May God and Jesus truly be with the hundreds people sleeping on the street. It’s cold outside.
Homeless advocate Eric Sheptock says there are about 1,500 that sleep on the street in the whole entire city. Three to four hundred is the downtown cluster of people who sleep outside.
There are 8,000 homeless people, I have been told, in the entire city. I have been trying to keep up with these numbers for at least 12 years. It’s hard to get the right numbers. Everybody is telling lies! Especially to the homeless people.
I was homeless 15 months the first time and six years, five months the second time, and I have learned through experience that the homeless people are the easiest people to take advantage of.
Now I am a veteran. Over 8,000 U.S. service members have lost their life in Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of that 8,000, 6,00 were under 23 years of age, 51,000 have been wounded, more than 1,500 have lost hands, arms, feet, legs. I have been trying to find out how many have been blinded, paralyzed, severely burned or severely disabled. These are some very serious issues that the veterans must deal with.
In the same perspective, here in Washington, D.C., we are blowing our minds trying to figure out how to help 8,000 of the poorest, most vulnerable people in the city, for a little place, a place called home! For me, this is outrageous. A majority of the 8,000 are African-Americans. And their foreparts worked the fields of this country for free. In 1619, the first slave boat came into Jamestown, Virginia.
We have The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank — three huge banks, and we can’t figure out how to help 8,000 people find a place called home.
Thank God for Jesus, I am not homeless anymore. I have a home. I have a place to rest. I have hot water. I have electricity. I have heat and plenty of food. Maybe one day, every child on the earth will have easy access to water, food, home and healthcare! Home, sweet, sweet home. It’s cold outside.
Homelessness is an embarrassment to the nation’s capital. Peace be with the people who do not have a home. I am a used-to-be homeless veteran.
Michael Matthew is a Street Sense vendor.
