Humanity For Homeless Halts Monday Night Meal

It has been a sad and difficult time for me. During possibly the most important time in the war on poverty, I have had to stop the feeding program due to health reasons. I simply cannot do the physical part any longer. I am searching for help. Help comes easy, volunteers have come and gone who want to serve food, but volunteers who will really step up and pick up the food weekly and serve it is a different story.

It takes the right kind of person, someone who can deal with a multitude of different people and treat them all equally. A person who can relate and get to know the people it is serving. If such a person steps up, the feeding will continue.

I will continue my activism in as my body allows. I will continue this organization as a place to inform and give others a voice that would not normally have the opportunity. I will continue to collect cloths and distribute them either at the homeless service center or by walking the streets, which I am doing very little of now.

My goal was to keep this up for at least a year and I failed by a few weeks. We have feed over 2,000 people/meals, given out 100 pounds of cloths and helped many people. To all those who have helped along the way I thank all of you.

It is my hope that by Winter I will be doing better and can resume during the hardest time of the year.

I say this is the most important time in the War on Poverty because it is. The middle class is shrinking as the upper class is growing; this means more people slip into poverty daily. Santa Cruz is quickly gentrifying itself completely.

In my case, I am one foot from being homeless. If it were not for family, I would be. Living off $1,000.00 a month in Santa Cruz is not possible. The semi-affordable housing I am living in is being turned into high-end condominiums. Now forced to find a new place, money is low. This is a classic example of how someone becomes homeless. My credit is shot due to medical bills. This means no apartment would even consider me - even know I have a perfect lifetime renting record. This is how people end up homeless. It used to be your income spent on rent should be 1/3 of your income. Now apartment and other rentals are using a 2/3 income figure. To rent a 1,000 a month room you need to make nearly over 2/3 instead of 1/3 a month and have good credit.

The American dream is a joke. The American dream went from “you can do anything you put your mind to” to, “how do I survive the “golden years” and still pay for medical and rent?” Disabled and elderly often take less medicine, splitting life saving heart medicine in half to last longer. Some are spending there retirement in wheel chairs homeless. Others are lonely and living in crappy low-income nursing homes. These places take all but about 30.00 a month of your Social Security.

We are an army of consumers and the people who run this country want just one thing from you, all your money. They tax you on your income, when you buy something with the money you already paid income taxes on --they tax you again. Then there is gas tax, tax on snacks, and here in Santa Cruz the infamous Fun Tax -- meaning anything you pay for considered entertainment, like a movie, -- costs .50 extra in tax. You pay property taxes if you have property. SS tax, Etc. Etc. In the end they get nearly all of it. We keep buying and making the rich richer and ourselves poorer. We are intimidated with ads everywhere we look.
Our president told us to be patriotic after 9/11, go out and shop, show those terrorist your not afraid. Did someone really do that, run out and buy a hummer to help the war on terror? Have to keep the machine moving, we do not want a little thing like 9/11 to keep people from spending.

Whatever happened to people helping each other, shared resources and wealth? Oh yeah, I live in America.
• LIVE SIMPLY SO OTHERS MAY.
• READ!
• STOP BUYING SHIT YOU DO NOT NEED! BUY USED!
• BUY AN OLD DIESL AND CONVERT IT TO RUN ON RECYLED VEGIATBLE OIL.
If anyone is serious about doing the vegetable car, please contact me at thatoldbookstore [at] hotmail.com. I have run my car on veggie-oil for 90,000 miles.
This is 1912 technology. We always had a way to stay clear of petroleum oil, but we never will until people simply stop the demand or start demanding clean cars. Fuck your Hummer, did you NEED it? Do you drive it alone?

Humanity for Homeless
Tim Rumford