The house as an icon of "home" negatively affects those without one, who find themselves without the stability of a residence while it burdens them with a deep feeling of detachment. The "house-less" are trapped by the idea of "home:" shackled by an ideology that equates them with homelessness, in constant search for a "home of their own" and separate from any community. For those who gather some wealth, when "home" becomes property, the owner acquires the attributes of freedom; the house is the only place to feel free. In the process the home turns into a cage, a physical enclosure, from which they are unable to leave. For them, the main worry has become losing their property, not their freedom.
[...] For a house to be a home, it mustn't trap those who live in it. If the house were to provide both freedom and roots then the regulations for constructing and trading real estate would strongly prioritize values like attachment and mobility over profit. The house was a priority product in the economy: for developers, for contractors, and for real estate agents worldwide. On a practical level, if houses were considered real vehicles for dreams that wouldn't be treated as just another commodity to be bought and sold in the so called "free market."
Taking my thoughts about the sublimation of home, prison, and homelessness further, and looking at the situations in which crime rates decline, and yet the numbers of people in prison increase -- even as new prison are built, the prisons in the US remain almost full to capacity -- it might be said that prison picks up the fallout from the new economy and provides a "home" by defualt. The increase is uprooted tenants -- transitory, house-less, and homeless -- is directly related to the unsustainable price of property, and the celebration of wealth as the only social value. In an impossible search for "home," community, and security, prison appears as the safest option, and deliquency and crime the necessary down payment.
The consideration of prison as the home by default is not far from an understanding of tourism: not as a safe getaway but as a barely disguised form of imprisonment. The corrupting values of property affect leisure. For the wealthy, tourism provides the same ideological structure as those promoted by property.
A and I were shocked the first time that we saw a recruitment table in the Times Square subway. Two men in army fatigues approached us. "Do you guys ant to see the world?" They handed us a postcard of a plane cutting through a deep blue sky that said, Join the Army, See the World. The army's slogan targeted those who couldn't afford to take holidays but harbored a desire for adventure.
When I came across the statistic that only one out of seven Americans possesses a passport, I instinctively made an association between the fear and fascination of the unknown with the adoration of the domestic. The inability to travel abroad, to face difference, uneven wealth distribution, and the lack of education, are reshaped into a devotion of "the big home" America.
If wealth is the primary value, the value of a person is determined by how much that person has. If the poor are considered worthless and valueless, they can be taken easily, as society fails to protect them. As crime is often a form of appropiation, crimes against the poor target their bodies, since they have little other property. As a consequence poor women, as the most impoverished, are the most vulnerable.
[...] "The rate of rape/sexual assault per 1,000 persons was significantly greater where the annual family income of victims was less than $25,000, compared to those with incomes greater than $25,000, with the greatest risk occuring in families whose annual income was less than $7,500. This same trend in family income and rate of rape/sexual assult was seen among whites, while blacks had similar rates of rape/sexual assault in the %15,000-24,999 and $7,5000-14,999 income groups as they did in the less than $7,500 income group."
In fact, poverty is a more decisive factor that race: most of those in prison are unskilled and were unemployed before being jailed. The breakdon in the US Bureau of Justice Statistics study suggests a prejudicial hypothesis: immigrants, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be criminals. But the statistics don't address the connection between crime and poverty. To prevent crime, poverty has to be addressed; addressing poverty means providing education and work and good wages and benefits.
[...] If one crosses poverty and gender devaluation, the result is machismo. "Take me" means make me yours through sexual intercourse. By taking someone by force, rape is not only related to appropration, but also to the abuse of women as objects. Machismo presents the man as the owner of the oman. If a woman is single, she is perceived as having no owner, and therefore she may as well belong to whoever wants to take her. The devaluation is even more marked if the woman is recently separated from a partner and now alone. In that case, she appears as an abandoned object others may take advantage of. In the same link that the former detective sent me, the relationship between rape and marital status notes, "The rate of rape/sexual assult victimization for females was nine times greater for divorced or separated individuals, and six times greater for never married individuals, than the rate of widowed or married individuals."
CENTURIES OF STRUGGLE for women's liberation, and all the battles in my life for independence, have been diluted. Regardless of theoretical equality, in practice women are disadvantaged. They are considered inferior, less than fully human, degraded by their gender. Additional circumstances may devalue specific women further, "Poor, divorced or separated, urban, 16-24 are at the highest risk for rape." translate this into the language of the rapist and you get: low-value, used and abandoned by another man, not rooted, independent and insecure, she will, in all likelihood, not report the crime.
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