Tag: homelessness

Dec 14 2008

Musical Chairs

That old game, I played it in grade school.  A circle of chairs, say 10 chairs, for 11 people.

And the music starts, and we all walk in a circle around the chairs.  Until the music stops.  Then we dash about to sit on one of the chairs and thereby claim it.  We can sit!  We have a chair!  Ha!

There’s one person left standing.  They do not get a chair and are out of the game.

This goes on, subtracting a chair each time, until there is one chair left.  As the music starts, two people walk in a circle around the chair and when the music stops, well, we have a winner!  Someone gets the chair!  And all the rest are left out.

It’s a pretty strange game, come to think of it.  Though if I recall, it was kind of fun, too.

Nov 10 2008

Losing My Home

To be clear, I don’t own my home, I’m renting it – it’s not my house, just my home.  I’ve been here since the first of the year and have enjoyed it.  Since I live alone, it’s more house than I need, but since I have very little furniture the house has a nice zen emptiness to it and provides ample space for doing tai chi and kung fu.  Here’s a pic of my living room.  I don’t entertain much.

My-Living-room

Oct 20 2008

Homelessness 101: I moved to NYC in 3/1983

I was in my 20s (yeah, I’m old).  The Reagan era was a time of rampant homelessness, as the city had not fully recovered from its 1970s bankruptcy…and then, to save money, mentally ill people were being turned out onto the streets; there were not enough beds in homeless shelters and the shelters themselves were unsafe….

These problems got shoved aside during the gentrification years after Rudy Ghouliani took office.

there’s more:

Aug 24 2008

In Which I Go Out Among the Good Citizens of My City

I was volunteering at a community event benefiting my employer, at a small park plaza located downtown.  I don’t generally go to public events like this if I can help it — I dislike crowds.  But duty called, so I went.  It was a lovely, sunny, warm day.  I didn’t have a lot to do during much of the day except just sit at a volunteers’ hospitality table, so had time to read the book I brought with me at intervals, and I had almost unlimited time to just watch the goings-on around me.

Apr 16 2008

soldiers. and. a right-to-life.

• unSupporting Our Troops

Rep. John F. Tierney (D-MA): So it is a little astonishing to me, and I think to others, the planning for what is going to happen to our troops, their meals, their water, their housing, the essentials of life, their protection, all of that doesn’t even begin to happen until May 2003, after Baghdad falls, but in the meantime the administration had your company planning for Iraq’s oil infrastructure months before it had a plan how to support our troops.

Oct 24 2007

The HEARTH Act.

One of the big travesties in this country is the fact that we still have hunger and homelessness in this country even though we are still the most prosperous nation in the world. However, given the continuing problem of hunger and homelessness in this country, we need to be able to engage in much more effective planning in order to reduce hunger and homelessness and get people off of the streets and into homes.

The HEARTH Act is designed to do that by bringing groups and people together in order to address the problem of hunger and homelessness.

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