A while back I wrote about Cory Booker’s autobiography, and a quote he included from a housing advocate in Newark. Booker, learning from this advocate, talked about how important it is that everyone have access to housing. Both men believed that housing was a human right, just as we have rights to property, we have rights to stable, affordable, healthy housing. The reason housing must be a human right is because we cannot survive without it. We cannot flourish, we cannot store necessary medications, and we cannot live out our democratic responsibilities without a home. A true democracy helps its people do more than survive – it helps them participate, grow, and be valued members of society. A home is a necessary component of a true democracy.
A quote in Johann Hari’s book Chasing The Scream brought these ideas of a true democracy to my mind this morning. Housing is a first step toward solving many of the problems we see in society, but it also depends on how we think about our society and see our responsibilities within society. Right now we are too quick to cast out others and to see their lives as valueless.
Writing about drug users and people addicted to drugs, Hari writes, “In a true democracy, nobody gets written off. Nobody gets abandoned. Nobody’s life is declared to be not worth living.” We write off the lives of the homeless, of drug addicts, and of our nation’s poorest people all the time. If we were to be a true democracy, however, we would have to think more critically of our shared stories, futures, and connections, and work to lift up those who we have pushed down. A true democracy doesn’t limit you to your worst quality or mistake, it helps pull you up beyond your lowest point.
The quote makes me think about how important housing is for a democracy. You can’t participate in local politics without a local home. You can’t engage meaningfully with your society if you don’t have a place within society that you can call your own. You also, I think Hari would agree, can’t triumph over drug addiction without a home where you can be safe and have the necessary protection from the terrors and pressures which may push you back toward drug use. If we want to be a true democracy, we need to think about the ways in which homelessness leaves people behind, and we have to decide that their lives matter, and that they can’t be written off, even if they have used drugs or committed crimes in the past. Writing them off and shutting them out of our democracy doesn’t help them and doesn’t solve any problems, it only further entrenches the problems that already exist.
Novel Learning 