Monday, March 11, 2013

Guest Blog: Thoughts on Homelessness from Fred Carrol


  • Fred Carroll is a Middletown  intellectual icon (we at the Insider certainly think so!), a humanitarian, artist, chess player, founder of the Bums with Brooms social movement to clean up the streets of the city,  secretary of the Realist Balance Party of Middletown, and by traditional definition a practitioner of the "nomadic" lifestyle and  has been at times what most would consider, and by his own definition as well homeless. Below is an essay by Carroll. Thank you Fred!

    At Risk Of Stating The Obvious; Thoughts on Homelessness from Fred Carroll......

    As NORA becomes ever more tangible and the Buttonwood Tree blossoms the contrast struck by the Old School Mentaltown Townies is all of a full blown mind muck to this author.....I don't so to speak "get it". What game are we playing here, is the most begged question to my mind. On the one hand we have many very serious people with everything in the world to lose who are putting blood, sweat, and tears into their respective avocations and ambitions....and on the "other" hand we have so many people in this City who "represent" on a daily basis the high pathos of addiction and dysfunction to the point of creating their very own "Dystopia" right in the midst of the larger paradigm. Or am I mistaken, is commerce the larger agenda? Or is whatever you call the other thing....."Services"? the bigger agenda......I'm not at all sure that this a question which has been definitively answered. So lets take a quick look here....the Services Crowd can stand around whacked and jacked on their combination of legal and illegal Dope, smoke cigarettes, and spit on the sidewalk absolutely ANYWHERE, but can "NORA" just pack up and shift North or South or East or West and "reinvent itself" at some other location? No, in a word....no. So why in the Hell are all these malevolent clowns still holding court on Main Street every goddamn day? Does somebody assume that this loose army of like minded idiots is incapable or not inclined to kill every good thing that has happened in the North End recently? Let's test it, after all....what have we got to lose?
    • Addendum...."Homeless" or "homelessness" is surely the wrong word, though whatever the term or concept it surely overlaps and confluences with homelessness proper significantly. George Carlin uses the phrase "street people" and extend that to "street culture", or what I would I would call "Dirt Bag Culture"....and then the rest is history.
      Fred Carroll

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