Before 9/11/2001, I had a fairly "normal" life, working as an electrical contractor, owning my own business and dreaming of building a better world. My wife didn't "get me" nor did she choose to support the innovative things I wanted to try out using music, computing, alternative energy and the Internet to "earn a living" in a rapidly changing world. I can't say that I blame her for not trusting me, but I can say that the things I foresaw back then were accurate.When she divorced me, she didn't know that she was releasing me into the new social class - The Precariat. Losing faith in a system is one thing. Losing faith in a person is something else.
Maybe I can be restored in society and in my family. Only time will tell. As a homeless person, I gained a whole lot of insight into what cities, homes, cars and systems in general have become in the "modern" world. Being literally out in the cold teaches one to become warm on the inside. Not that I wasn't warm, friendly and accepting back when I had the comforts of income, property, and a place in a community. But now I realize that those things are not secure for anyone unless they truly believe in them. Faith is before and after all the very basis of value in every realm from the physical to the spiritual. Trust in the unseen is worth more to the precariat than anything that can be seen, heard, touched or even felt.
As stated by my friend and fellow precariat, Paul of Tarsus:
"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." [II Corinthians 4:18]I have seen dozens of preachers and "professional" clergy who likely couldn't stand to be without a home, car, income or wife for a week, let alone for ten years as I have. It's OK for those who call themselves Christians to judge me, dismiss me, call me a 'bum', ignore me, insult me to my face or even shoot at me. It happens all the time. But I have never been so treated by anyone who was, in society's terms, "worse off" than me.
I have lost faith in the capitalist system and the institutions (including most churches) of the industrialized world. But I haven't lost faith in the Human Spirit to overcome the tyranny of complacent conformity to the contrivances of this unraveling world.
Thanks for reading.
