I found this story while looking for another story on billmoyers.com. As many of you know, Bill Moyers was Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. Moyers has been a figure on public television nearly since its birth. He has exposed the charlatans and crooks and pointed out the crises caused by capitalism. He retired once but was coaxed back to fill the void he had left. Now he is set to retire permanently. He will really never be replaced.
Here are some excerpts from a story most Americans want to ignore – the homeless in America. Remember Republicans claim it is a choice these people make:
Levi Cummings didn’t die of old age. He didn’t die in an accident, and he wasn’t murdered. Cummings died because he was homeless.
He likely froze to death — the state medical examiner must still officially release the cause of death — last Thursday, a victim of the polar vortex and of his inability to afford a place to stay.
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There are currently 578,424 homeless people living in the United States, a third of whom have no shelter at all. As temperature start to fall across the country, they are an extremely vulnerable population, even in areas of the country that don’t regularly see freezing temperatures like Oklahoma and California. More could soon suffer Cummings’s fate.
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Many cities have emergency procedures in place when temperatures drop in order to make more shelter available for people who are on the streets. But those procedures are often too restrictive to prevent otherwise-preventable deaths. For example, even though hypothermia can set in when temperatures are as high as 50 degrees Fahrenheit, many cities don’t open the doors to their winter shelters until temperatures hit freezing or below. In Des Moines, as the National Coalition for the Homeless pointed out, temperatures have to drop all the way to 20 degrees, and in Baltimore it needs to hit 13 degrees with wind chill before winter shelter procedures are put in effect.
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