It will come as no surprise that on Monday, December 11, 2006, CBS News online reported escalating Baghdad violence. Last week, Wednesday to Saturday, 179 Iraqis were either shot and bombed, or --- in reprisal killings --- tortured, shot, and dumped. One U.S. soldier was killed by a bomb.

This, too, is no surprise: Despite Gavin Newsom's 2003 Mayoral campaign promise to rid San Francisco streets of panhandling homeless people, we pass dark figures curled up in doorways on Sutter and Van Ness, sometimes trailing urine streaks. In January 2005, the City of San Francisco's official biannual homeless count reported 6,248 "unhoused" San Franciscans, among these Bessie Berger, a 94-year-old San Francisco citizen living with her caretaker sons in their freezing Chevy Coupe.

Howard Zinn, Boston University History Professor, WWII bomber pilot, and anti-war activist wrote "A People's History of the United States", exposing the underbelly of twisted, distorted, and unreported American history. In his biographical video "You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train," Zinn contradicted behavioral scientists' contentions that aggression, violence, and war are just a part of "Human Nature." He believes that environment determines whether our alleged "propensity for violence" is acted upon.

Stated Zinn, "The consequence of believing that wars come as the result of Human Nature is to place the blame for wars on individual people --- on the citizenry -- and to take away the blame from the leaders of the nation who are driving the country into war."

Paul Boden, former head of the Coalition on Homelessness, now directs an organization called "WRAP," The Western Regional Advocacy Project.
WRAP published a recent report entitled, "Without Housing" stating, "Public policy debates and media representations rarely address the systemic causes of homelessness; instead they often portray homelessness as a problem with homeless individuals."

The report correctly redirects the cause of homelessness away from homeless people themselves to "what we consider to be one of the most important - if not THE most important - factor in explaining why so many families, single adults, and youth are homeless in the United States today: (Decades of Federal housing) cutbacks to, and eventual near elimination of, the federal government's commitment to building, maintaining, and subsidizing affordable housing."

What do Boden and Zinn have in common?

Both advocate for The People, indicting political leaders who employ relentless propaganda to drag countries into war, blaming violence on "Human Nature," just as they blame poor and homeless people for their own poverty and lack of housing.

Says Zinn: "It became very important for me ...to argue against that idea whenever I could. Because it's an idea so deeply ingrained in people that it has this insidious effect of turning their attention away from the policymakers towards themselves.

"It's like telling the Poor that 'you are poor because of your own faults, not because you live in a society in which the wealth is distributed very unjustly.'"

Thus, when 94-year-old Bessie was turned away last week by the San Francisco Housing Authority for an apartment, she was told, in effect, "If you freeze to death homeless in your car, you must have done something wrong."

Hm-m-m. Let's see. Would that "something wrong" be surviving to 94? Or just being poor in a fabulously wealthy City?