March 2004
Homelessness: The Shopping Cart Factor
Robert L. Terrell
Shopping carts are the technological foundation on which homeless culture rests in urban America. Given this, we can learn much about ourselves by devoting focused attention on the manner in which shopping carts are used by the homeless. Study of this subject can also provide interesting insights into the brilliant manner in which homeless citizens have carved out a place for themselves on the mean streets of the nation’s inner cities.
In order to place the subject in an historical context, it seems appropriate to note that contemporary shopping cart culture is descended in some measure from previous manifestations of mass social deprivation. The homeless people whose lives are tenuously tied to shopping carts in far too many of our cities today belong to the segment of our communities that are largely composed of those that Sociologists used to refer to as “marginal people”. As such, they are the ones who subsist as best they can outside the mainstream at the margins of so-called polite society. Major societies have always contained such people. In ancient, preindustrial times they were frequently gleaners, who swarmed warily along the largely barren furrows of recently harvested fields with sharp eyes and shaking hands in search of bits and pieces of plants that might be salvaged and consumed in order to stave off the spector of starvation. As societies evolved, and industrial production replaced agriculture as the primary form of labor engaged in by the working classes, the ancient traditions and keen survival skills of gleaners were adopted to the new, urban circumstances in which the poor were thrust.
Hoboes, bums, drifters and tramps are only some of the various kinds of poor people who have made up the ranks of the urban poor during various stages of the currently receding industrial era.
Those poverty stricken, frequently diseased, souls were victims of a social order that refused to acknowledge that their devastating deprivation was an inevitable by product of a primitive, mean spirited social, political and economic order that systematically marginalized them.
As a result, they were forced to endure a hard edged struggle for survival based in large measure on an endless search for items of value, however minimal, that they might recycle for money or food. Bartering, boosting and other forms of irregular, quasi-criminal hustling were essential skills for those who expected to survive in the best emotional and physical shape possible.
Those forced to endure such circumstances understand the cruel reality of the survival-of-the-fittest ethos of the U.S. ruling elites in ways that are rarely comprehended by members of mainstream society.
The humble souls who toiled in relative anonymity as rag pickers and scrap scavengers in the immediate past were participants in a gruesome social experience that established many of the foundations of contemporary homeless culture.
Moreover, they shared many cultural traits and survival skills associated with the rag merchants, junk collectors and scrap metal scavengers who commonly plied streets and alleys of poor neighborhoods in many U.S. cities prior to the implementation of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society social reforms.
Those reforms served to ameliorate some of the most horrific dimensions of urban poverty for a couple decades or so. But by the beginning of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan, and like-minded Conservative ideologues, captured the reigns of government, the ranks of the poor began to expand such that the streets of major cities around the nation began to fill with homeless, hungry people.
President Reagan led an ideologically-based assault on every branch of government tasked with helping those who could not help themselves. His accomplices, and subsequent disciples, built on that cruel, cold hearted legacy in ways designed to make it appear compassionate and responsible.
By now the calculated, vicious process of attacking the segments of government that actually help people has been raised to the level of a crusade with criminal dimensions.
Those familiar with the origins of this particular national mania can not help but be reminded of the eugenics movement that unfolded here in the United States during of the first decades of the1900s. That movement was led by fanatic, white supremacists deeply entrenched in mainstream positions of power and influence.
Their long, well-funded jihad in favor of racial purity and genetic superiority produced a draconian government assault on average working class citizens. The nation’s poorest citizens, blacks in particular, bore the brunt of the assault. Those who wanted or needed government assistance were particular vulnerable to being sterilized, sometimes without their knowledge or consent. The practice of sterilizing those considered to be genetically inferior did not fall into disrepute until the theories on which it was based were implemented to their fullest extent by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in their assault on Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and others considered to be genetically inferior.
Nonetheless, residual elements of that particular form of elite hatred toward those who are either average and/or poor are still with us, and still reflected in many governmental practices. One need look no farther than the data regarding the identities of those executed by the state for so-called capital offenses in order to be faced with irrefutable proof that this assertion is accurate.
Homeless people are victims in part to the legacy of programs and policies that have their roots in the eugenics movement, which was a precursor to Reaganomics.
As long as the policies the accrue from such anti humanitarian philosophies remain in place, the United States will continue to produce more than its share of homeless citizens.
Those hapless human beings, and the multitudes slated to join them in the years immediately ahead, are cultural descendants of the gleaners of ancient times. Most important, they have established a culture that is proving remarkably resilient in the face of unrelenting, intense efforts to eliminate them by various guardians of the nation’s criminally unbalanced socioeconomic status quo.
One of the most important skills required of those who hope to survive the grim culling process that each member of that culture are subjected to on a daily basis is mastery of the various modes of recycling the trash, garbage and intermittent compassion of the inattentive, overfed, wasteful sectors of mainstream society.
Shopping carts are key components of the process in inner city urban settings.
One of the best examples of this skill being exercised can be viewed early in the mornings just before dawn on the largely deserted streets that lead to major recycling centers for bottles and cans.
Caravans of forlorn men with bent backs and straining muscles wend they way silently through the dark streets toward the recycling centers pulling or pushing shopping carts piled high with the booty they have collected from curbsides and trash barrel’s. Some of the men push single shopping carts, and others string together two or three carts, each one filled with items that have been discarded as worthless by those residing on the favored side of the social and economic margins that distinguish winners from losers.
As the sun rises, and the cold, damp air that sends silent shivers through the straining bodies of the contemporary gleaners of bottles and cans instead of potatoes, carrots, onions and stray grains of wheat, corn or rice, shopping carts are used for other purposes.
Personal goods that have been stashed in cubbyholes and street side hideaways are reclaimed and stacked high in the carts, which are used the rest of the day in much the same manner as main streamers use automobiles and SUVs.
Sometimes the carts are used to transport cripple friends, or companeros who are to too drunk, or to high, or too tore down from bad drugs and worse food to navigate on their feet.
Some homeless people catch naps while piled into their shopping carts, and others use their carts to cradle pets.
From time to time, irate mainstreamers launch campaigns to control the use of shopping carts, each of which is stolen property. But to little avail, and this will probably continue to be the case until the United States experiences some form of transforming revolution in its social and economic policies.
The reasons why are interesting.
Shopping carts emerged in this society as symbols of wealth. They were initially used in luxury department stores, and then in the large, modern super markets that replaced the small, neighborhood based mom and pop grocery stores from which most U.S. citizens purchased their food and many household goods before chains and franchises began to dominate urban commerce.
Shoppers in facilities that featured the newly-introduced shopping carts were encouraged to purchase more than they could carry in two hands. They were urged to load up, get more and reward themselves via increased consumption of every sort.
Slowly, inexorably, the culture was transformed. Many people, tens of million in fact, began to see themselves as consumers. Moreover, they bought into the notion that grand, conspicuous consumption was a sign that one was prosperous, attractive, virtuous and successful.
The process of transforming the core of mainstream society in the United States into a thoughtless mass committed to wasteful, excessive consumption, has proven to be extremely profitable to the corporate sector. The elimination of mom and pop type businesses, downtown shopping areas in small towns and numerous other kinds of locally owned businesses are some of the most notable results of that transformation.
The constantly expanding amount of garbage, trash and barely used but currently outdated products produced to our highly wasteful, consumer society has proven to be a godsend for homeless people.
Dumpster diving in the rear of huge supermarkets, or harvesting half eaten meals from the trash cans discreetly located near the premises of luxury restaurants and hotels provide far more easy pickings for those who are perpetually hungry than the dirt-covered produce gleaned by the ancient ancestors of contemporary homeless people.
As far as shopping carts are concerned, they have proven as much a godsend for contemporary inner city homeless people as was the wheel for ancient societies previously dependent on animals to haul the essentials of life.
Recognizing that they were being provided a cultural implement of immense utility where their style of life is concerned, shortly after they became ubiquitous in locales where mass commerce is conducted, homeless people began to liberate shopping carts and use them for their own purposes.
Given the fact that they are virtually indestructible, shopping carts are particularly well-suited to the needs of urban homeless people.
Because they have wheels, they make it easier for homeless people to move heavy loads over long distances with relative ease. Moreover, no great loss is incurred if one’s shopping cart loses a wheel, or is stolen. When such problems occur, a viable solution can be quickly secured in the vicinity of the nearest supermarket.
Maybe the most important thing to be understood about all this is the fact that homeless people who use shopping carts have won a truce with the rest of us. This is largely due to the fact that any effort to eliminate the use of shopping carts by the homeless is bound to fail because there are too many shopping carts and too many homeless people.
Furthermore, the mainstreamers can’t afford to send even a fraction of the homeless people who liberate shopping carts to jail or prison because doing so would prove too expensive.
Finally, it seems reasonable to assume that the culture of homeless people, which is largely based on their ability to subsist on the garbage and refuse of mainstream society, will be with us for years, if not generations, to come.
The same is true for liberated shopping carts.