Review Of The Kitra Cahana’s TED Talk “A Glimpse Of Life On The Road”
This is a short film of a woman who was homeless. She took a different spin on homelessness that shows that some people want to have this kind of lifestyle. Some people want the adventure that puts them across the country not knowing what they were going to eat, where they're going to sleep or what they're going to do the next day. They take away the material things that are not needed. But what I realized was that both the people who don’t want to be homeless and the people who do want to be homeless sometimes are there for the same reason. This reason is freedom. A homeless person might not want to be confined and leave home and get in their car and go, not knowing where to stop. They become homeless because they feel like they're missing something. They want to explore more of the world to find it. This woman talked about the struggles that these people have to go through with so many laws and things that they have to abide by. It's hard for them to even sit on the street without getting into trouble.
“Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this, under the thumb of discriminatory laws, eating out of trash cans and sleeping under bridges. The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road, but travelers often respond with a single word: freedom. Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well (not only work to survive), there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape, of liberation and, of course, rebellion” This quote talks about a reason for homelessness that isn’t common, instead of people who are lazy or alcoholics or addicts, but these people want something completely different. They want freedom. They want to be able to do what they want and not have anyone else tell them what to do, which is something that everyone wants. These people go to different extremes to get that freedom and away from the world and away from material things that are worthless to them. For these people, homelessness is more of choice. Now since they made that choice, they also choose to have no job. Therefore they have no money or housing, and they don't look for anything to fix that. They live off of whatever they can find. This is what they are used to so they are afraid to leave what they already know.
“They'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream. They take advantage of the fact that in the United States up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans” In this quote, you can see that these people believe that they can't change themselves. They think the best way to change who they are is by becoming invisible to humanity through the homeless. They don't believe in the American dream that everyone can be happy and wealthy and free. They think that if you are wealthy, you will have a higher standard, then you will never be free or able to escape, so they take away everything in your material life. They survive off of whatever they can find. The only good reason for the amount of food Americans waste is for the poor. They can get some substantial meal in them, so they don’t starve which keeps them alive. Except dumpster diving is illegal, so people do it to get food that was already going to the trash and get in trouble for taking it, which doesn’t seem right. The homeless already have it hard enough.
