At a town hall meeting last week, Henrietta Hughes bravely stood up in front of the room full of people to ask the president for help for those like herself who are unemployed and forced to live in their car. She said:
"I have an urgent need, unemployment and homelessness, a very small vehicle for my family and I to live in. The housing authority has two years' waiting lists, and we need something more than the vehicle and the parks to go to. We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help."
Via Feministe, we find that her question resulted in an assault by conservative pundits, and it's truly enough to make one sick. Michelle Malkin was the biggest bully, snarkily saying:
If she had more time, she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too... Well, pardon my unbending belief in fairness and personal responsibility, but why should my tax dollars go to feed the housing entitlement beast?
Um, I don't know about you, but this "housing entitlement beast" i.e. homelessness is a pretty damn good cause to care about and put our money toward. Of course Rush Limbaugh jumped in as well, falsely saying that she "ask[ed] for a car," with others contending that she's "using the system." It's stories like this that exposes just how truly disgusting the likes of Malkin and Limbaugh are.
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Housing is a RIGHT that should be afforded to all people.Period.
May these cold-hearted, soulless bitches such as Malkin and Limbaugh, and their blissfully ignorant listeners who worship them, never know what it's like to wonder where their next meal is coming from. Or wonder how they will pay the rent. Or what they will do since their child is sick and they don't have insurance and they can't pay. May they never know such abject poverty.
I have known such poverty. It is no picnic. If Malkin and Limbaugh think it is, perhaps they should try it sometime.
I remember my mother telling me we had no more food in the house, and that I had better eat my dinner, because there wasn't anything else. She didn't mean that there was nothing else I'd *want* or nothing else that she would fix. She meant that there was NOTHING else to eat in the house. Period.
I grew up blocks from a housing project. My mother considered us lucky that we weren't *in* the housing project. We might as well have been. I remember the police chasing criminals through our yard. I remember drug needles all over the sidewalks. I remember knife fights and murders. I remember we would sit out on the roof of the porch and wonder if the 7-11 would be robbed that night or not, as it seemed to be robbed all the time. I remember all of this.
And I consider myself LUCKY that we were never homeless.
Malkin and Limbaugh, keep digging. Karma is patient. I truly believe that what goes around comes around. I pity them.
Tracker, thanks so much for sharing your story. I worked at a housing resource center in MA this fall and was absolutely appalled by the conditions that the government thinks are acceptable for its poorest members: mice, mold, gas leaks, violence, etc. And if you speak up to change these basic hygenic problems, you stand to lose your housing. And that's just for the lucky few who can get off the multi-year waiting lists.
"Housing entitlement"? How could one even begin to consider such conditions a privilege?
Oh, and if you scroll down in the Malkin article, you get some nice stereotypical, racist comments. Come on...I hope for the sake of all political punditry that she can do better than "pork and Kool-Aid".
I wish I hadn't scrolled down to read those comments, they were pretty revolting. A lot of them too poked fun at Obama for actually being a decent human being and trying to help this woman out. Sure says alot about the audience Malkin appeals to.
Limbaugh and Malkin - and we're one cowardly lion short of the Wizard of Oz.
Jesus fucking Christ! The woman has cancer and the Republican fucktards call her a freeloader for being unemployed. Call me crazy for insisting on logic, but dare I ask how someone with a debilitating illness is supposed to work in the first place?
Notice she can't even vote because she doesn't have an address. This woman is up shits creek, basically, and doesn't even have a voice in the political process so she had to appeal directly to the President.
I've been on SSDI and had to apply for free medications from drug companies for having a low income and no prescription drug coverage, and it's pretty fucking hard if not impossible to file for federal disability benefits or corporate assistance without an address. I suspect she isn't getting jack shit in the form of help from either Limbaugh's or Malkin's income taxes.
On the ABC blog about this, she said she wasn't able to vote in the last election because she didn't have an address. That reminded me of back before the election, when Republicans in Michigan were saying they were going to contest the ballots of people whose homes were foreclosed on. Is our democracy really so far gone that homeless people are systematically disenfranchised? Talk about people who have a real interest in voting for change. To me, it hearkens back to when only white, male landowners were allowed to vote. How is this any different?
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH liberal individualism taken to its frightening extreme, which unfortunately finds itself well within the spectrum of mainstream American politics..
I honestly am beginning to believe that we cannot reach the kind of people who think, for instance, that housing is a privilege and not a basic human right. Their values, if you can actually call them "values," are so alien from ours that we might as well be speaking a different language.
It's interesting, because if we described an individual who had no empathy, saw other people as objects, felt that they had sole entitlement to the good things in life, and callously disregarded the health and safety of those weaker than them, we'd call them a sociopath. Take a group that thinks and acts that way, however, and we call them "conservatives."
Malkin et. al. remind me of another totally ignorant (as in unknowing) woman who said: "Let them eat cake" . She later, quite literally, lost her head - - -