Previously on A Weedy Young House.

There is such an importance to having strong, stable, local food economies.

A lot of the reasons why you spoke about earlier is that those farmers need that support to keep growing the food.

And if we do not have those farmers growing food, then we will all be hungry.

Regardless of your status in life.

So, you know, stabilizing those communities and then add on to that the health and wellness that comes from eating nutrient rich foods that haven't been traveling for miles or been sitting in a plastic bag for days and days on end.

And we know that when there are healthy communities, they are going to do better in all areas of life.

And so we are here to support those farmers and make sure that they get support, but also support our communities making sure that they can be part of that.

Welcome to Wesian Howse.

I'm your host, Theo Henderson.

This week, we're talking about the importance of civic activism and have the perfect guest to talk about it with in a moment that is so desperately needed.

Before we get into today's episode, some exciting news.

Weezian Howes have been nominated for a Signal Award, a podcast industry award that honors the best shows in the medium.

If you have a second, we need your vote to get to the finish line.

Go to the link in the description of this episode and vote for Weedian Howse in the Activism, Public Service and Social Impact category.

It's an easy way to support the show, and voting is open until October ninth.

And now Here's on House News.

I will title this one.

No one talks about this reality anymore.

The uptick of aggressive sweeps targeting the un housed is not a new phenomenon.

However, the amount of targeted sweeps against the unhoused at the direction of executive orders from California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Trump has given inspiration to many other places.

Currently, Los Angeles is the center of an aggressive removal of unhoused people.

Last Monday, September twenty ninth, park rangers targeted a long established unhoused community Arroyo Seco Parkway.

Unhoused residents have claimed that park rangers have been in menacing presence in the past week.

This tactic, known among many unhoused members, is used and known as forced removal.

The goal is to get them to self evict.

This is based on the number of times an individual has had negative interactions with law enforcement.

Sweeps don't get mentioned in the light of the unhoused perspective by mainstream media.

Usually, complaints driven by house residents sets in a series of motions by the city leaders and law enforcement to swoop in and cause more trauma to the unhoused until the next complaint comes in.

However, the residents at the Arroyo Seco Parkway are trying to mobilize to protest against these sweeps.

The question I have is how can other unhoused community members protect themselves in places such as San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco, Omaha City, Fremont, East Hollywood, South La Pima County, Chicago, Annapolis, or all of Oregon.

These are places that have already started the houseless purge.

I believe this topic needs to be explored more, and Weei and Howe's will continue to explore this in future episodes.

And that's un Houses.

When we come back, we'll chat with activists and author Beth Green.

Welcome back to Weedian Howes.

I'm THEO Henderson.

If anyone's life is an open book, it's Beth Green's.

She's a lifelong activist who specialize in analyzing our power structure, trains individuals to accept injustice and remain passive in the face of oppression.

From a young age, she's spoken out about injustice, and she's here to tell us how to unlearned passivity and take back control.

Here's our talk.

Here we are, miss Beth Green.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well, you knew I was thinking, because it's you're a title we the unhoused.

I've never actually been unhoused, but I have been living in tenements, slums, really terrible scary places in New York City.

So I can relate to being in a building there you walk down the stairs and there's so much urine that you could slip down, or having their ceiling falling in, or you know, living on the Bowery which is like skid row, and having to walk past men strewn in front of my front door with the police lock in my hand in order to get to the bathroom in the hall.

So I know a little bit about what it's like to be underhoused.

Let's sort it this way, and how frightening it is and I can only just imagine what it's like for people who are like living in a car or even more vulnerable situations.

So I am a musician, I'm a counselor a spiritual teacher.

But I've also been activists since I was a little girl, and I am very, very dedicated to trying to make the world a better place.

And I was reading that you auent activism around twelve years old, if I correct, if my memory serves me correctly.

Nine Actually I started at nine.

Yes, that's when they threatened to expel me from elementary school.

Can you elaborate on why they wanted to throw you out of elementary school?

Well, yes, if you understand the times.

It was nineteen fifty four.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was going after you know, the government call everybody communists.

People were being thrown in prison and so and I looked at that, and I said, there's something wrong with this picture, right.

So I was really looking into things, and I started reading about the Spanish Civil War, and I saw about the lack of justice and society.

And they added the words under God to the pledge of allegiance in nineteen fifty four.

It wasn't in there before, and I said, this is a betrayal of our constitution, the separation of church and state, and so I refused to salute the flag.

And that's the first time that anybody actually tried to expel me from anything.

But that was just the beginning of a rather fraud career of you know, I became what I called the socialist, you know, when I was twelve.

But that was about equality, treating people decently.

It wasn't about becoming you know, Stalin or anything like that, and that was not approved of.

I did get expelled actually from college when I was just over sixteen, because of being in the band the bomb movement at a time then nobody much was doing it.

So I'm very aware of what it's like to be up against the authorities that have or seemed to have all the power and you seem to have none.

And as a young person, you know, there was no movement.

There wasn't even a civil rights movement to speak of, and there was nobody to protect you, to stand behind you, all the police or men.

If you were raped, you were interviewed by two men who abused you.

I mean, it was there was just no power.

And that's That's what my experience was, and I had to fight my own fear in order to just keep going.

Just a curious question, how did your parents take this up?

Because were they activists do or because I would suspect that they had some kind of fueled bill you to keep going or to have something to say, Particularly in the fifties, I know that that's a very revolutionary thing to have a nine year old child, a daughter, if you will to be out speaking out in that kind of fashion.

Well, you're absolutely right there.

My parents were not activists.

They were very frightened people.

I grew up in a working class Jewish family, and you know, what they wanted was for me to go to college.

I mean that was the dream of every Jewish parent, was go to college, get a good job.

My parents didn't graduate high school themselves, so it was very difficult.

But they they just didn't understand.

But they didn't try to stop me then, not then, but later they tried to stop me.

They found out I had written a letter to the New York Times when I was sixteen about from the band the Bomb Movement.

I never told them that I sent this letter.

I never expected it to be published, but instead It was published all around the world, and it is one of the things that got me expelled from an Ivy League college where I had a scholarship.

Right and I was just a freshman.

My parents didn't know I was going on demonstration.

They didn't know I was doing anything.

When I was expelled, I tried to get them to let me out of the school because they were so prejudiced against me.

They were trying to get me.

And I know it sounds very annoyed, but it's true.

I was very ill.

I had spent a year and a half in bed or a chair from the age of fifteen to sixteen and a half.

When I went off to college, they knew I was sick.

They put me on a probation where I couldn't cut any classes, which was impossible because I was too ill to get up to move.

I've been chronically ill all my life and it just got worse at fifteen.

And so when I finally did get expelled and the school said they would punish me for being in the band of bomb movement right at the wrong time in history, and they said they would teach me a lesson I would never forget, and they did.

I never forgot it and I saw the iron fist and how it can come down and crush somebody.

That's when my parents crumbled, and that they tried to hide me because they didn't want the neighbors to see that I wasn't in school anymore, you know, that kind of nonsense.

And just to add something to the parent thing, when I was maybe nineteen years old, I met a man, a Haitian who was black, and my parents would not talk to me for eight years.

That's I mean, they would not talk to me.

If I called them, they would hang up the phone.

They did unbelievably horrible things.

I won't even go into it.

They were awful.

And that's just how much support they weren't able to give me themselves.

Well, that's well shocking, you know, for you to live that life, and so we to progress on that.

You also have written books, have you?

Is that correct?

Yes?

Which one is the most current?

I'll just start from there.

The most current is a book called The Handbook for the Inner Revolution, and that book is under one hundred pages.

Every book that I've written is on one of my websites, Healing Artsnetwork dot org, and they're all free.

And these books came through me.

Music.

It's the same thing.

I've got six albums of music, all just came through me.

So I became a channel for the divine.

I can say when I was thirty five years old, all of a sudden, I mean here, I had been this real radical Marxist.

And when I say a Marxist, I mean I've read Marx.

I understood what he was saying about the economy.

I could see how it has led to the horrible situation of so many people in our world, the income inequality and all of the pain.

And that's where I was coming from.

And I was a West Coast coordinator for the Waitress for Houseworld campaign because I had discovered the absolute misogyny in the movement.

You know that women had no voice, couldn't say anything.

We're asked to do the coffee, you know.

So I started, you know, my own study group, and then I became a member of the Widgess for Houseworld campaign.

But I was really burnt out on politics deal.

It was so rough.

There was a kind of an anger and hostility and infighting and you know this one putting that one down and power grabs within the movement.

It was not the vision that I had of what we needed in order to revolutionize society, to make it a more equal place, kindness towards everybody.

I believe that the purpose of a society an economy is to meet the needs of people and the earth, and that's the only reason to have an economy, not to make profit, but to meet the need.

And don't forget the earth.

And so all of this, I was very, very burnt out and had had some terrible experiences, many terrible traumatic experiences, and suddenly I started to hear voices see things.

You have to understand.

I'm an atheist, right and I'm starting to hear this inner voice.

It's a little bit shocking.

And that was the beginning of a whole flip into spirituality.

But I never lost that fire in my belly about making this world a better place for people, and that the purpose of spirituality wasn't to rise above everybody else and to go to heaven start to speak.

The purpose was to be in a higher place of consciousness so that you could become more caring, more understanding, more compassionate.

And so I wrote a book.

I can say I wrote it.

It's six hundred and eighty eight pages, called Living with Reality.

It's about how we are, what we could be, and how to get there.

And it's a step by step program of consciousness evolution, spiritual evolution.

But three of those platforms, becoming oneness, becoming accountable, and becoming mutually supportive is the foundation of what I call spiritual activists of see inner revolution.

And so the shortest book that I wrote happens to be the most current, but the most deep, is the Living with Reality.

I want to quickly backtrack because I noticed you said, and I didn't remember when you jopped my memory about the burnout in the movement, and I wanted to talk take a little time to talk about that.

Why was it so necessary for you to write about it?

Because I have heard similar things, and being in the movement myself, I could see some of those kind of markers going on in the movement that I have I'm currently in now, and I can see why.

For me, you have as a defense mechanism is to either stand back or leave the movement entirely, or protect yourself in ways that you don't delve too deeply.

What we used to say, and Christian circles love people at a distance.

You can love them, but you don't have to be so intimately involved.

You could kind of just keep a distance so it can protect your sanity and your spirit in order to continue doing the work.

So yeah, I really understand what you're saying.

Well, I didn't write about that experience in the movement.

I just started writing about how we can shift consciousness.

But I can tell you, I guess I could just say this publicly that what happened is that after devoting my life to the Wages for Houseworld campaign, because it was about women having very little power or no power because we had no money, no wages, and you know there was a time not that long ago, you know, when women couldn't have a credit card by themselves.

You know, we were paid.

Well, it's still in you know a lot of income inequality between men and women.

But also as a dragon, men to have women to be dependent.

Men can't strike when women and children don't have enough money.

So I really believed in this movement, and after four years there's something very weird happened.

And it didn't start with me, but the leader of the movement, who is a brilliant woman and I really respected her, she started to cannibalize she went through every Now I'm serious.

I mean this is a fact and it's documented fact.

She started to remove all the leaders of the like Shaild there was a very strong movement in Toronto, and the leader of the organization got rid of the leader of in Toronto.

She got rid of the woman who was running the organization in New York.

Actually I was the second after the one New York.

She came to me.

I was on the West coast in California.

She pushed me out.

Then she did Toronto.

I found out she did similar things in London, so I had no choice.

They pushed me out and it was all ego.

You know, See I look at it.

The oh is that the problem is ego.

It's the way that we care only about ourselves.

We think about ourselves, and it's the survival mechanism that we developed when we were infants.

You know, how are we going to manipulate the world to get our needs met?

So everybody manipulates the world to get their needs met, and that becomes associated with survival and it's very hard for people to break those patterns.

So even though it's destroying our world, you know, people's short term thinking all knee based thinking, you know what I'm talking about it right, And then there are these gems of people who so somehow or other, see past that rise above that.

Whether you're a Christian or you're a spiritual, it's not spiritual, it doesn't matter.

It's that understanding that we are all one and we need to care for one another that transcends all of that.

And there are people who really live that life and I really respect that.

But that's that's what happened to me.

And I was so devastated by that experience that I probably hit bottom.

And it opened me up to have a different perspective and to start to include my spirituality, which I never thought that I had.

Well to give you a brief primary about how Wedi and How's began, Median House starts off with me starting a podcast while I was living on the streets for over eight years, and to that end, there has been a concerted effort by mainstream media is to paint the in ho house community as unsavory, violent criminals, mentally ill.

So to that in I basically created a show that uplifts the voices and stories of housed people and their issues with dealing with houselessness.

Housing and security and the realities that are faced that are intersecting with houselessness and poverty.

I started interviewing my friends at the park and then I expanded outward and it started to get traction from other in house people in other places that wish there was a show just like what I had, and it gave me the inspiration to continue on to keep the show going.

That's so amazing THEO.

I mean, I so respect what you're doing.

Thank you, thank you, And why I bring on guests to connect the dots with the house or houses secure, or people that are dealing in different movements, to let them know that there is a connecting thread that's going on that's running through particularly in these times.

You know, you're watching on the news and all of the hostility that's going on with ice up against undocumented or people that are going about their way because a lot of sometimes these people are not just undocumented.

These people are documented, they have families, They're going minding their business.

I watch them run up on a school.

I've seen them that violently snatch a kid out of parents' arms.

I've seen them just going about just going about their day working picking out in the fields, running for their lives and things of that nature.

It's unreal, isn't it that we're seeing that massive?

Can I throw in something that irks me?

Yes?

Okay, So I love the fact that a lot of people are up in arms against what the government is doing, and I love a lot of people are upset about the tariffs and the prices and all of that.

But I can't understand how you can say that the price of goods is the most important thing when you're seeing the absolute brutality that's being perpetrated against human beings, not to speak of the fact that we just bond, you know, of Venezuelan boat, you know.

And so even though I'm glad people are angry because of the things that impact them, but I'm just stunned that people and there are a lot of people who are angry about what you've been raising, and you know, God bless them.

But I'm just stunned at how self centered we still are.

You know that we don't get it.

For example, if the person next to you doesn't have medical help and they cough on you, you're dead.

And so don't you get it, you know what I mean that you can't you can't separate out that you know that that we're all one, that we all have to care for one another.

And anyway, I'm sorry, I just took a little sidetrack.

But also well, while we're on that sidetrack, one of the things that hurts me because I have a certain side eye for the ones that are talking about the terrorists and things like that, or the former magas and things of that nature, because of the fact that this is not the first time this person was president.

This was the second.

This is the second time.

So you so you revote for this guy and you are so shocked and surprised.

It's just like it just it's that that really irks me because you were, okay, we're harming other people exactly, but when it started to get hurt you now you are punching the air, you crying, have ugly cried down the wall, and you know it's not slinging your you know, you know, you just you just just combobulated.

I just it just bothers me.

But what really hooks Migrits is the fact that all of this craziness is going on.

It's just like the person there was a play I saw many years ago, and chaos was going on behind that person, and the person was standing there presenting to the case of that wasn't what was going on.

It was basically a complete lie.

And and all of everyone's looking like, you know, looking like what, that's not what's happening.

And people are just going on like, you know, hearing the leaders is saying that it's not true.

There's been multiple news reports showing the opposite of what the government is saying.

And people take that from the people that are doing this, and they walk away saying, well, they're just going after legal aliens.

They're just going after illegal if you came to the it's just seeing all of this.

Not justgal aliens, they're going after criminal Yes, well yeah, well THEO what about this?

All upset that Trump is in Epstein's you.

Know, birthday, while yeah, what da the hell is going on?

And and and we we didn't have access Hollywood before he got elected.

We don't know that the guy is a is a pervert, a womanizer, and a disgusting, amoral human being.

So people are up in arms because he hasn't released the Epstein transcript.

So it's the same thing, you know, this is the thing they're gonna this is the hill they're gonna die on.

Yeah, right, not not the abuse that's been going on.

Right, It's just like on the stage, you seeing the whole building collapsing and they're saying that they're doing construction and everyone, you know, just like all of this is going on, and it's just like it's just boggling my mind, Like and I hate this because it just makes you question your sanity.

It's like, am I really seeing this or is this something wrong with me?

That this is something like there's a problem with this.

It's like it's it was initially in his first uh, his first election, when people were like, still willfully this is saying that doctor King says, and it it sums it up so much.

It says, there's nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

And I don't know, and that has been ringing in my head every time the topic of the man came up.

I have had countless conversation I've said, this man is a problem, this man is dangerous, this man is a racist, this man is all of these things.

Long before all of the hula bloo that's been out here.

You know, we're all turned against one another and we are one.

I think part of it is there's there's several things to unpack with this, but one of the things that it comes down to is that people fed and out of their fears.

And one of the things, despite how despicable I just test the man, it's that he does very well is to isolate people's insecurities and fears and amplify it to such a degree.

Because it's not just you know, they say these outdacious things.

They have people that will diewn the hill on it that goes out of their way to single people out in day to day life to hurl the most egregious and insulting things to them or in situations where violence can take place, and he's unleashed this in such a way that you know, you see the reels you see people having to put up on phones, people just you know, running up or them spitting on them, punching them or attacking them and hurling the most, like I said, the most hatefueld things.

You know, there's always has been hate in racism and things of that nature, and there's no way around that.

But the point of it is he has struck a nerve in this country that has turned the ugly side that has been recessed in most of the population or has been shouted down to such agreed that they've unleashed it.

They've they've let people be proud to be hateful.

To the question where there were blacks that were against Kamala Harris, I have a say statement, just like the Latinos for Trump, and that's the farmers for Trump and everyone else that they voted for Trump that are getting their world's demolished.

Is that people become invested in their own oppression.

And it's similar to what you say, is the fact that as long as someone else doesn't get the kindness and empathy that I want and I deserve that kind of empathy, but not you because you don't deserve it because one your criminal, your drug addict, your you know, your mentally ill, whatever it is.

That it's different where someone can convince me that the problem is you, not me, then I can feel better about, you know, impressing you, even though we're both going to be oppressed, but at least I'm not just you know.

And it's and sometimes this goes on in the unhoused community.

You will hear some one house person that's been on House and then they'll look and they'll lambass some other on House person that may be suffering from issues of substance or mental health issues, or they don't understand the full scale of what's going on with this person's life, and they will make themselves as the mascot.

And people that don't like on House people, will poor people anyway, will gravitate to them and use them as the whipping post to use to justify that.

Right.

Oh yeah, that really gets me.

You know, they put up these women to defend Trump or blacks to defend Trump.

It's like, m m oh, okay, I agree with you, but but you see, what I'm saying is that it's fundamental to the way that human beings grow up.

When we come back more with background, Welcome back to Wodian House.

Without further ado, here's the rest of my talk with Beth.

You know, I got I wrote a book called God's Little Aphorisms, and an aphorism for somebody who might not know, is just like a saying.

And so these things would just come to me, and there'd be a reason that I would be going through something and this would come to me.

And one thing that came to me was you cannot clean the air over one house in Los Angeles.

No matter how rich you are, the air outside your house is going to be polluted.

And so this idea that we can build walls high enough that we can separate ourselves out from the fate of humanity is insane.

You know.

I used to ask because I because I'm a counselor I'm an intuitively guided counsel or.

It just came to me, and all of a sudden, I started counseling, and I wasn't trained as a counsel.

It just I just did it.

And I just started seeing and understanding where people were coming from on an emotional level.

And I can see into into people and I see things from their past and relationships and so on.

But it's always, you know, we have to deal with our not just what happened to us, but how we reacted to it.

And so people are exactly what you're talking about.

Everybody has trauma in their history.

Everybody, I don't care who you are, and everybody feels oppressed.

And everybody is because the capitalist system, in my opinion, is based on It's not in my opinion, it's the truth it's based on exploitation.

If I pay you what your labor is worth, I don't get any profit.

And now it's gotten to the point that there is no relayationship between what you are doing and the value of what you're producing the money you're getting, because it's all going to the top.

I heard recently that Elon Musk owns more than fifty two percent of the American people, and that the top one percent owns more than ninety two percent.

That's the problem, you know, that is the problem.

And the scarcity doesn't come from a lack of having resources or it's the way we organize society and how all the profits go up.

And so, you know, I always have felt that if you're a person like I've been chronically ill all my life, it's a miracle that I am not on housed.

It really is.

I mean, I've been on welfare, you know, and I've been on Social Security.

When Ronald Reagan came into power in California, he threw everybody off SSI.

I was completely disabled in my twenties, completely disabled, and they said it's just too bad.

And you know, while you're waiting, how are you going to live?

Right?

While I'm appealing, you know.

The people who try to help me said, well, you know you'll win on the appeal, but what are you going to do in the meantime?

And so I went to the welfare department and I had fifteen dollars in my pocket and they said how much money do you have?

And I said I had fifteen dollars and they said that's too much.

Yeah, wow, come back in five days.

Oh yes, oh yes, come back in five days.

And then I came back in five days.

By this time I had figured out the system, right, you know, So this time I said I didn't have any money, but they said, well, do you have a car.

I had a gas duzzling, ancient, dilapidated car that was a piece of junk during the you know, the the oil crisis, right, and it had like the windows couldn't go up and down.

They were electric windows, but they didn't go up and down.

And I had to sit with a box behind my but I needed it because I couldn't walk, I couldn't get on a bus.

And they said that my car was worth some outrageous amount of money, which it wasn't, and that if I had to sell my car and use up all that money, then I could come back to the welfare department.

And so I said to I spoke to the supervisor, and I said, this is insane.

You know, I have no money.

I haven't been evicted yet from this tenement that I'm living in, but it's coming because I'm out of money.

And they said, well, it's too bad because you have to have an eviction notice, but they are.

And the supervisor said to me, the purpose of all of this is to keep you on welfare.

She admitted it out loud.

So you're not going to get any help here.

And I had to go to work and be in agony, agonizing pain for several hours a day, typing to make enough money to pay for the tenement building that I was living in.

It was very, very hard, being disabled and being having no support living in New York City.

You know, it just it just wasn't easy.

And I understand how desperate you can get and how crazy it can make you.

And if people were cheating on welfare, I understood why they were, because you couldn't live on what they were paying you.

Again, how it's the propaganda, how language works.

They're making a stink.

These people were welfare queens or millionaires living and Park Avenue on.

And it's so infuriating because you don't understand the issues of trying to survive.

And she tried to make here in Los Angeles because I was on gr and I was on the disabled part of it, and I was good for a month two hundred and twenty one dollars.

And how is anyone going to survive off of two hundred and twenty one dollars a month to survive to do anything.

There's no rent that I know of, unless you know you're you know, us in a cardboard condominium.

But that's other than that, There's no way you're going to survive for that and for people to not understand that.

And you've tried to explain this tool exactly, and it used to really bug me because there is like in that sincere ignorance of consciential stupidity.

I don't know which what it is is that to address the scenario I'm going to show.

When I was in college, there was they talk about Gutenberg and printing of the Bible and the reason why that was so important and because up to then you got your information from a source, and the source whatever they say is in the book.

You had to accept it, no questions asked, no refutation on whatever the facts were, you know.

And it was also as a controlling agents on an economic standpoint, because if it was they says, the guy says in the Bible, we need to go to war because we need more money for the king or the one percent or whatever.

That's what we're going to do.

And the people that were not that could not read, which was a major part of the population, they just had to accept it blindly and follow along.

And I make this comparison to today on the rise of add to intellectualism because a lot I believe I believe that this is one of the key components on why we have so much hatred, but also the facts of the fact of the matter of people pushing against education or pushing against reason, analysis, statistics, science, the debacle with the rf Kennedy junior year, with this craziness that he's talking about the funding of well established medical protocols that fifty years ago that was not in place, that saved the lives of people.

We're going to be going back fifty years from now trying to re establish just because of the lunacy of the Charlatans that are in place, and I believe, and I cannot help but believe that it's because of the rise of anti intellectualists.

There's people that are proud to be I don't want to say stupid, but proud to be uneducated, proud to spout off opinions, and they talking about that, they doing research, listening to some quack that know that these people are uneducated and know that they don't know how to parse and use critical thinking skills to be able to make a well reasoned, logical conclusion, they'll utilize them and to make sure there's a lot of emotionalism to it in order for them to carry on.

Then the ideas, which is why you hear when you hear the people questioning Trump supporters, their viewpoints are not thought out or there, or it's very misinformed, or it's the statistics are not there and it's over blown, or like the idea of a black on black prime or all of these other poorly thought out things, because they know people gradutate toward their fears and prejudices.

Oh, I couldn't agree with you more.

It's the lack of critical thinking is astounding.

It's astounding so it's more than ignorance.

It's uh, you know, you can be ignorant and then get information.

Information is available, but we are not trained to think.

Well, I am going to take this another step, which is that we are not supposed to think.

We're just supposed to do what we're told, and we will be manipulated by that and we will be exploited emotionally.

And I agree with that.

There was something I was going to say about this lack of critical thinking, but well, yeah, I mean they're going after Harvard, right, it's the symbol.

I agree with you completely.

There's nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidly, and that's where we are, you know.

So I would like to ask you a question.

Okay, do you have any brilliant ideas about what to do for the unhaused.

I don't know how brilliant they are.

I do have some ideas that I do believe that could turn the tide and understanding unhouse people because I'm an educator, I was a former educator.

So one of the things that I know, which is why it really really cooks my grid, is the rise of intellectualism because I was trained by old school teachers.

And even though I'm coming from a different generation, I had older school teachers that would go to take you to task on learning basic elements of critical thinking skills.

And as I embarked on my own teaching career, I noticed that skill set was slowly fading away in the curriculums of schools.

And right now, what I see is that there's a pernicious resistant toward critical thinking understanding basics like the civics of our country.

And I was telling them how old I was when I was going to school.

You could not graduate from elementary school without you taking a Civics test in understanding the branches of government.

You could not graduate from high school.

I couldn't graduate from high school in my history class until I took a civic lesson.

And I see now that people cannot understand the most basic things of our government and how it works, the nuts and bolts.

And because of that, it's because that's that earth of aggressive focus on the kind of thing that people can't make the most next logical steps or make them understand how the wheel works where.

And this is and I'm going to bring this back home to the house community.

The key to understanding about the unhoused community is you have to have education.

You have to understand the realities of it, not a blanket emotionalism.

Understanding how our systems create the unhoused community, how our disdain of on house and poor people motivates politicians to do the bare minimum, and also their ability to create punitative law against dunhouse and poor people.

And once you understand that and the civics of understanding how our systems work and we understand, we're holding more of the politicians to task on creating humane solutions like for example, support of housing, meeting people wherever they are.

But we have to have an honest conversation on how we weaponize mental health and substance usage.

They're symptoms, they're not the solution.

They're not the cause of what's going on, and it plays a part.

When you're in a patriarchy in a capitalistic society, you're going to have things that's going to go awry.

But we also have to be humane and have the impanty gene reinstituted in understanding that we're dealing with human beings, not automatons.

But you know that's just the first thing.

Yeah, well, you know One of the things that I that you're alluding to, which I think connects to something that I've also believe, is that the capitalist system itself and the government as it's hand, wants the people to suffer if they don't fit.

They want people to suffer.

So, for instance, if you were disabled or ill, as I have been, the government doesn't want you to get comfortable because they don't want everybody to say, Hey, I'm disabled.

I don't want to work all those hours.

I don't want to work fifty hours a week.

I don't want to work in a factory and lose my arm because I was involved in the worker's movement.

I don't want I don't want these experiences.

You know I also have needs.

Well, that's anathema that's going to make the whole system collapse if everybody says, I will not be treated in this way, right, the uprising of everybody.

So what they do is they make sure that the people who who are disabled or who are without resources are going to be miserable, and so that keeps everybody else in line.

It's like a whip to everybody else.

You see what happened to Mary Jane when she could you know, When I worked with a phone company in Cleveland, the rules for the women who were working there were so stringent about not taking any days off for being sick.

A one woman died at her job.

She just dropped in because she could.

She was afraid to take a sick day.

The treatment of people, it's not just the un how's it the treatment of everybody in our system, in the factories, in the offices.

What people are subjected to.

They want you to shut up and just keep working until you drop because if you just if you think that you might be able to do better in a different way, you're not going to go along with what's being done you.

So that's what we do, those of us who are really at the bottom of society, create discipline for everybody else.

You see what's going to happen if you do this, this is what's going to happen to you.

You're gonna end up incarcerated as an unhoused person, because it evidently it's a crime now to be unhoused, right, yes, yes.

Or worth erase, that's the thing too.

One of the things that we we used to stay on the street is that they want to believe themselves that they are compassionate that life.

For example, Mayor Basque has representatives explaining about inside Safe.

Her solution is supposed to be humane and compassionate.

She goes upon on house people in their encampments, tells them that they can go to this place, this hotel.

They'll put them up, but you cannot come back here and they'll take their things.

You got to throw give a ten or whatever, throw it away, take a photo.

You know that you are helping and you're not being aggressive or violent against the person.

The person has very minimal choices because they know that they're going to have to take it, because if they don't take it, they're going to be facing police activity, law enforcement of harassment.

And you can't take your dog.

Or you can't even take you know, other things that you have.

For example, you have a bike that you might not be able to take it.

You maybe only have to take two bags.

It depends on where the hotel there is.

But the reality is is once that's done the pr campaign, you will see clips of Mayor bass Is talking about street houselessnesses down.

We're getting on house people back in homes.

It's not acceptable to keep them out on the street.

It's a two word it's way, but they erase and then when you come back to the same spot, they got these big fences there, or they got hostile architecture put up there.

The point is that when the person gets into this place we call housing purgatory, they don't have solutions to get them to the housing that they claim or so they're staying there in limbo, or if they're having to face stringent staff or punitive rules.

And you know, unhoused people are wanting the solution of they want housing.

They don't want to go through all of the hoops.

Give them housing, so to help them get back on their feet, that would be simple.

But no, you got to go through the shelters, you got to go through the headaches, you got to go through disrespect, you got to go through everything.

So they can say that that they're helping you, but the reality is that they're continually giving you on that limbo.

And most unhoused people, when you hear them say that they don't want any help, it's because they know how exhausting the help that they're going to receive.

That's an interesting point, and it's frustrating because they give up everything because they were promised they're going to get the help that they need, and it doesn't end up working that way.

And then you go into like what they say the shelters, and those shelters are very unsafe, very disrespectful.

The staff is talking to you out of the side of the neck, and you don't want to be disrespectful, or you don't want to have to go through curfews, or you don't have to go through the beating kind of treatment that you have to go through.

And people that have been abused or have dealing in the abusive situation and are trying to flee that that doesn't work well in their psychic or their mental health.

You know who wants to go back to another abusive situation.

And it's like trying to tell these leaders that it's like they're talking to a brick wall.

The end result of that is these people who are service resistant, we have solutions for them, and they don't want to take the solution.

They can hear all of the horrible things that the unhoused person is telling them and they'll walk away with that, and then they will spread that to the communities who see unhouse people.

Then that creates that negative vibe that they have and then because they got it pumped in by people who supposedly are supposed to help them, and they'll listen to them rather than the experiences of unhouse people.

That's such a good point, you know.

To me, the solution to all of it is to have real democracy in our economy and in our society, and that means you have to have people speaking about what they actually need instead of being told what they need and you know, having somebody else who organize it for them.

So that we should have workers on the boards of directors of every company.

You know, you're working there, you know what's going on.

You should have something to say about it.

But it's the same thing.

I mean if you have conferences about people but not with them.

Yeah, you know what.

I mean, they know you.

The people who are in these situations have way more experience and understanding of what's going on.

Now.

Some of them are going to you know, be scamming.

That's a reality of the way.

That's a human condition.

Yeah, well, yeah, that's the human But there are people who aren't and who really have something to offer, and we are wasting people's gifts, you know, we're wasting their intelligence, we're wasting their energy rather than incorporating, and then you make them other right, So it's them, And it's in my book Living with Reality, and also in the handbook for the Interrevolution.

I start out with oneness means I am you, I am that, not I am not that, and that's what we what our society tries to do.

It's like, well, I'm not like that?

Oh really, really are you not like that?

And you know, I know a lot of people who are not un has, but not because they are any more well off mentally than the people who are, but because they were lucky that they had parents who supported them, or they had a husband or a wife, or somebody rescued them.

You know.

It's it's it's not like we're all we're that different.

Deep down inside, we're all pretty much the same and have the same kind of games, the same kind of mentality.

And that's the oh why I believe in the Inner Revolution.

We have to change consciousness.

We have to change the way people see themselves and one another.

We have to get people to understand that we cannot benefit at the cost of another human being, or of the earth for that matter.

Well that's like I say, you know this is we can go on and on.

I think this is a good place to in the conversation.

And I would like to invite you back to further the discussion on your other books and to see what other developments that we're going on in this crazy time, because I have a funny feeling that we're going to have some more crazier times with this president coming.

Oh yeah, well, and you know it's not just him.

It's like, what are we fighting for?

What are we fighting for?

We can't go back to the way it was.

It was that shit too, you know, let's get honest about it.

This wasn't any good.

So I would love to come back there.

You just invite me and all.

Be there, perfect, perfect.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you so much to Beth for her time and insight.

You can learn more about her work and check out her books and social media at the links in the description.

And that brings us to the end of another episode of Weedian House.

Don't forget to vote for us and the Signal Awards.

The link is in the description of this episode, and voting will remain open until October ninth.

If you have a story you'd like to share, please reach out to me at Wiedianhouse at gmail dot com, at Wdianhouse on Instagram.

Until then, may we again meet in the light of understanding.

HOWS is a production of iHeartRadio.

It is written, hosted, and created by me Theo Henderson, our producers Jamie Loftus, Hailee Fager, Katie Fischer, and Lyra Smith.

Our editor is Adam Watt, our engineer is Joel Jerome, and our local art is also by Katie Fisher.

Thank you for listening.