how to keep everyone warm?

2

December 5, 2017 by Jason Phillips

 

I just spoke to a homeless outreach worker I know, Dennis. He tells me rough sleepers have tripled in the last two years. He doesn’t have to say it though. Just walk through any city centre in the UK. Cardiff, for example – I have lived here in the centre for over ten years – and no winter have I ever seen so many doorways with poor lonely souls cuddled up in stained duvets. Heads buried to escape the cold. And then there was the lady who went to bed in the park behind the Museum the other night, in an old cheap tent, got her head down and then in the middle of the night froze to death.

 
With the technology and skills and amount of time that humanity has had to solve these very basic but fundamental issues surely we can help our fellow humans keep warm for fuck sake. But hey, lets spend more on weapons. A submarine, that will nuke entire nations, whilst people in our community beg at our feet, and curl over and die outside our windows. We have lost sight of our own, we can’t even provide basic shelter and heat for our people. Why do the majority of people in the country deem some kind of  submarine weapon of mass destruction more important than a simple warm room for a young lady who is down on her luck, a victim of circumstance?

 
Shelter is the basic need of every living animal, and us advanced humans have turned it into an investment game, something to trade. The most basic of needs has now become a game for the money grabbers. Let’s all compete. Fuck everyone else. Lets Win! It’s a method of making people rich, stamp on the poor and trade up, and inflate the cost of what is essentially just a pile of bricks. Inflate and inflate and trade and get rich. To the point where more and more people can’t possibly even get on the ‘Housing Ladder’.

Ladder? This suggests that we should get in on the bottom rung and then climb up. Why up! Why not get in and stay there? Why the greed and desire for more and more. Obviously being a ladder (singular) we can’t all climb it at once, without kicking other people off. Or stamping on people heads below, or even stopping them getting on at all. The more the price of bricks falsely inflate, the more we climb, the richer we are. Winning at life. Winning at snakes and ladders.

 
If we aren’t in the game of making money from a house, and we genuinely just need a room to meet our basic needs, then we are forced to deal with the demons on the ladder. The bread heads, or the people who have been tricked into playing, all petrified of falling off they clamber for the top. The homeless just need a room, one single room, but the ladder dwellers need to think of their portfolio. It’s their investment that matters. So everyone is profiting from houses. Profiting from basic needs. Is this moral?

 
Cheap, affordable housing for everyone, or how about free housing for everyone? Why falsely inflate the price of the very thing we all need, by so much that the bottom few percent find it impossible even to find the money to start a tenancy. Trade with something else, leave the fucking housing alone. How many empty building are there already. How quick do ugly buildings fly up at an alarming rate these days? I say: Everyone gets a free room for life. Ok, if you want to go out and build a mansion go for it. You will always have that room, a back up, storage, a personal locker. Or if you’re not arsed about upgrading or competing, you can stay there, in the warm – and not perish in the frost in ‘Great Britain’ in 2017.

I can only hope that soon there are so many fat bastards at the top of the ladder that it topples over, bringing them all down here again. Then maybe we can start a new system, which includes everyone.