Day 252 – February 13, 2012 – Intensity in tent cities…

Number of days in Amsterdam – 252

Number of days without a bike theft – 248

Days since it last rained – 0

I never thought rain and 40-degree weather would feel so good!

But I want to talk about home right now, not weather.

I get torn in two by the concept of home. In so many ways, Amsterdam is my home now. It’s the place where our child was born, the city that’s given us so many opportunities to start something new, and even if we struggle a bit – no matter what form that struggle takes – I feel like the city has adjusted, just a tiny bit, to make a place for us.

But the home I’m talking about right now is the old home. Not Detroit exactly, but nearby. Ann Arbor.

Almost an hour away from Detroit, Ann Arbor is a quirky, affluent cousin. It’s a picturesque town, the home of the University of Michigan, and a lively college town atmosphere because of that. It was a hotbed of ’60s counter-cultural radicalism, the place that spawned the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, and John Sinclair (who now calls Amsterdam his home as well, although it was back in Detroit where I met him and got to see him speak, at the release of his book Guitar Army).

Ann Arbor is a fun place, and most visits (that didn’t involve visiting the hospital) have been cause for happy memories.

But there is also the perception of this place, specifically here and now. Today I saw something on the BBC about how Ann Arbor is also the home of a tent city.

On the edge of the city, along the freeway, sits a tent settlement of homeless people. People trapped and forgotten by an economy that’s failing and forgetting them at the same time, leaving them with no social safety nets to catch them, simply tucking them on the side of the road in a frigid Michigan winter with no electricity. No jobs. No hope.

The picture painted of the situation in the states right now is a bleak one. We’re often viewed as a country that can only excel at the expense of our downtrodden and that, in times of crisis, the poor are expendable.

I have been occasionally put in the position here to explain the system in the States, with questions like “you mean everyone doesn’t have access to medical care? People can die because they can’t afford treatments?” And all I can say is “yes.” I have no defense for it, because it’s indefensible.

Several years ago, Nicole and I spent almost a year where we were both unemployed. We struggled along on the minimal amounts unemployment insurance gave us, supplementing with freelance and day labor jobs as we could, paying the mortgage with credit cards and managing to find work before our benefits ran out. In today’s economy, people are not finding work, their benefits are running out, and they’re moving into tents.

I’ve been poor, and I’ve worked in restaurant as added insurance that I knew where my next meal was coming from. But I’ve never been afraid that I’d be sleeping outdoors in the winter because I was that poor.

And if this is the case in Ann Arbor, what chance does Detroit have?

The situation in the States is creeping toward the way it was during the Great Depression. There are 13 million unemployed – and that doesn’t even taking into account the working poor, people with jobs who can’t bring home enough to feed their families.

And until the situation of the homeless poor is addressed, there’s no room to address the problem of the chronically homeless – those that are destitute because of drug or alcohol problems, or mental illness. The mentally ill are a group first hit years ago, when Reagan first started chipping away at the mental health system. Hospitals were closed, and patients were dumped on the streets.

It’s sad, knowing the place where I came from can’t take care of the poor huddled masses it so openly welcomed once.

And it really makes me think hard about which place I really want to be calling home right now.