Why I Dress Like a Homeless Person

Homeless GandhiDo clothes make the man? For many years I made my living as a college professor.   My classes were known for a high degree of activity, interactivity, creativity, and laughter.  People brought their friends to see the show because I was not one of the professors who wore a suit and stood behind a podium and recited his lecture, or read it off the PowerPoints.  Rather, I took part.   I demonstrated the Buffalo Dance, ran the video camera, mixed the paint, moved the furniture, held the fire extinguisher, and whatever else needed to be done.  For this kind of performance art, one needs clothes that are designed to facilitate movement, not those that are designed to restrict it.  Think about it, suits were originally the mark of the ruling class, for precisely the opposite reason, to demonstrate that they were not required to do any physical work.  Ease of movement was for the workers, and they wore clothes appropriate to their need to move unrestrainedly.  So did I. 

A second reason I dress as I do is that I have a reaction to synthetic clothes.  All I can really wear is cotton.   It is more practical for work clothes, of course, but also is a natural product and it makes perfect sense to me that my body would know that.    A related reason is that I do not wear leather for religious reasons, and suits require leather shoes and belts, don’t they?  Vinyl shoes and belt? I don’t wear vinyl for aesthetic reasons.

Homeless HippieThird, work clothes, that is, blue jeans and T-shirts, are my traditional apparel.  I was a hippie and as the years pass I realize more and more clearly that I was *right* to be a hippie.  The things we warned against have come to pass.  If you go to a county fair, say, and observe how people are dressed, you would think the hippies had won.  Would that we had.  The damage would be 50 years less severe.

The fourth reason is that the less I have and the longer it lasts, the less I waste, and the less the impact on the planet.

Fifth, the homeless, the working people, the poor, and the refugees are the favored of Jesus, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”  So that’s where I should want to be isn’t it, among the least, doing what I can?

Are you waiting for the real reason that I dress like a homeless person?  They are all real, but the killer reason is that I do not assent to the corporatism that dominates my country, and I want it very clearly apparent that I am not a member of the corporate ruling class or one of the pathetic corporate ruling class wannabees.  I object with my life to Consumerism, and the ruling class that has ignored the homeless while promoting Consumerist materialism and greed so that their corporations could make obscene profits, causing the degradation of the planet and the human soul.

One thought on “Why I Dress Like a Homeless Person

  1. Good one, Larry! Also, shopping for clothes is a bore!!!! I like new things once in awhile but I can’t understand how much time many people spend continually finding lots of new things to drape on their bodies!!!

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