A Homeless take on “All Lives Matter”

You know what’s ironic about “all lives matter”?

It’s that in the homeless community, we’ve been fighting for that as a sincere mantra.

We see homeless folks who are white, black, asian, gay, trans, disabled, and everything – and to us “ALL THEIR LIVES MATTER”.

We are ALL kin, no matter our background, because we watch you all happily kill us or pretend we don’t matter on a daily basis.

But we REALLY mean “all lives matter”, because we SEE “all lives”, and we see how you treat “all lives” once we fall below some arbitrary economic success line that allows you all to forget about us and pretend we deserve the hell we experience and the police abuse we live through.

Nobody I’ve seen using the slogan “all lives matter” actually cares about homeless lives.

So we know you aren’t on our side.

You just want to undermine human rights activists.

You’re the same people who tell me that homeless people bring homelessness onto themselves, like we’re somehow inbuilt with a “homelessness gene”.

You don’t care about all lives.

You care only about your own.

But we LIVE with all lives.

To us, all lives really do matter.

We are family beyond even the most simplistic terms you can’t even understand. Because all of you hate us – or even worse, pity us.

But more than that, we share an experience that nobody ever should, *AND WE RECOGNISE THE FACT THAT NOBIDY SHOULD EVER EXPERIENCE THIS.*

I can meet a homeless person from any ethnicity, gender, orientation, age and anything else, and we can recognise in each other something that connects us that you never will.

Something that makes us FAMILY.

I don’t frivolously call other homeless people my kin.

We share an experience beyond what you have, and beyond what we want anyone to have.

#BlackLivesMatter

#TransLivesMatter

#TravellerLivesMatter

#DisabledLivesMatter

You get it?

When I say “all lives matter”, I fucking mean it – which is why I don’t say it in response to people trying to get everyone to acknowledge the fact that their lives don’t matter in the eyes of society.

Weirdly, the only people I see responding to “black lives matter” with “all lives matter” don’t ever care about homeless lives – and mostly they spout anti-homeless hatred.

Yeah, I’m SOOOO sure you care about “all lives” – so much that you hate literally all lives that don’t fit your narrow idea of “worthy lives” 🤦‍♂️🖕

We don’t use “all lives matter” as a mantra, though.

We use #NoOneLeftOut, because it perfectly encapsulates what “all lives matter” pretends to, whilst actually defining humanity as one and ensuring we all have the same basic rights that we define perfectly: NO ONE LEFT OUT.

Everyone gets shelter and basic needs. No exceptions.

But there’s a caveat: we won’t ever respond to “black lives matter” with “No one left out”, because we aren’t a white supremacist group trying to undermine a valid human rights cause.

It’s depressing that I have to make that clear:

WE CANNOT HAVE HOMELESS RIGHTS WITHOUT DISMANTLING RACISM.

If anybody does respond to “black lives matter” with “no one left out”, they are 100% trying to co-opt a human rights issue in order to undermine another human rights issue, and they are by definition a worthless shit stain in deserve of a shovel-based facial reconstruction surgery.

All lives matter to us, because we actually see all lives when your society gives up on them.

Our family consists of your rejects.

Our family consists of people you are determined to see die through your ideology.

So don’t pretend to me that you’re an egalitarian by saying “all lives matter”, whilst doing everything you can to ensure people are denied basic humanity 🤬🖕