Surely, every UW student has become acquainted with Madison’s homeless problem. This social ill confronts us whenever we are on State Street, eliciting pity, contempt or usually, indifference. As with most injustices, the agelessness of the problem dulls the conscience into tacit acceptance. If it has always existed, how can it be solved?

This week is Homelessness Awareness Week. Over the weekend, Madison hosted the National Student Conference Against Hunger and Homelessness, bringing together activists from across the country. This Wednesday, WISPIRG is hosting a “Sleepout on Library Mall” to further bring attention to the unfortunate condition of the people on the street.

Implicit in this campaign is the notion that homelessness in not inevitable. The right-wing idiocy about the homeless choosing to live as they do may appease the callous conscience, but the truth is another matter. The problem stems from unbridled capitalism.

The Great Society era of the ’60s — achieved through the efforts of the decade’s social movements — nearly eradicated homelessness in the United States. An aggressive attack on poverty, hunger and new federal housing programs empirically proved that the problem was fundamentally economic and that government policy could be effective in solving it.

Then came the neoliberal devastation of the ’80s and ’90s. The draconian Reagan administration cut the Housing and Urban Development budget from $74 billion to $19 billion, while the not-so-liberal Bill Clinton succeeded in ruining the lives of more welfare recipients than any other president since the program’s birth. In both cases, homelessness got a dose of adrenaline.

The justification for these policies was best expressed by Mr. Reagan: Those living on the streets “are homeless, you might say, by choice.” A statement like this stems from an excess of stupidity and cruelty, and the late president was not lacking in either quality. Words like his encourage scorn toward society’s vulnerable, as the unsavory attitudes that many Americans have toward the homeless demonstrate.

According to a recent city of Madison report on homelessness, most of the homeless population are women — mostly single mothers, and children. Sixteen percent are veterans. Unemployment, low wages, lack of medical insurance and mental illness are the primary causes for their condition.

In 2006, the Homeless Services Consortium of Dane County outlined a plan to end homelessness in the Madison community. Its approaches were practical, focusing on housing subsidies, medical subsidies and shelter subsidies. The report concedes the objectives may take years to realize, but permeates a surety that the problem can be solved. All that’s required is the necessary government will.

Is it not a moral abomination that people are forced to sleep on the streets in subzero temperatures because the state has other priorities? In this wealthy nation, hundreds of billions are spent on colonial ventures, while human misery can’t even find a bed and blanket with which to cover itself. These discarded soldiers of the empire, alienated and abused youth, excess lumpenproletariat and all the elements deemed superfluous to the system are forgotten by the electorate, ignored by their legislatures.

Yes, the type of solutions I am discussing are the so-called band-aid solutions, treating the symptom and not the disease. The latter — class-based, profit-driven society — is the source of poverty and addressing that is necessary, too. But the alleviation of the disease’s worst effects — namely homelessness — is possible in the near-term and, therefore, an immediate moral imperative.

This week’s activism is encouraging. It is part of a national struggle to pressure government on all levels to confront an issue — it can’t be stressed enough — that can be solved. Only through efforts like the one we are seeing now in Madison will progress be made.

In the meantime, people continue to live and die in the ugliest of conditions. The American Dream may not be a total farce, but for some, it surely is.

Kyle Szarzynski ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in Spanish and history.