I'm subscribed to Mercy Trimphs, which for all days in Lent has a Chesterton quote.
Today's Quotation.
“It is an actual fact that the dispossessed have more sense of possession than those who go away because they have great possessions; and in these days do not even go away sorrowful. We all agree that the sense of ownership has been almost exterminated; but it has in fact been exterminated more by those who own too much than by those who own too little. When we appeal to the broken men, we appeal to those who have lost their homes and their happiness; but they still have more notion that happiness might be found in a home. There is more of this in the homeless poor than we can now discover in the vulgar cosmopolitan crowd of the homeless rich.”
-G.K. Chesterton (“The Cry to Capitalists,” GK’s Weekly, December 5, 1935)
As a homeless, I definitely agree with Chesterton. But I do not agree with the Chesterton society in this thing here:
Act on it.
Organize a food, clothing, and essentials drive to benefit your local homeless shelter.
Sorry guys, no. That's perhaps a good thing or perhaps not, but totally irrelevant to what Chesterton was speaking about.
He was hoping, not that people without property should have some more comforts, which they do not own, where they exist only on someone else's mercy, where they go and have to follow someone else's rules. BUT that they could get back to a situation of property.
Decentralise farming, and some homeless could perhaps start by buying up a cheap and abandoned farm somewhere.
In my case, giving me a paper version platform and not whittling down my internet one, so I can actually live off my work as a writer would be magnificent. But unfortunately, they have not been heeding that call.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
First Passion Sunday
26.III.2023
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