Having in my lifetime been homeless and having worked to encourage and assist the homeless in getting off the streets and back into regular society, it has been my experience that the term the homeless use to refer to themselves is "homeless".
Yes, the term "unhoused" IS stupid. It's classic virtue signalling--insipid, inane, insane, and completely idiotic.
What people do well to understand is that homelessness is NOT a problem. Homelessness is the symptom of a thousand and one separate problems, ranging from economic privation and misfortune to mental health to substance abuse. In many cases the issue is "all of the above."
There is a sentence from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" that has always had a particular resonance with me, and it explains perfectly why use of such reinvented terminology is not merely pointless, it's morally reprehensible.
" Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. "
Dr King was, of course, writing about the evils of racism and the segregation which arose from that racism. Yet the premise is just as true for any labeling, any categorizing, any classification of people as being either "this" or "that'. All such labels by their very nature, just as Dr. King explained so eloquently, substitute the "I it" relationship for the "I thou" relationship.
All such labels by their very nature relegate persons to the status of things.
All such labels by their very nature deny the humanity that we all share.
Using "unhoused" rather than "homeless" is a woketivist's cowardly way of avoiding the issue of homelessness.
In Jesus' Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, He makes it quite clear that we are called to have compassion for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden.
"for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ "
We are not called to judge how a person comes to be hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or even in prison. We are called to care. We are called to have compassion. We are called to meet all people, regardless of their circumstance, wherever they are--physically, psychologically, and emotionally.
Using "unhoused" rather than "homeless" is not meeting a homeless person where they are. By pretending that one label is somehow less dehumanizing than another label, the woketivist is implicitly endorsing the use of all labels, and disregarding that all labels are by definition a dehumanizing of the individual.
Using "unhoused" rather than "homeless" manufactures a non-issue for the woketivist to "solve", while doing nothing to address the issues of economics, social isolation, mental health, substance abuse, and whatever other demons manage to invade a person's mind and tear their lives apart.
By debating which label the woketivists will demean and dehumanize others, they show themselves to be none of the sheep for whom the Kingdom of Heaven awaits, but the goats who will be cast in to fire and damnation.
We do well to always remember that the person standing on the street with nowhere to go is not merely "homeless". That person is also a human being.
The AI told the the truth, just in a sideways manner. Here it is. The only goal--all of it, 100 percent--of moving to "unhoused" is to shift all responsibility away from the person and place all of it on other people (and their money).
It's classic external locus of control and self-victimization in order to get other people to pay for your stuff.
That's all it is. None of the other justifications are true. They're just distractions.
The Left has always been sneaky manipulators of language, in a never-ending attempt to appear compassionate and politically correct. Even the term "politically correct" I probably never heard prior to 30 years ago, when it became more proper to say African American instead of black. The giveaway of the motivation is in the term itself - it's "political".
You crack me up! Unhoused sound like somebody evicted from their home. Homeless is someone without a home. Each day our speech is getting more under scrutiny.
Calling a confused person "they/them" is also fucking stupid. As someone pointed out, all of a sudden changing language that has been in place for centuries should get push back. Especially when it makes zero grammatical sense.
I spent hours in elementary school English class learning proper English composition. Most of you did, too. I'm not about to fall for this communistic language crap. Words mean something and changing that is dangerous. It's about erasing the past and replacing it with newspeak.
As well as confusing normal everyday conversations. I won't try to pull the mental gymnastics it must take to incorporate "they/them" into a conversation about a singular person. Nope. Not doing it.
From the author:
“…this is not about language evolving naturally, it's about stupid ass woke people turning every word into a landmine”.
Well said.
Having in my lifetime been homeless and having worked to encourage and assist the homeless in getting off the streets and back into regular society, it has been my experience that the term the homeless use to refer to themselves is "homeless".
Yes, the term "unhoused" IS stupid. It's classic virtue signalling--insipid, inane, insane, and completely idiotic.
What people do well to understand is that homelessness is NOT a problem. Homelessness is the symptom of a thousand and one separate problems, ranging from economic privation and misfortune to mental health to substance abuse. In many cases the issue is "all of the above."
There is a sentence from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" that has always had a particular resonance with me, and it explains perfectly why use of such reinvented terminology is not merely pointless, it's morally reprehensible.
" Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. "
Dr King was, of course, writing about the evils of racism and the segregation which arose from that racism. Yet the premise is just as true for any labeling, any categorizing, any classification of people as being either "this" or "that'. All such labels by their very nature, just as Dr. King explained so eloquently, substitute the "I it" relationship for the "I thou" relationship.
All such labels by their very nature relegate persons to the status of things.
All such labels by their very nature deny the humanity that we all share.
Using "unhoused" rather than "homeless" is a woketivist's cowardly way of avoiding the issue of homelessness.
In Jesus' Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, He makes it quite clear that we are called to have compassion for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden.
"for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ "
We are not called to judge how a person comes to be hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or even in prison. We are called to care. We are called to have compassion. We are called to meet all people, regardless of their circumstance, wherever they are--physically, psychologically, and emotionally.
Using "unhoused" rather than "homeless" is not meeting a homeless person where they are. By pretending that one label is somehow less dehumanizing than another label, the woketivist is implicitly endorsing the use of all labels, and disregarding that all labels are by definition a dehumanizing of the individual.
Using "unhoused" rather than "homeless" manufactures a non-issue for the woketivist to "solve", while doing nothing to address the issues of economics, social isolation, mental health, substance abuse, and whatever other demons manage to invade a person's mind and tear their lives apart.
By debating which label the woketivists will demean and dehumanize others, they show themselves to be none of the sheep for whom the Kingdom of Heaven awaits, but the goats who will be cast in to fire and damnation.
We do well to always remember that the person standing on the street with nowhere to go is not merely "homeless". That person is also a human being.
Can we reprint your comment as an article?
Sure!
The AI told the the truth, just in a sideways manner. Here it is. The only goal--all of it, 100 percent--of moving to "unhoused" is to shift all responsibility away from the person and place all of it on other people (and their money).
It's classic external locus of control and self-victimization in order to get other people to pay for your stuff.
That's all it is. None of the other justifications are true. They're just distractions.
The Left has always been sneaky manipulators of language, in a never-ending attempt to appear compassionate and politically correct. Even the term "politically correct" I probably never heard prior to 30 years ago, when it became more proper to say African American instead of black. The giveaway of the motivation is in the term itself - it's "political".
You crack me up! Unhoused sound like somebody evicted from their home. Homeless is someone without a home. Each day our speech is getting more under scrutiny.
Calling a confused person "they/them" is also fucking stupid. As someone pointed out, all of a sudden changing language that has been in place for centuries should get push back. Especially when it makes zero grammatical sense.
I spent hours in elementary school English class learning proper English composition. Most of you did, too. I'm not about to fall for this communistic language crap. Words mean something and changing that is dangerous. It's about erasing the past and replacing it with newspeak.
As well as confusing normal everyday conversations. I won't try to pull the mental gymnastics it must take to incorporate "they/them" into a conversation about a singular person. Nope. Not doing it.
I always wondered about the difference between "colored person" and "person of color".