The Poor ARE Invisible 🫥

rustypickup:

While my social media feed is full of memes and links to articles from my friends on the DC take over, focused on the drop in crime, soldiers patrolling and someone throwing sandwiches, the posts from my ordained friends are different. Their posts are about the homeless being rounded up, pictures of the homeless havi g the tents and possessions scooped up by machines and pitched into dumpsters. As someone who has worked with the unhoused pointed out, people hold on to the most important and personal items until the end. Family photos and family bibles, birth certificates and more. The homeless were arrested and those possessions treated as trash, we would never do this to the better off, only the poor.

I too laugh at a good sandwich pun, and I am upset with the destruction of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Voice of America, but as a culture we still by a large extent ignore the poor. The homeless in DC, and Medicaid cuts are more pitched at the middle class suddenly having their grandparents kicked out of nursing homes rather than poor mothers being denied prenatal care and a poor person being denied care for cancer or diabetes. For all the angst being leveled at DOGE and this administration, we still too often fall back into our cultural framing where the poor are an afterthought.

I’m ashamed to say I forgot about Trump’s threats to the homeless; then again, I’ve seen no reporting on the removal of the homeless. Just how so many government agents are inconveniencing the middle class.

I dismissed Trump’s threats because he couldn’t forcibly remove them to housing, and I knew he never meant to. I conveniently ignored the fact he’d dispossess them anyway.

This is power over the powerless. We don’t forcibly dispossess prisoners of their goods. They may lose their possessions to thieves or repossession while in jail, but the government doesn’t destroy what they own before incarceration. But the homeless? We finally stopped beating children as discipline in schools. The same argument against abusing the powerless applies to almost everyone; except the homeless. Who are the same people Jesus called “ptochoi.” Who were the people Jesus associated with. The homeless we overlook. The homeless who are invisible. 🫥  Blessed are they. Congratulations to them! We can’t make sense of it, so we ignore it.

Trump didn’t do this to us, and he didn’t make it worse. We can’t blame him. 

While masked agents were violently attacking a delivery worker this morning, bystanders repeatedly asked to see their badge numbers but they refused.

Bystander: You guys are ruining this country, you know that, right?

Agent: Liberals already ruined it.

After all, a delivery worker is not homeless. 

Pretty sure there’s enough blame to go around.