A small while back, we opened our comments and found a very angry and insulting comment from someone whose email was from UC Santa Barbara, possibly a student or employee account, calling us bullshit, telling us it was no wonder we were homeless, and suggesting we had used the link and small quote to an article unfairly. We could feel this persons poison, but we decided to think about it.
We went back to that article and reread it, and we do not think we were confused by what we read, but after all this is why Google Blogger provides us the opportunity for others to link to an article and read it for themselves by providing easy link options.
The small excerpt that we posted, to get your interest in reading the whole article as you skim through our blog posts, is entirely within the Fair Use rulings of copyright law, and typical of blogging on the net. No one on the net who links to official web sites, etc, needs permissions for small quotes that might even promote someone else's web site, blog, product. By linking we're sending traffic over. THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS PHOTOCOPYING AN ENTIRE BOOK FOR A CLASS AND THEN RETURNING IT TO THE BOOK STORE FOR FULL CREDIT. IT'S NOT EVEN THE SAME AS USING A COMPUTER TO COPY AN ENTIRE DVD!
In fact we consider ourselves conservative. So far we haven't recieved a single request to take down a link to an article, post, or picture.
We've never set up a MySpace, A Facebook, or any other purely social networking site or there would probably be even more activity than the 3000 or so hits a month this blog has been receiving simply because people are searching out resources, want to know they aren't alone, or are curious about where they should put their charity dollars.
We won't be posting this angry person's comment, not only because it was so pointed that we had to wonder if she was stable, but also because we can tell she doesn't know that if we did, it would expose her e-mail address to the entire Internet.
Why was this person so angry?
We posted an excerpt and link to an article stating that it was from 2003 - that's 10 years ago. The article itself has the byline of the person we named. It starts with the pronoun "I" meaning that first paragraph by that person was a testimonial. In fact, it was a very personal admission to start an article. It would be up to that person, the author, to take it down if she percieved that it was miswritten or misread, or simply if she no longer wanted it to be read.
The angry person said that the person who wrote the article lives (we take that to mean 10 years later) in a gated community and is a writer for NPR. Well, maybe that's the progress she made in 10 years out of homelessness? IF SO WE ARE HAPPY FOR HER! WHAT AN INSPIRATION!
Additionally, this angry person said that if we needed testimonials we should go get them instead of linking to them!
Of course this person was full of assumptions and you know what they say - assumptions make an ass of you and me.
We think that Lacey (if that was her real name) assumed that we are uneducated or stupid. She assumed that she could be insulting to us because what? Our poverty? Maybe she's just one more drugging and drinking UCSB student living off a trust fund from some rich parents that fuels her huge sense of entitlement, like telling us how to run our blog?! (Isn't that one of those colleges where it takes five or six years to get a bachelors because of all the fancy travel in between?)
Lacey assumed that we don't hear testimonials from homeless wherever we go. We don't have to "go out" roaming affar for them. We are not paid journalists with gassed up news vans and microphones filing reports to play on the 6 PM news but that does not mean our volunteer work here is less valid. No, all we have to do is take a bus, go to the library, have lunch in a park, go to a feed or the laundry or walk down the street, and that's when homeless people are talking their experiences, sharing, in some cases helping each other survive. That's when someone is talking about how they were treated at a shelter, or what some recruiter from a non-profit that says they help the homeless said to them, or what food was like at the food bank or that the police harrassed them last night.
At the same time, we know that the majority of homeless are not going online to express their opinions or share their experiences, because they don't know how to, or are using every last bit of their energy to survive, or because they are not in their right mind, or because they are afraid! (We hear that one a lot! People are afraid if they are identified they will loose their shelter space or be harrassed.) We try to post homeless and poverty activist blogs and link to testimonials because we know these are brave members of our homeless community.
In the month of December we met 6 people WHO HAD JUST FOR THE FIRST TIME BECOME HOMELESS, from a wide variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds and ages. One thing in common - no work. We didn't have to look for them.
Perhaps "Lacey" and members of the UCSB alumni, staff, and the students, should watch the video AGING OUT, which is a documentary film by Roger Weisberg and Vanessa Roth, that follows the path of teens in foster care and what happens to teens when they have to make it on their own at a time when a lot of college students are going home to parents after graduation.
One of them despite doing very well in foster care received thousands in scholarships and chose to go to UC SANTA BARBARA. There she found herself without any co-signer for rent to live off campus, very little extra to live on, and despite working and taking classes, the pressure was too much for her. She had a psychotic break. Luckily, her ex foster mother did have the heart to take her back in, or she would have been on the street like many without families to go to on breaks, for the summer, and when illness strikes. Sadly though, some years passed and this former UC SANTA BARBARA student was murdered on SKID ROW in Los Angeles in 2004.
Here is the link to AGING OUT, the film, and Risa Bejarano is the student.
AGING OUT : THE DOCUMENTARY read about Risa and other foster children here!
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