This is Billy Bob and the Consortium
Let’s Have a Conversation Today
Good Morning, Coffee is Expensive this Morning!
Good morning to you too Pete, are you trying to start a riot this morning? Easy guys, I just wanted to see if you were awake and ready for a conversation or not. Pete, you are up to trouble this morning, I hope you have coffee, for your sake. Easy Mike, I have good coffee this morning. Alright, then what are you up to this morning, you are acting a little cagey today. Yup, I am, I want to have a real talk this morning, so I am giving y’all a warning, take your coffee knowing we gonna talk today.
Alright, alright Pete we surrender, let’s talk and let’s have coffee and I hope treats for this talk you are trying to warn or warm us up for. Come on, it is about one of our favorite subjects and we mention it all the time, we just don’t talk about it, think y’all. Pete, I want my coffee, and I want to know what you are up to, now please. Okay sally, easy, coffee and treats. Pete, you know if Barb were here right now, she would have thrown her coffee all over you, right? Don’t get me stared now, I know she would have, but that is half the fun, remembering how upset she would have been with me. Okay, please take the floor and share.
Hey folks, it’s me Billy Bob, let me break in before we begin, you may think that experts are talking today, we are about to embark on one of Pete’s deep thinking exercises, and it may be heated, but join us anyway, it is fun when he makes us think so hard, homeless folk don’t get to think this way often enough.
What good is throwing us in jail for just trying to live? Trying to find food, get cleaned up or sitting down for a minute or two? Pete, why this topic today, of all the things to talk about, why this one, it makes us all so darn mad, why? Because we are all facing more jail time than ever because of the new laws and the public demand that we disappear. But we know that jail does nothing to end, slow or fix homelessness, but they still use it more than ever to make it appear as if we have gone away and everything is all better. But here is the flip side of the coin Pete, the police are forced to do a job that they are not trained for, and it wears them out as well.
Okay, Billy Bob, are you willing to lay out for the folks reading this what happens when we are sent to jail and why it is so bad for us. Oh Pete, your price for coffee today is tough, but okay. Folks, when we go to jail, we do not get to keep the paperwork we may be collecting for benefits, food stamps, disability, housing and the like, it is often thrown away without regard to its importance. We are used to being all alone for hours, if not days, in near total quiet and silence, then we get thrown into jail and there is so much noise that it can drive some to the point of mental instability, which makes them keep us longer. The final hard part is this, it gives us criminal records, which can make it difficult to get a job, benefits, and financing for needed things when trying to get off the streets.
Pete, what got you going on this idea this morning, why do you have us talking about the one thing that haunts and scares us so much. Because those people out there, the ones with homes, have this side minded idea that us going to jail is good. Go figure, they say in jail we get abed, food and showers, they do not understand the torment of being arrested, chased, and forced to deal with those who have done real crimes.
Now that is a true thing, those scary dudes with real crimes behind them, I hide in my bed when I have to go to jail, they frighten me, I sleep less in jail then I do on the streets. Bill, you are right, but they don’t understand, they are too comfortable. That is what they need to understand, imagine the worst bully they faced in school and magnify 10 times and then try and sleep, that is jail, we just are trying to survive in a nation that has forgotten us.
Pete, what has been your experience when you end up in jail? Sally, I have been inside only a few times, and it is awful, I do not know how men commit crimes on purpose and intent and then spend years and years in there like it is normal. It makes us seem like we have it easy, and we are homeless. They fight, harm and even kill for a bad look, a scrap of food, and for not doing what was expected, and these are men who are penned up like animals for decades. Why do people think putting us in there is good for us?
I think this is why there has been more of the homeless hiding and moving to the outskirts and in to the ‘underbrush’ recently, the crackdown have them scared and afraid, they do not want to go to jail. Well, guys, here is the hard reality, they go to jail for 10 or 15 days, and then where do they go? Right back to the streets to start all over again, to start accumulating the tickets and fines to send them right back to jail again, a broken and deadly system. It is not like we can go to jail, walk out and pick up our broken pieces and start back where we were before jail, no that little bit of hope is gone.
They have no answers, they don’t care to find answers, the system is broken, no housing, no treatment beds, no shelters, and we get caught square in the middle and when the squeeze comes, pop, we go to jail, ooppss, they did it again, we have to clean up the streets is the common answer. Darn, Frankie, that is harsh reality. But it is real, and it is truth, and they don’t like truth, so that is my input for today. They want the housed folk to believe it is all our fault, well it ain’t, what is ours is ours, but it ain’t all ours. Okay Frankie, you get the extra coffee this morning, you said it right and hopefully they heard us this morning, but only time will tell.
Folks, thanks for joining us today, this was a conversation that may have scared you off, because it was designed to challenge you. Jail has and is being promoted as the only answer for a class of humans that are unhoused, unwashed, uncared and unkept and thus we ain’t no good to no one. But here is the question from us, the Homeless consortium, why are we the bad guys when we don’t control the economy, the housing, the jobs creation, the horrible immigration policies, and the price of food across the nation, that is the cause of us being and being an eyesore and no jail will never be an answer for homelessness folks, Selah, and have a great day
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