Jake Parsons
Mrs. Parkinson
English III
8 April 2016
Not Having a House and Having to Put Up with Everyone Thinking You Smell.
Homelessness. It has become an epidemic in our country and it is the top priority for many politicians when it comes to domestic issues. And yet, we know so little about this issue. You might be wondering, “How can we have know idea about something as pressing as homelessness?” Well the answer is simple. We think we know what it’s like. We think we know what we are talking about. But we don’t. We just assume that homeless people are a bunch of lazy, dirty, stank-nasty freeloaders who need to go get a job. But they’re not. The only way to know what homelessness is like is to experience it firsthand.
A man named Lars Eighner knows this all too well. He was homeless for three years after he was laid off from his job at a mental hospital. He later became an author and wrote the article On Dumpster Diving which basically describes what homelessness is really like. He makes note of how it is not as dirty as you think and there is no shame in dumpster diving. Especially when he says, “Those who disparage his profession are the fools, not he.”(Eighner 718). Here he explains that people who look down on dumpster divers are actually the losers in this scenario as they are missing out on the plentiful booty he finds in the dumpsters. This eliminates the stigma that hobos are dirty and unintelligent as it shows most of what they find is perfectly clean.
