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Today is December 20th, 2023, we're at the Homeless Memorial Vigil on Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. Could you tell us your name? My name is Thomas Ratliff. Thomas, could you tell us what you think are the biggest causes of

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homelessness in Washington, D.C.? Well, there are obviously the abstract things that I think of selfishness, the compulsion to hoard wealth and material goods that I think are endemic to our society.

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At the specific level, there's the failure of corporate and governmental structures to adequately provide the things that people need in their daily lives, to see it as important to propound different kinds of wellness for

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all people, both physical and mental, and to instead turn to policing and other kinds of draconian ways of attempting to control their neighbors. I'm talking about people in power

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here, both in government and in business and in the nonprofit world to some degree as well. I think that those lead to many negative outcomes, one of which is people being homeless and unhoused

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in our city. What are the critical issues you think the movement to end homelessness should focus on? Wow.

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So we "a" of course, there's a cost-of-living problem in Washington, D.C. which is severe and which results in a lot of precarious housing, people barely keeping a roof over their head, and of course people that are

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actually leaving it all together. Increasing the stock of affordable housing, I think, is really important. There's a degree to which the city wants to focus on encouraging

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builders to build buildings and then providing vouchers where the city pays for the full cost of buildings. I think that instead we should look at things like rent control and property value controls of different kinds that would

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actually make it the actual value of the rental or purchase property affordable for more people in D.C. If you could get 50 people to join in with you on an action to end homelessness, what would you have

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them do? I would disrupt the... I think one of the things that really causes the status quo to be maintainable is that many people are getting by with their jobs and their housing situations and they are busy and they're not thinking about how the

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systems of government and business are failing lots of people. And so I would do disruptive actions. I think that things like the highway blockages, which we've seen with Black Lives Matter and the ceasefire Palestine movement

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are models we should be looking at, ways to really provoke average people to have to face the situation. Also I would be intermeshing with different kinds of labor organizing because really the place where people can affect the

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elite structures is by hitting them in the wallet, which means taking control of the workplace and refusing to work at such things. If you build a better world, what

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for you would that look like? A better world would be one in which the ethics of care in various forms are pushed forward as what we should be holding ourselves to and what we should be teaching our children and that includes identifying different

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kinds of oppressive forces like racism and sexism and homophobia and jingoism and nationalism and identifying them as toxic toxins and poisons and psychological poisons and identifying different kinds of modes of thought where we see others as being less than and

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ripe for being exploited or otherwise controlled or or taken over as things that we don't want to do and that are not rewarded by the economic structure or the political structure. I think that there's an ethic of care that is very easy to

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articulate, which if it's robustly embraced, it fills those things out. That would be a move toward a better world, I think.

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Tonight is the memorial vigil. Is there anybody you'd like to remember tonight? Yes, I wrote this on the wall. I have a few people, but

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particularly I would like to remember Collins, who was my friend and who passed and whose name was read last year, I think. Is there anything you'd like to leave us with tonight? No, thank you for this.

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I'm not sure where this goes, but I'm enjoying every part of the Humanities Trucks activities in relation to this whole event. This is something that I'm glad

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that this is supporting and something that I approve of. It's a good thing for the world. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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Thank you.