Food Not Bombs and Schools Not Prisons:
Somebody in or around Food Not Bombs is going to invent a new movement called Schools Not Prisons, just because this idea is too cool to ignore.
You know how a lot of times kids who get convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison get sent to prisons for young first-time offenders to teach them their lessons, in a way that keeps them separated from hardened criminals? They do that because evidently somebody discovered something that’s not so hard to imagine: If you send young first-time offenders to prison with hardened criminals, the kids may learn something from the prison administrators about why they shouldn’t break the law, but they’re going to learn a lot more from their fellow inmates about being criminals. That means that the net result of the young first-time offenders’ incarceration among hardened criminals is going to be a decreased sense of respect for the law, instead of an increased sense of respect for the law, which was supposed to be the point of punishing them for their crimes in the first place.
A lot of people have been wondering a lot lately how to get vagrant kids off the street. Speaking as someone who had to spend a few weeks at a homeless shelter once, and who’s known a lot of street kids in my life, let me tell you something about being homeless…
There are two basic communities of homeless people. One group is the older people who have had a run of bad luck and lost everything. A lot of times it’s their own fault. Even if it’s not entirely their own fault, there isn’t a whole lot anyone else can do about it, because these people are mentally disabled, crazy, alcoholics, drug addicts, or whatever. Those are the people most people think of when they think of homeless people, and those are the kinds of people that most homeless programs are set up to “help”. The best help you can give these people is to give them somewhere to sleep, something to eat, an address where they can receive mail, access to help wanted ads and a telephone, somewhere to take a shower, somewhere to get their clothes washed, and so on. In other words, they provide for their basic human biological needs, and a little help getting themselves out of the situation, for anyone who cares to take advantage of it.
Living at a homeless shelter has to be one of the most spirit crushing, soul-destroying things anyone can possibly experience in the free adult world. Sure, they provide you with basic biological needs and the chance for a future as a functional human being, but at what cost? At the Salvation Army where I stayed, they fed us food that wasn’t fit for a dog. Their idea of giving us somewhere to sleep was a 1/2” foam camping pad, a blanket, and a few square feet of hard tile floor. They turned out the lights at 9:00 and woke us up at 4:00 in the morning, so we could get an early start on looking for a job. I say “woke us up” mostly as a euphemism—that is, they “woke us up” in the sense that you need to wake a person up after he’s spent a night lying on a hard floor surrounded by 50 snoring, coughing, farting men. And even to get that for a place to sleep, you had to sit through an hour-long nightly sermon in the chapel. Their idea of a shower was a tile-lined room with four shower-heads running constantly, a long line of naked men standing outside the door, and a staff member sitting outside the door watching to make sure nobody got beaten up or anything. Their idea of “a telephone” was literally a telephone, and 20 or 30 or 40 people standing in line to use it. And their idea of giving you something to do for the day was to separate the men from the women into two different rooms and turn on a big TV in each room playing football games or reruns or whatever was on that appealed to the largest demographic in the room. I think they had a few newspapers and magazines and paperbacks lying around too. In other words, if your goal in life was to live like barnyard livestock, the homeless shelter offered you everything you could ever ask for. But if that’s not your goal, and you spend a few weeks living like this, how long can you really hold on to any sense of hope for the future?
The other group of homeless people are kids mostly in their teens and early 20s. Some of them have problems with no easy solution, but I’d have to bet those kids are in the minority. A lot of street kids have set out to make a life for themselves but took a wrong turn somewhere. A lot of them set out to make a life for themselves and had basically nothing to start with. A lot of them are trying to figure out what they want in life and where to look for it, and so far they’ve figured out that devoting their lives to working at pointless jobs just so they can earn meager paychecks isn’t what they’re looking for. If the only place they have to go is somewhere like the Salvation Army where I stayed, are their problems ever going to be solved? Or are they going to get worse? If your idea of helping these kids is to give them the choice between providing for their biological needs or preserving their human dignity, how exactly are you solving anything? That’s why most street kids prefer to take their chances on the street. If you try to solve their problems by teaching these kids (either intentionally or unintentionally) that trying to get anywhere in life is a waste of time, just like so many of the 50-year-old alcoholics they have to eat and sleep and shower next to think it is—and seem to be proving by the fact that they’re 30 years older than these kids and are still living like human livestock—do you think that’s going to encourage kids to try to get off the street, or discourage them? If they do get off the streets, is it going to be as a result of anything you did? If homeless street kids are a burden to society, and you have the resources they need to start making a life for themselves on their own, but you offer them those resources in a way that makes the kids not want your help, is that going to decrease, or increase, the length of time each of these kids are going to place a burden on society?
So here’s my solution:
Schools Not Prisons is an auxiliary movement to Food Not Bombs. (I can say this even though I don’t have any official authority among Food Not Bombs, because Food Not Bombs is not an official organization, it’s an Anarchistic movement, where nobody has any official authority over anybody. They are organized by ideas that work so well that lots of people join in, turn those ideas into reality, and make those ideas keep happening, without anyone needing to control those ideas. You’re more than welcome to try to invent new auxiliary movements to Food Not Bombs if you like, but, ah, don’t be surprised if you discover that I’m a lot better than you are at coming up with new ideas that Anarchistically-minded people pay attention to. Anyway…)
A Schools Not Prisons house needs three large main rooms, separated from each other. It can have more rooms, and obviously needs a few essential rooms, like a bathroom and a kitchen, but these three main rooms are critical.
One of the main rooms is the barracks. The barracks is full of bunk beds with thick mattresses. You can build bunk beds yourself, and you can buy good foam mattresses pretty cheaply at an army surplus store. The barracks also has lockers in it, for people to lock up their things. The barracks is kept quiet and is reserved for sleeping, so anybody can get good rest any time of the night or day. It isn’t segregated between men and women, and couples are allowed to sleep together, provided they can fit into a bed together. That is, their ability to sleep together isn’t going to be controlled by anyone else, but it might be controlled by physical space limitations.
One of the main rooms is the library. That’s another quiet room, provided for the sake of anyone who wants to spend their waking hours doing quiet things in a quiet environment. The room will have books in it, and whatever other resources are available that lend themselves to quiet activities.
The third main room is the common room. The common room is for any activities that don’t fit into the barracks or library. It will have tables and chairs, because this is where meals will be served and eaten. The common room will also have a stage at one end, for the sake of whoever wants to put on any kind of a presentation. This is a room where people can socialize and do whatever else they want. Most importantly, it doesn’t have a TV!
The rules of the Schools Not Prisons house are pretty simple:
1: We’re all friends here, or at least we act like we’re friends, even if you don’t personally like each other. Respect people, settle your differences peacefully, don’t insult people, threaten them, steal from them, fight with them, or anything else like that. If you’ve ever watched Sesame Street, you know everything you need to know about how to get along with people here.
2: Don’t break the law here, because if you do, we can get into trouble. Don’t do drugs or sell drugs, no prostitution, and no alcohol, even if you’re a legal age.
3: If you cause trouble for anybody, we throw you out. This isn’t a crack house; this is a place for people who don’t want to live in a crack house.
4: This is a shelter for people under the age of 30. If you’re over the age of 30 and have something to contribute to the environment, we’ll let you stay here. If not, we won’t.
(Despite what a lot of people might think, among people who have spent much time among street kids, it’s not terribly difficult to differentiate between older street people who help watch out for younger street people and older street people who see younger street people as prey. The easiest way to tell the difference is: Do street kids look up to these older people, or avoid them?)
Staffing the place shouldn’t be too hard. There are plenty of baby boomers in America who are hurtling toward retirement age, who are going to have a lot of free time on their hands pretty soon. They’re the ones who lit this particular torch; so I bet a lot of them would love do something to help out the kids who are carrying it now. There are also plenty of street kids who aren’t homeless but would probably love to help create an environment to help out other street kids. If any street kids wanted to live at a Schools Not Prisons house very long, they could help out by doing chores around the place. If they contributed half an hour’s work every day, and they were being paid minimum wage for it, that would work out to about $2 a day, after taxes. That would work out to about $60 a month in rent. That’s not a bad deal at all.
The social and economic structure I’m suggesting here is the way most street kids I’ve known live already. Contrary to what the mainstream media would like you to believe, these kids aren’t just a bunch of good-for-nothing troublemakers. They all understand Sesame Street etiquette, and they practice it amongst themselves. When you all live outside the law, business owners and politicians see you as a plague infesting the streets, because you don’t live your life around earning and spending money, you don’t pay any taxes, you own extremely few possessions, and you participate in the financial economic system of the world as little as possible. That makes you a threat to these people, because they have very little control over the way you live your life, which means it’s extremely difficult for them to control your life in a way that will benefit them. I’m sure most business owners and politicians don’t carry their line of reasoning that far, at least, not consciously, but I am pretty sure they carry it as far as seeing that they do own a lot of property and they do pay a lot of taxes, and if they don’t want street kids infesting their neighborhoods, guess who the police are going to listen to. Anyway, my point is, when you live out on the streets, and especially if you live out on the streets by choice, you can’t expect the police to give a f*ck about you, so you have to solve your own problems within your own community.
More importantly though, I think, most street kids understand Sesame Street etiquette a lot better than most so-called “responsible” adults, which is why they don’t want to participate in the world of “responsible” adults. Most of these kids are so nice to each other just because they feel that’s how people should be, and most “responsible” adults aren’t nearly that nice to each other. So these kids set out to make their own world for themselves in their own way. “Responsible” adults compete against each other for everything in sight, from jobs to houses to social status to material possessions. If you try to participate in the “responsible” adult world, but you don’t feel like competing against people every minute of your life, you’re f*cked, which is why these kids don’t bother. And I must say, there seems to be something to be said for people living this way. After all, no Al-Queda terrorist has ever crashed an airliner into a homeless shelter, have they?
A lot of people say that street kids are a burden to society, that they’re leeches or parasites or whatever. Like I said, they don’t pay taxes but they use the streets and the sidewalks and everything else that other people pay taxes for. Sometimes they collect food stamps and welfare checks or whatever, which means the tax money other people paid is being given away to them. And if paying money was the only way for people to contribute to their society, well I guess you’d be right. But, ah, let me tell you something about economics of a much larger scale…
The Use Value economy recognizes the entire global environment and the entire realm of human behavior as an economic system. Remember what I’ve said in the first two books about every other culture in the world valuing work for material reward less than Western culture does, because Western culture has always been the most materially prosperous, and therefore has attached the strongest cultural values to working for material reward? And you remember what I said about it being impossible to construct a functional global economic system that doesn’t recognize the good qualities that other people have to offer?
If some kid is willing to sleep under a bridge and scavenge food out of a dumpster behind a restaurant when it closes, in what meaningful way is that different from someone else at some other point in history sleeping under a tree and picking wild fruit to eat? So what else do you call these kids beside modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherers? So guess what: Street kids’ social and economic structures and values work the same way that nomadic hunter-gatherer’s social and economic structures have always worked. I’m sure they didn’t do this intentionally, but they figured it out on their own, and they adapted it to fit their living conditions.
As a modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer, just as for nomadic hunter-gatherers at any other time or place, you can only own as many possessions as you can carry. (You can try leaving some stuff somewhere you think it will be safe, but if you do, you’re taking a big risk on it being stolen, which is why you don’t do it with anything you value greatly and can’t replace easily.) A lot of homeless people use shopping carts to let them carry a lot of possessions with them when they move around, but street kids don’t do that. Why would they? Pushing a shopping cart full of your worldly possessions down the street makes you look homeless! Street kids still have enough sense of dignity left not to sink to that.
The fact that older homeless people push their worldly possessions around in shopping carts and street kids don’t ought to be any anthropologist’s first clue that they are two distinctly different groups of people. The older homeless people with their shopping carts are people who are still trying to make it in our materialistic economy, which is why they’ve found the most effective way to own material possessions given their living conditions. The street kids don’t care as much about material possessions, which must mean that they’re satisfying themselves with their lives in some other way. These kids are so uninterested in participating in a materialistic economy that collectively they’ve invented (or, reinvented) their own economic system.
What takes the place of material possessions in any non-Western economic system? Cultural values. Where do cultural values come from? From enough individuals figuring out these values that collectively they become the cultural values of that group of people. Once those cultural values are established, other people can join the culture either by figuring out those values on their own and merging themselves into the greater culture, or by learning the cultural values that other people figured out in order to be able to join the existing culture.
As a modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer, one way or another, you learn to make your life complete with the material possessions you can carry with you. The modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherer economic system is not one where people own property, it works the same way any nomadic hunter-gatherer economic system has ever worked: Material goods move from place to place, and if they move through your possession, you get to make use of them for a while. If you own something particularly cool, like a portable mp3 player, sooner or later, somebody’s probably going to steal it. That’s low when people do it, but it does happen, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. Luckily, however, someone stealing your mp3 player will not ruin your life. If it does ruin your life, you won’t survive on the streets very long. On the other hand, if you don’t own anything particularly valuable, you’re basically immune to theft. Whatever possessions you call your own are yours free and clear. Material goods necessary to maintain biological survival obviously move through the modern urban hunter-gatherer community at a rate sufficient to maintain everyone’s biological survival, because if they didn’t, the culture couldn’t survive. If these kids live this way by choice, and they find enough material resources to maintain their biological survival, what else are they supposed to need to make their lives complete?
Of course, I said, “if they live this way by choice.” As it concerns most people who succeed to some degree in the “responsible” adult world, that statement rather implies that these kids had the choice between living on the street or living in some other way that offered them benefits that were somehow equitable. If your choices are between living on the street or living with abusive parents that’s not much of a choice, the only choice you have is how to make the best of a bad situation. Neither of your choices was particularly good.
That’s where Schools Not Prisons comes in. Quite simply, you take the social and economic structure that already exists among street kids, and you put into a building. You give these kids decent beds to sleep in, and give them lockers to put their few worldly possessions in. (Although I bet you’d be surprised how little use the locks on the lockers would get—I’m willing to bet a lot of street kids would feel like saving themselves the risk of their stuff getting stolen wasn’t even worth the hassle of locking and unlocking their lockers. You’d just have to put locks on the lockers for the sake of anyone who did want to use them, and for the sake of keeping Schools Not Prisons from seeming like a den of thieves.)
Then you add some more material goods into the economic system that wouldn’t’ve gotten there otherwise. First of all, you feed the kids the same way Food Not Bombs feeds anyone. Vegetarian food is cheap—especially when it’s donated for free from restaurants or grocery stores whose managers were just going to throw it away, which is where Food Not Bombs gets most of their food. With vegetarian ingredients, you can make healthy, substantial, appetizing, non-personally-insulting food. (I swear, I’d rather starve to death than eat another meal at that Salvation Army!)
Now that you’ve created an environment where the social and economic system of the modern urban nomadic hunter-gatherers functions and their immediate survival needs are met, you’ve created an environment where the kids are going to feel comfortable, where they feel like they fit in, where they feel like they belong, and where they find the experience of living there personally meaningful. You give them some books to read and a place to read them where they feel like the world makes sense, and you just might be surprised by how much more they could learn from those books than they could otherwise. You give them some books, a room, some tables and chairs, and a place to meet other people who might know more than they do about something they want to learn more about, and you just might be surprised by how much more they could learn from each other than they could’ve learned in school. Sure, books would be bound to disappear out of the library from time to time, but I’m willing to bet that books would appear in the library just about as frequently.
A lot street kids have a lot of artistic or other creative talents, which would’ve gone to waste working at a pointless minimum wage job. So what do these kids do? The exact same thing my brother and I and all of our relatives have always done, which is to try to find a way to use their creative talents to create a life for themselves they can be satisfied with. That’s why you put a stage in the common room, and you could also put some scrap paper, pencils, erasers, and a few other basic art supplies in there too. Any time nobody was on the stage, anybody would be free to get up there and do anything they wanted. You’d probably end up with an open mike night (assuming you had a microphone) every night of the week, where kids would get up to read their poetry, sing, play instruments, or whatever.
Street kids are street kids because they don’t give a f*ck about money or material goods in any sense that most “responsible” adults do. Our Western Capitalist economy revolves around money and material goods, so if your life doesn’t, you’re left out in the cold—literally. The way the social, economic, and educational systems that America is founded upon function, if you don’t live your life around money, material goods, and competing against other people every minute of your life, everything you are and everything you could be gets thrown right in garbage. So all you have to do to solve that problem is to create a social, economic, and educational system that doesn’t revolve around money, material goods, and constant competition.
In summary, a Schools Not Prisons house is a building where street kids get:
A roof over their heads, somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and somewhere to keep their few worldly possessions safe;
An environment where they feel like the world makes sense;
An environment where they can work to earn their keep in a way they find personally meaningful and that produces tangible results;
An opportunity to learn things in a way they find personally meaningful; and
An outlet for their creative talents.
In other words, you create a social and economic system where people can satisfy their immediate survival needs, find spiritual meaning in their lives, learn, work, socialize, and enjoy themselves. In other words, all the things that make the “responsible” adult world function. Or to look at it another way, a Schools Not Prisons house is an environment where people get to survive, be safe, feel safe, reproduce (or at least, meet up with potential romantic partners), make friends, be respected, feel good, and put their abilities to use—in other words, where they get to fulfill all of their needs as human beings. Every culture, society, and civilization that has ever succeeded has succeeded by offering these things to its people, so I’d have to say that Schools Not Prisons is already off to a good start, and it doesn’t even officially exist yet!
On a larger scope, the Schools Not Prisons movement is, in effect, my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen made up of buildings spread all over the world. That is, it’s an opportunity to build cultural values based on something other than material wealth. As I’m sure you recall from the Thermodynamics chapter, “our” Western cultural values of the pursuit of happiness through the pursuit of ever more material goods can’t possibly endure indefinitely—or even, for very much longer—so the sooner we start looking for another way to make our civilization function, the better. The inevitable result of our self-destructive social and economic systems is going to be more and more people not being able to survive in our economic system by competing against everyone else constantly. That means more homeless people, including more street kids. If the Schools Not Prisons movement is successful, then as the number of street kids grows, the number of Schools Not Prisons houses is sure to grow. Even if the only thing the Schools Not Prisons movement can do is to stay out of the way and help get other people out of the way while the rest of our economy collapses around it, then once again, my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen, embodied here in the Schools Not Prisons movement, will take over the world for no other reason than because it will be the only social and economic system left standing. It will do that because its social and economic systems are constructed on human evolution itself, which means that as a social and economic system, it can survive for as long as the human race survives.
Would street kids who wanted to go roam the country take advantage of a free youth hostel network like this? Of course they would. But then, a lot of those kids do it anyway, even though a network of free hostels like this doesn’t exist. Would a network of free youth hostels encourage a lot of kids to go out roaming the country who wouldn’t’ve done it otherwise? Of course it would. Some street kids set out on the streets by choice because that’s the only way they can find to learn the things they’re interested in learning about. Some street kids don’t end up on the streets by choice, and have to learn those things in order to survive. Whether they end up on the streets by choice or not, street kids try to make the best of their situation just like everyone else in the world does. If you have to pursue your education by living outside the law and constantly trying to stay a step ahead of the law, what kind of an education do you think that’s going to turn out to be?
That’s why I call this movement Schools Not Prisons.
Of course, every Schools Not Prisons house would have to keep on hand lots of information about teen pregnancy, STDs, drug abuse, depression, suicide, runaway hotlines, gang violence, domestic violence, etc., etc.. The goal is not to help kids run away from their problems, the goal is to help kids face their problems.
Oh, one other thing. You remember what I said in the Democracy 2.0 section of the Generation of Heroes chapter, about how Americans who haven’t seen much of America can’t possibly be expected to offer very well-informed input into the collective decision-making process of our country?
Heh, heh, heh…
I’m sure that most “responsible” adults think this is all just a bunch of wishful thinking and are certain something like this could never work. I’m equally sure that most street kids in America who hear about this are going to be certain that this could work and they would have joined the Schools Not Prisons movement long ago, if only it existed.
Well, I guess that just illustrates all too clearly the whole reason “responsible” adults can’t figure out how to get street kids off the streets, doesn’t it?