Homeless, Migrants, and TikTok
TikTok Is Exposing The Breakdown in Social Services
I’ve been out of commission with that dreaded five letter virus this week. Probably picked it up by shaking hands on the campaign trail. Note to self: bring hand sanitizer everywhere.
Stuck in the house, too tired for anything mentally or physically strenuous, I read the gossip blogs and looked at TikTok videos — the intellectual equivalent of Oreos and bacon — but when you’re sick, it’s okay.
The TikTok algorithm immediately picked up on my OCD tendencies and started sending me radical cleaning videos. Yes, there are videos of people cleaning filthy rugs with power washers, scrubbing the sinks of hoarders, and mowing the lawns of shut-ins. I found those videos deeply satisfying.
After an hour of watching dirty things become clean, the TikTok genii decided that I would also be interested in interviews with homeless people, which is an entire genre of videos of TikTok.
Those homeless videos skate a fine line between tacky voyeurism and awareness building. Some people might be watching those videos for a quick fix of horror and a way to feel good about their boring lives. Yet, there is something of value in these videos.
When done well, the interviewers highlight the humanity of people hooked hopelessly on opiates. Before they got hooked on drugs, these skeletal people had families and bed and clothes. Drugs wired them into drug-seeking zombies willing to lose life and limb for just one more fix.
And even without drugs, some of us already know how fragile our middle-class lives are. As a parent of a neurodiverse young man, I know exactly what would happen to my son and his friends without parental support. All those quirky boys would be on the street, too. And their lives would be nasty, brutish, and short.
In one episode, (no link — it’s long lost in my TikTok black hole) one homeless woman explained about how hard it was to get help from social services. She said she couldn’t go to a shelter, because then she wouldn’t qualify for housing. There wasn’t enough housing. She couldn’t get to the appointments for social services because she didn’t have money for the bus. Every night, she would get robbed and lose her Food Stamp Card, so she didn’t have enough to eat.
I know from my own experiences trying get to disability services for my son that the social services system in our country is totally broken. Now, the growing number of homeless on the streets of our cities is compounded by hundreds of thousands of migrants, who suddenly are tapping into those same services.
In NYC alone, there are 60,000 migrants in shelters, many of whom are about to get dumped on the streets. Schools are struggling to find seats for the children, and the funding to cover their education — each child will be entitled to ESL services, as well as tons of trauma therapy. Those families need food stamps and more.
The system is seriously going to break without major reforms.
So, this is a rambling little newsletter that went from silly to serious pretty quickly. I blame the Covid.
Be Shameless
Shameless. That’s my campaign style. I dressed up my whole family in campaign t-shirts and paraded them through town at a street fair for two hours last weekend. I’m making TikTok campaign videos. I’ve got newsletters, Facebook pages, websites. I handed out 1,000 flyers outside 10 Back to School Nights this month. I’m chatting with seniors outside Stop and Shop. I’ll show up and talk at any book club. I’m recruiting family members to do stuff, when I’m sick. I’m shameless, and it’s awesome.