AT HOME WITH THE HOMELESS: A Prayer of Thanksgiving

By Andrew Williams on December 2, 2023

In the spirit of the holiday season and memoriam of William S. Burroughs, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, I offer up this prayer of thanks for the following:

Thanks to the police who routinely inflate charges against suspects and mistakenly turn off body cams while beating and shooting black people, queer people, trans people, and the mentally ill to death.

Thanks to the district attorneys for reminding us that their job is to secure convictions, not justice, in obeisance to the powerful voters and fundraisers in their jurisdiction.

“The law is the law.” –Tautologus.

“The law is an ass.” –Dickens.

Thanks to groups like Moms for Liberty, and their legions of grim, hateful, mean Christian women clutching their cherry-picked Bibles to their breasts, condemning those with motes in their eyes while selectively ignoring the planks sticking out of theirs, doing the never-ending work of white-wash- ing American history while flushing black history, brown history, queer his- tory, and trans history down the memory hole.

Thanks to a government that’s never found a subsidy or campaign donation it doesn’t like, who threatens to make deep cuts to human services while spending billions on military boondoggles, who fights wars against nations and drugs alike with last century’s tools of armament and punishment.

“You must be the anvil or the hammer.” –Goethe

Thanks to a former resident of the White House for exposing so many of democracy’s loopholes and exploiting them while elevating nepotism to deism and fooling just enough of the

people just enough of the time to nearly get away with the biggest grift in our nation’s history. May he not only end up in prison, but under prison.

Thanks to the nation’s merchants, who managed to restrain themselves until just after All Hallows’ Eve to bombard us with all the Christmas hullabaloo at their command. A special thanks to Mariah Carey for her perennial wassail– whether sung live or lip-synched.

Thanks to local newscasters, who daily elevate edutainment to a new level for being so selectively tone deaf that a solemn tribute to a deceased leader is followed hard on by a look at what celebrity was seen with what other celebrity.

Thanks to our corporate overlords, who know what we want and deserve and are willing and eager to give it to us, good and hard.

Thanks to the alt-right, their relentless pursuit of alternative truths and alternative facts, and their tacit willingness to fiddle while the world burns.

Thanks for an economy that requires everyone young and old to work multiple jobs just to keep up in the Red Queen’s race.

Thanks to Hamas for reviving the hoary ghost of Roman senator Cato the Elder. “Israel delenda est!”

Thanks to the pharma-industrial complex for bringing us opioids more potent and more addictive than heroin and morphine combined.

Thanks for public schools where education has been so defunded, diluted and defanged that they do more indoctrinating than educating–teaching what to think instead of how to think– and all while still paying hard-working teachers a pittance. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Thanks to social media for further shortening attention spans and elevating confirmation bias to science, in the process, short-circuiting critical analysis and opening the door to the enemies of democracy.

Thanks to tech companies for being modern Pandoras and unleashing AI on a woefully unprepared and insufficiently wary public. Were you not watching the same movies we were? SO …now that my spleen

has been vented, it’d be churlish of me not to acknowledge some good things.

Thanks to access to good food, adequate clothing, and shelter and to the social services agencies who have too much to do with too little, who nevertheless get up every day and give as many people food, clothing, and

shelter as they can. They make a difference in unhoused people’s lives – often the difference between life and death. The base of Maslow’s pyramid is the foundation on which lives can be rebuilt.

Thanks to the hardworking editors and writers who strive to give the American public the information necessary to make good decisions and struggle daily with the promulgators of alternative facts and realities.

Thanks to public libraries and the librarians who staff them. For every person who can’t afford higher education, libraries provide a means to achieve that education and stand foursquare for freedom of speech and print–no matter how much Tiffany Justice and her kind may howl and rend their garments.

Thanks to those who can understand that not all Israelis support Netanyahu and not all Palestinians support Hamas. These are critical distinctions that can- not be ignored if there is to be peace in the Middle East.

Thanks to teachers, especially those who do not “teach to the test’ or blindly follow school board dictates but give their students the critical tools they desperately need to be citizens of the world. They understand too well the words of Mark Twain: “God made the idiot for practice, and then He made School Boards.”

Thanks to the workers working overtime to restore basic services, repair freeways, and respond to emergencies. They are among our everyday heroes.