If you’re homeless, blind with fear and sick down to your soles, broken down and so alone you want to crawl out of your skin and be someone else, somewhere else, look my way and know: I’m that voice that flows from your heart that says you’re stronger and more than you know.

Martin Luther King said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” If people know their history, King’s Poor People’s March, completed after his death, has not resulted in a society where all citizens matter, especially black men, the majority of men seen on Oakland streets.

This is a call to conscience for the entire community to support the progressive decriminalization of homelessness in Santa Cruz. Our proposed amendment in support of the Right to Sleep removes references to the act of sleeping and the use of blankets in the camping section of the Municipal Code.

All you have to do is walk down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley to discover we have a serious challenge called homelessness. It is unacceptable that simple cost-effective solutions which are in place to confront this conundrum have to struggle for funding. It is especially disturbing that the obvious is overlooked.

Corporations are treated legally as though they were individuals. They receive many of the rights of individuals but don’t have the same responsibilities. Officials in high positions use their corporate status as a firewall behind which they can hide from the repercussions of their actions.

"I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I can’t change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit."

Activists condemned Supervisor Wiener’s proposal to ban tents during the winter, saying: “Mr. Wiener’s letter is in direct contrast to the very spirit of the City of St. Francis. His timing was telling, as was his lack of solutions. Homeless people are suffering enough, and his letter was surprisingly cruel.”

No politician wants to be accused of working to eliminate jobs! So, the pressure to keep the prisons full is great. Criminalizing homelessness could be seen as a double win — keeping the prisons full while also “solving” the homelessness issue by giving homeless people beds in prison.

Thanks to the initiative of homeless people, the sleep-in grew into several weeks of relative safety for people otherwise being shoveled out of parks like trash or hustled off public streets by the merchant groups’ hired patrols. The homeless people developed a functional government and crafted “no drugs or alcohol” rules.