and ready for mass arrests. For the past two weeks, Honkala and her followers have been marching across New Jersey, and undercover police have been videotaping and photographing them. Fearing violence, Honkala's put out a call for international human rights observers to watch over her group during the RNC.

Most of Honkala's group can't afford legal trouble or physical confrontations. Yesenia Cruz, a 24-year-old mother of five, is more than eight months pregnant. Elizabeth Ortiz, a fiery, stick-thin mother of three, has a weak heart -- she had a triple bypass before she turned 40. Craig Tann is a drug addict and former dealer who once served three years in prison and doesn't want to go back. But they're going to march anyway, partly out of determination and partly out of dedication to Honkala. She's helped some off the streets. She's helped others find jobs or get disability payments. She's given all of them the dignity of belonging to a cause larger than themselves. Many of them seem like they would follow her anywhere.

This is the germ of the movement that many activists have long dreamed of building. Endless words have been spilled bemoaning the lack of diversity on the left, the devolution of protest into a subculture for the disaffected children of the middle class. Attend any organizing meeting for protests against the Republican National Convention and you're bound to hear someone remark, wryly or sadly, on the crowd's whiteness. Honkala, though, has managed to organize and radicalize people who never before contemplated any kind of political action, people who regard McDonald's as a delicious treat rather than a corporate abomination. They are people who've already suffered a lot and are choosing to suffer a little more in the service of her vision.

The movement, as everyone who marches with Honkala calls it, is built around the conviction that homelessness is a societal failing, not a personal one. When most people think of homelessness, they imagine the ragged, disoriented people who sleep on the streets of most cities. Many of those people need treatment for drug problems or mental illness, and when such people come to Honkala, she refers them to rehab programs. But as she emphasizes, there's another side to homelessness, one that's invisible to most Americans. It's made up of people who've slipped off the last rung of the economic ladder and can't get a leg back up. Many of them are single mothers with children. People like her.

more…
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/05/honkala/

[DBoon]

1. McDonalds a delicious treat...

Reminds me of when I worked at a Jack-In-The-Box in the mid '70s (High School). We'd get a definite "welfare rush" the day of the month the welfare checks came in - mothers taking their kids out for a special treat. Even then, it seemed sad.

[iconoclastic cat]

2. Wow---I really am an elitist ass.

[Sugarbleus]

3. Thank you for posting this. I mention this frequently. I posted a

piece just before the convention about this and their links to the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. They are a part of this march. They among others in a coalition have been traveling the country gathering support for their cause. They also set up tent cities they call:
"BUSHVILLES" (like Hoovervilles during the depression era) all over the place. They've been hassled a lot, and they've been kept from the media eye better than Cheney. They wanted to set up a Bushville around the RNC also...All these groups are in touch with UN human rights watch.

It's incredible. It touches my heart and speaks to the causes that I wish to support. Those peoples plight is not far from my own.

Yes, the masses have moved too far to eliteville and it saddens me. We bemoan our plight in life but never stop to look around at who might, just might be having it way harder than ourselves. We need to be grateful for what we DO have and lend a hand to help those who are just barely hanging on. ALL HUMAN LIFE IS PRECIOUS. America and the vote is for ALL of us.