Terms like barbarism should not be thrown around lightly. Barbarism conjures up images of cannibals, assassins, or terrorists. We think of living in an environment where all the social norms have been destroyed. Middle-class people living their normal lives in relative safety and comfort feel that they are shielded from barbarism.
The definition of barbarism starts with the “absence of culture and civilization.” Given that food, shelter, sanitation, and healthcare are the most basic components of human civilization, aren’t masses of homeless people being deprived of these basics living in a state of barbarism? Isn’t a society unwilling and unable to prevent more and more people from falling into this state barbaric? Isn’t a city unwilling to take from the obscenely rich to help the desperately poor barbaric?
By another definition, barbarism is “extreme cruelty or brutality.” Isn’t it cruel to allow people to live in extreme deprivation? Isn’t it brutal to force people endure the heat, the cold, and the rain without cover? Is ignoring the fact that six people a day die on the streets of Los Angeles every day not cruel? Isn’t leaving thousands of women to fend for themselves against sexual assault barbaric?
As bad as things are now, how much more barbaric can it get without any brake on the selfishness of corporate landlords or responsibility of government to actually house everyone? Aren’t we diving deeper into barbarism with millions of Californians thinking they could be the next ones homeless. Isn’t it cruel that a family of six must live in a tiny apartment? Isn’t it brutal that a person working full-time has to choose between shelter and food?
We might think that barbarism comes only from the actions of evil people, but it is as likely to be the result of benign neglect. Bureaucracy, greed, and indifference actually are the main source of extreme suffering and thus barbarism in California. It is nothing less than obscene that possessing untold riches, we cannot meet the simple challenge of housing everyone. Many countries much poorer than us do not have this problem.
We have decided that homelessness is not really our problem. We may feel bad about it. We may want it to get fixed. We may even be willing to pay more taxes to alleviate the suffering. But we are not willing to fix the root cause of the problem: rents are too damn high because there is very little regulation. Utilities are highly regulated. Their price increases must be approved and often are scaled back. Utilities are required to offer discounts to poor people. So how does it make sense that the largest expenditure we have – housing – is left up to the marketplace alone?
The housing crisis is not something that is happening to somebody else. It is a verdict on our society as a whole. And we should not be in denial about how very much worse it can get if we continue to avoid systemic change. Shelter is a birthright. No society that can’t house its people deserves to be considered “civilized.”