On Sunday, September 24, 2023, The RBCC marched with Vermont Worker’s Center and many friends in protest for healthcare and housing as a human right. We firmly believe ALL people have a right to live without the chronic and crippling fear of housing instability or untreated medical issues and medical debt. If nothing else, the people of America deserve the same benefits given freely to our so-called representatives. What follows is the speech given by Executive Director Shawna Trader during the event:
Growing up we were taught we needed three things: food, water, and shelter. Yet everywhere we look those essentials are getting harder and harder to find. They’ve gotten so impossible to find that we’ve had to improvise a workaround: community. The power of community is that it is an effective engine of liberation. Little by little, person by person, love fuels community to expand and diversify in the direction of freedom. We must remove the obstacles to love that we see in our community. Which means we must fight for equity in an iniquitous world. How?
Privilege and power and wealth separate some of us from the pain that is an everyday reality for the people. How many of our representatives represent us? In our circle at The Rainbow Bridge we have folks that already lived in the woods and lost everything they had in the flood. They re-upped and were flooded again. They re-upped and moved into temporary housing. They were forced to leave and lost again. each time the will to re-up wanes, and the hands of our leaders fill up with the blood, sweat and tears of our people. We have seen the remains of human habitation in our public spaces post-flood, as if we were anthropologists finding a people lost to time. Only these folks were lost to our laws, our policies, behaviors, and investment practices. When was the last time our representatives felt the cold terror of finding shelter in spaces that were illegal for them to occupy, or a burning empty belly?
It may come as some surprise to those in power that folks without homes have friends. They have family. They have connections, community and routine. Folks without homes have their own normal, their own safety, their own comfort, security and joys, their own lives and loves and pets and precious somethings. We cannot allow a world that disowns people. We cannot stomach a world that thinks nothing of the tiny and delicate but deeply cherished comforts of our most vulnerable people. Just because someone is unhoused doesn’t mean forcing them to move is not disruptive. Folks without homes have emotions and pain and a limit to their perseverance. Despite it all they can laugh, sing, sip, smoke, cry, grow, love and share.
We cannot allow a world that disowns people. The state of Vermont has environmental refugees right now. It has people writhing under the oppressive thumb of poverty. It has familes split apart and people clawing at their clothes and pulling out their hair and isolating and working three jobs and kids that know too much about the guts of walls and floors and basements and the panic caused by a dark cloud in the distance. We cannot allow a world that disowns people.
Far too long have oppressed people and our issues been politicized. The deeply entrenched enemies before us- white supremacy, misogyny, blood-sucking capitalism, and all the people that profit in power or wealth from the anti-human monstrosities they call the law or precedent or justification for authority and maintenance of the status quo- they benefit from us and our issues being politicized. Politicizing people and our oppression shifts the arena from a material or moral place, to a virtual space where the humanity of any given subject is easily stripped away. Being oppressed is not political. Being trans is not political. Being poor is not political. That’s just being people! That’s US!
We are so much more than the claustrophobic boxes poverty forces us in to, but we must act now with the greatest fortitude to see our light find a home on this planet. Our star is much brighter than the hate. Our blood boils with the blood of our elders, and screams out for freedom. Living must not be political. Living must not be illegal or impossible, lest we resign ourselves to a fate worse than death.
