How to End Homelessness

 

Moby Grape. Bob Mosley, bottom centre.

The cost of housing in Canada and across the developed world has grown unrealistically high. Tent cities are sprouting up. 

However, the main cause of homelessness is not poverty, but mental illness.

The mentally ill cannot get organized enough to go through the proper channels to get aid. But that is not the only problem. Tim Poole recently observed that he has worked with the homeless, and he found that most often, they will refuse shelter if offered. Toronto mayor John Tory has recently made the same observation. He asked the police to clear the local parks. He thought that arranging for accommodations for everyone would fix the problem. He has been blindsided by this all becoming controversial, because the tent-sitters refuse to move.

I read long ago about the bassist for Moby Grape, Bob Mosley. He went schizophrenic, and was found years later sleeping under a bridge. He refused to rejoin for a band reunion or to come indoors. “He felt he’d earned this.”

"We went to find Bob, and there he was, living in this cardboard box. He had these friends, the squirrels and the lizards that he had. And I brought this guitar, cost me a hundred bucks, you know, and I left that with him and a tape of Moby Grape songs and a tape recorder with batteries in it and some extra batteries. So the next weekend, I came back, and there was no guitar, but the cassette case... He had tried to tear all the tape out of it and had left it, you know, down there in the bushes.”

Generally speaking, the “mentally ill” are people who have seen the madness of the people around them, and, one way or another, want nothing to do with it. They are doing what they can to escape the matrix.

My own brother suffered chronic depression. He owned a house in the city, but preferred to live out in the woods in a cabin without running water or, I believe, year-round road access. He felt calmer there.

This explains the stigma of mental illness. They are heretics. Their views are potentially contagious. They might make sense.

The solution to homelessness is simple, and cheaper than what we are doing now. Set these people up in cabins in the woods. 

Or revive the monasteries.