Many viewers of the morning news don’t think twice when they hear about the thousands without homes because these individuals are no longer portrayed as people with feelings and ideas. Instead, they are numbers. We see people turned into statistics because they are easier to compute that way.

When countless people are living on the street, when there’s no state in the union where workers making minimum wage can afford market-rate housing, and when hundreds of thousands of school children are living in cars and trying to do homework in the dark, we have an emergency.

FROM FERGUSON TO GAZA, militarism directly impacts all of our lives. The American Friends Service Committee’s new poster art exhibit examines the effects of militarism in both foreign and domestic policy, and highlights alternatives and positive nonviolent solutions.

Block by Block "ambassadors" utilize a strange sweeping technique to harass people on the streets. I hope the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission will request that Block by Block employees refrain from this kind of "beautification" activity. It demeans us as a community to have people treated like trash.

When highly diverse individuals are lumped into a single category, the result is terribly misleading. In the composite picture in the minds of those who promote anti-homeless laws, many different sorts of people are merged into one. The ensuing discussions get shipwrecked because nobody is having the same discussion.

One can’t help but notice that all this wrangling over intake forms, coordination, and “centralized intake” hasn’t managed to produce any additional low-income housing or shelter beds. Berkeley’s last low-income housing expenditures were about 15 years ago, and involved rehabbing some already existing low-income housing units.

Many people already question whether so-called affordable housing projects in Oakland and the Bay Area are really affordable to most disabled persons receiving their income through SSI, or for retired persons receiving Social Security. It is evident that all too many are not truly affordable to low-income people.

Although several deaths of young African American men at the hands of the police have received a great deal of publicity, hundreds more police-inflicted deaths have not been reported. Across the nation, police officers who have killed innocent African-American men are rarely punished by racially biased court systems.

The Supreme Court recognized dignity in all when it announced that LGBT couples have the right to marry. Let us hope that governments everywhere will someday address the issues of poverty in the same spirit. A disproportionate number of young people who end up on the streets identify as LGBT.

The horrific attack targeted a church that has a long legacy in the struggle for African-American liberation and civil rights. Acknowledging the effects of generations of racism and violence is a first step. Taking concrete actions to transform our society to end racism and violence is the next.

Sometimes at night, you recall who you once were. You were a kid and played with other kids. You had a mother and a father. You wanted to be a firefighter or an astronaut. You were loved. And in your darkest imaginings, you could never have seen yourself come to this place.