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january 15, 2007 (0053us)
an opposable right to housing?
I am wary of weird terms like "the opposable right to housing". I've been forever scared about something underhand they might conceal.
Opposable to what, by whom? To me a man does have or does not have a right to housing, period!
Anyway, to begin with, a right to what kind of housing?
If the right to housing is to be a law, with a deadline and some precipitate constraints therefore, it's to be feared that it will end up in buildings of a type everybody hopes is to disappear: "social housing" of the rabbit hutch type, that is, the very type they have been dynamiting for a while more or less over the country.
st-Martin Canal, ParisA Parisian social worker has sent me statistics not made out from forms with boxes to be ticked, but made out from direct contact with homeless people. Less than one out of three of the homeless who put up in the tents of "Don Quixote's Children" non-profit organization for the holidays (see picture), was in basic need of "a roof or shelter over his or her head." The others, more than two out of three, were badly in need of "a home", "his or her own home," "a nice cosy place." The difference is essential, it means that the problem does not lie in a matter of walls, but in a matter of heartwarming.
The houses, that a sensitive man forms an idea of in his heart, are not staircases, doors and plumbing fixtures piled up. They are places of joy and good. Places of happiness. The Father has formed an idea of them for millennia; he reminded us of it in 1974: But whatever does the tempter offer, he who can create nothing, neither joy nor good? Have I not built cozy (or warm) houses (Rev of Ares 26/8)?
Cozy or warm houses are not places where central heating, though perfectly likeable, would be fundamental. They are houses where the warmth of love, of peace, of freedom, prevails. Houses where it's nice living and which do not necessarily meet the requirements of the technical and sanitary agencies. What sort of law, what "opposable right to housing" could guarantee housing where it's nice living? No law, no right whatever could, because happiness eludes every definition of a code of housing procedure. But it does not elude the definitions of happiness that The Revelation of Ares gives a reader who will not just leaf through it.
So a lot of the homeless, the guests of "Don Quixote's Children", a praiseworthy non-profit organization, were not animals in search of clean cages, but men in search of a home outside the door of which the child screams with joy (Rev of Ares XXVII/10), even though it was a hut open on to the magnificient Creation, surrounded by souls, goodness, bounty, laughter, mercy, freedom, spiritual intelligence. A lot of the homeless once lived in low-rent apartment buildings made of plaster and steel, low-rent apartment buildings which their young tenants, whose rebellion against the lack of beauty (Rev of Ares 12/3) is very uninhibited, quickly cover with graffiti so that they may look different from a prison. The low-rent apartment buildings have made a lot of the homeless turn homeless.
What is "opposable" to "social issues" in politicians' rhetorics is all that we Ares Pilgrims urge the world to see, understand and be. Our mission does not ignore social issues, it spiritualizes them, because to the Creator and to us mankind is definitively, essentially spiritual.

copyright 2007
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15Jan07 53usC1
Nor do I know what an "opposable right" is, unless it implies that you respect all other persons' rights.
However, there was a saying, "an Englishman's home is his castle." Perhaps the essence of a home is privacy, a place of one's own, where not even the king may enter?
The peace of the Lord be always with you!
Brian

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