by Jeff Stepper

Created on: March 05, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Not all homeless are drunks or drug addicts. I am speaking from experience. I lived on the streets for almost three years due to circumstances beyond my control and I am neither. I lived in my car for about a year until it broke down and I wasn't able to get it fixed. It was then that I moved into a tent down by a local river.

One of the people that I met while living there was a man we called One-Eyed Mike. He was a Vietnam Vet. After his first tour of duty he came home to find that his wife couldn't wait and had gone off with someone else. He re-enlisted and went back to fight. While over there he was too close to a grenade when it went off. He lost his right leg, right hand and also his right eye. When he got back to the states, there wasn't much help for him. Not even the Veterans Administration would do much for him. Not being able to work, he slowly sank into despair. The checks that he gets from the government are not big enough to allow him to pay rent, so here he is, living on the streets.

Then there is Dakota. He worked hard all of his life and then one day he fell on the job and was injured. He could no longer work and had no health insurance. He slowly went through all his savings, sold his house, and ended up on the streets.

After I got back on my feet, I joined an organization called The Homeless Policy Task Force. They are charged with ending homelessness in 10 years. This is mandated by the state. That is a pie-in-the-sky dream. I have learned that there are those people that choose to be homeless for one reason or another, mostly for the freedoms that being homeless brings. So society will never completely get rid of the homeless.

After being with this group for a few months, I realized that they are not going to be able to do what they are charged with. After several months they were still trying to decide on the exact wording for their mission statement. I saw that they were just another type of bureaucracy. The chances of them actually doing anything is slim to none, in my opinion.

Being homeless, you cannot vote, have a P.O Box, or a library card. To have any of these things, you need to have a local address. The Mission, where most of the homeless stay, cannot be used as a local address. Two of those things make it very hard to get out of the homeless cycle. To get most jobs, you need to have an address and not having a library card, you don't have access to the Internet which would be helpful in finding a job.

And then there is the way that

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