October 7, 2025 • 54 mins
Theo speaks with longtime activist Beth Green about how to push through moments of apathy in the organizing movement.
Follow Beth's work here: https://www.heartcastmedia.com/beth-green/
Keep voting for us in the Signal Awards -- open til October 9th!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Previously on A Weedy Young House.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
There is such an importance to having strong, stable, local
food economies. A lot of the reasons why you spoke
about earlier is that those farmers need that support to
keep growing the food. And if we do not have
those farmers growing food, then we will all be hungry.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Regardless of your status in life.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So, you know, stabilizing those communities and then add on
to that the health and wellness that comes from eating
nutrient rich foods that haven't been traveling for miles or
been sitting in a plastic bag for days and days
on end. And we know that when there are healthy communities,
they are going to do better in all areas of life.
(00:41):
And so we are here to support those farmers and
make sure that they get support, but also support our
communities making sure that they can be part of that.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Welcome to Wesian Howse. I'm your host, Theo Henderson. This week,
we're talking about the importance of civic activism and have
the perfect guest to talk about it with in a
moment that is so desperately needed. Before we get into
today's episode, some exciting news. Weezian Howes have been nominated
(01:22):
for a Signal Award, a podcast industry award that honors
the best shows in the medium. If you have a second,
we need your vote to get to the finish line.
Go to the link in the description of this episode
and vote for Weedian Howse in the Activism, Public Service
and Social Impact category. It's an easy way to support
(01:45):
the show, and voting is open until October ninth. And
now Here's on House News. I will title this one.
No one talks about this reality anymore. The uptick of
aggressive sweeps targeting the un housed is not a new phenomenon. However,
(02:08):
the amount of targeted sweeps against the unhoused at the
direction of executive orders from California Governor Gavin Newsom and
President Trump has given inspiration to many other places. Currently,
Los Angeles is the center of an aggressive removal of
(02:28):
unhoused people. Last Monday, September twenty ninth, park rangers targeted
a long established unhoused community Arroyo Seco Parkway. Unhoused residents
have claimed that park rangers have been in menacing presence
in the past week. This tactic, known among many unhoused members,
(02:50):
is used and known as forced removal. The goal is
to get them to self evict. This is based on
the number of times an individual has had negative interactions
with law enforcement. Sweeps don't get mentioned in the light
of the unhoused perspective by mainstream media. Usually, complaints driven
(03:12):
by house residents sets in a series of motions by
the city leaders and law enforcement to swoop in and
cause more trauma to the unhoused until the next complaint
comes in. However, the residents at the Arroyo Seco Parkway
are trying to mobilize to protest against these sweeps. The
(03:34):
question I have is how can other unhoused community members
protect themselves in places such as San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco,
Omaha City, Fremont, East Hollywood, South La Pima County, Chicago, Annapolis,
or all of Oregon. These are places that have already
(03:55):
started the houseless purge. I believe this topic needs to
be explored more, and Weei and Howe's will continue to
explore this in future episodes. And that's un Houses. When
we come back, we'll chat with activists and author Beth Green.
(04:22):
Welcome back to Weedian Howes. I'm THEO Henderson. If anyone's
life is an open book, it's Beth Green's. She's a
lifelong activist who specialize in analyzing our power structure, trains
individuals to accept injustice and remain passive in the face
of oppression. From a young age, she's spoken out about injustice,
(04:46):
and she's here to tell us how to unlearned passivity
and take back control. Here's our talk. Here we are,
miss Beth Green. Can you tell us a little bit
about yourself?
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Well, you knew I was thinking, because it's you're a
title we the unhoused. I've never actually been unhoused, but
I have been living in tenements, slums, really terrible scary
places in New York City. So I can relate to
being in a building there you walk down the stairs
and there's so much urine that you could slip down,
(05:20):
or having their ceiling falling in, or you know, living
on the Bowery which is like skid row, and having
to walk past men strewn in front of my front
door with the police lock in my hand in order
to get to the bathroom in the hall. So I
know a little bit about what it's like to be underhoused.
(05:41):
Let's sort it this way, and how frightening it is
and I can only just imagine what it's like for
people who are like living in a car or even
more vulnerable situations. So I am a musician, I'm a
counselor a spiritual teacher. But I've also been activists since
I was a little girl, and I am very, very
(06:05):
dedicated to trying to make the world a better place.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
And I was reading that you auent activism around twelve
years old, if I correct, if my memory serves me correctly.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Nine Actually I started at nine. Yes, that's when they
threatened to expel me from elementary school.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Can you elaborate on why they wanted to throw you
out of elementary school?
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Well, yes, if you understand the times. It was nineteen
fifty four. Senator Joseph McCarthy was going after you know,
the government call everybody communists. People were being thrown in
prison and so and I looked at that, and I said,
there's something wrong with this picture, right. So I was
really looking into things, and I started reading about the
(06:47):
Spanish Civil War, and I saw about the lack of
justice and society. And they added the words under God
to the pledge of allegiance in nineteen fifty four. It
wasn't in there before, and I said, this is a
betrayal of our constitution, the separation of church and state,
and so I refused to salute the flag. And that's
the first time that anybody actually tried to expel me
(07:11):
from anything. But that was just the beginning of a
rather fraud career of you know, I became what I
called the socialist, you know, when I was twelve. But
that was about equality, treating people decently. It wasn't about
becoming you know, Stalin or anything like that, and that
(07:32):
was not approved of. I did get expelled actually from
college when I was just over sixteen, because of being
in the band the bomb movement at a time then
nobody much was doing it. So I'm very aware of
what it's like to be up against the authorities that
(07:54):
have or seemed to have all the power and you
seem to have none. And as a young person, you know,
there was no movement. There wasn't even a civil rights
movement to speak of, and there was nobody to protect you,
to stand behind you, all the police or men. If
(08:15):
you were raped, you were interviewed by two men who
abused you. I mean, it was there was just no power.
And that's That's what my experience was, and I had
to fight my own fear in order to just keep going.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Just a curious question, how did your parents take this up?
Because were they activists do or because I would suspect
that they had some kind of fueled bill you to
keep going or to have something to say, Particularly in
the fifties, I know that that's a very revolutionary thing
to have a nine year old child, a daughter, if
you will to be out speaking out in that kind
(08:54):
of fashion.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Well, you're absolutely right there. My parents were not activists.
They were very frightened people. I grew up in a
working class Jewish family, and you know, what they wanted
was for me to go to college. I mean that
was the dream of every Jewish parent, was go to college,
get a good job. My parents didn't graduate high school themselves,
(09:19):
so it was very difficult. But they they just didn't understand.
But they didn't try to stop me then, not then,
but later they tried to stop me. They found out
I had written a letter to the New York Times
when I was sixteen about from the band the Bomb Movement.
(09:39):
I never told them that I sent this letter. I
never expected it to be published, but instead It was
published all around the world, and it is one of
the things that got me expelled from an Ivy League
college where I had a scholarship. Right and I was
just a freshman. My parents didn't know I was going
on demonstration. They didn't know I was doing anything. When
(10:01):
I was expelled, I tried to get them to let
me out of the school because they were so prejudiced
against me. They were trying to get me. And I
know it sounds very annoyed, but it's true. I was
very ill. I had spent a year and a half
in bed or a chair from the age of fifteen
(10:22):
to sixteen and a half. When I went off to college,
they knew I was sick. They put me on a
probation where I couldn't cut any classes, which was impossible
because I was too ill to get up to move.
I've been chronically ill all my life and it just
got worse at fifteen. And so when I finally did
get expelled and the school said they would punish me
(10:44):
for being in the band of bomb movement right at
the wrong time in history, and they said they would
teach me a lesson I would never forget, and they did.
I never forgot it and I saw the iron fist
and how it can come down and crush somebody. That's
when my parents crumbled, and that they tried to hide
(11:06):
me because they didn't want the neighbors to see that
I wasn't in school anymore, you know, that kind of nonsense.
And just to add something to the parent thing, when
I was maybe nineteen years old, I met a man,
a Haitian who was black, and my parents would not
talk to me for eight years. That's I mean, they
(11:27):
would not talk to me. If I called them, they
would hang up the phone. They did unbelievably horrible things.
I won't even go into it. They were awful. And
that's just how much support they weren't able to give
me themselves.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Well, that's well shocking, you know, for you to live
that life, and so we to progress on that. You
also have written books, have you? Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Which one is the most current? I'll just start from there.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
The most current is a book called The Handbook for
the Inner Revolution, and that book is under one hundred pages.
Every book that I've written is on one of my websites,
Healing Artsnetwork dot org, and they're all free. And these
books came through me. Music. It's the same thing. I've
(12:15):
got six albums of music, all just came through me.
So I became a channel for the divine. I can
say when I was thirty five years old, all of
a sudden, I mean here, I had been this real
radical Marxist. And when I say a Marxist, I mean
I've read Marx. I understood what he was saying about
(12:37):
the economy. I could see how it has led to
the horrible situation of so many people in our world,
the income inequality and all of the pain. And that's
where I was coming from. And I was a West
Coast coordinator for the Waitress for Houseworld campaign because I
had discovered the absolute misogyny in the movement. You know
(13:00):
that women had no voice, couldn't say anything. We're asked
to do the coffee, you know. So I started, you know,
my own study group, and then I became a member
of the Widgess for Houseworld campaign. But I was really
burnt out on politics deal. It was so rough. There
was a kind of an anger and hostility and infighting
(13:22):
and you know this one putting that one down and
power grabs within the movement. It was not the vision
that I had of what we needed in order to
revolutionize society, to make it a more equal place, kindness
towards everybody. I believe that the purpose of a society
an economy is to meet the needs of people and
(13:46):
the earth, and that's the only reason to have an economy,
not to make profit, but to meet the need. And
don't forget the earth. And so all of this, I
was very, very burnt out and had had some terrible experiences,
many terrible traumatic experiences, and suddenly I started to hear
(14:06):
voices see things. You have to understand. I'm an atheist,
right and I'm starting to hear this inner voice. It's
a little bit shocking. And that was the beginning of
a whole flip into spirituality. But I never lost that
(14:26):
fire in my belly about making this world a better
place for people, and that the purpose of spirituality wasn't
to rise above everybody else and to go to heaven
start to speak. The purpose was to be in a
higher place of consciousness so that you could become more caring,
(14:48):
more understanding, more compassionate. And so I wrote a book.
I can say I wrote it. It's six hundred and
eighty eight pages, called Living with Reality. It's about how
we are, what we could be, and how to get there.
And it's a step by step program of consciousness evolution,
(15:08):
spiritual evolution. But three of those platforms, becoming oneness, becoming accountable,
and becoming mutually supportive is the foundation of what I
call spiritual activists of see inner revolution. And so the
shortest book that I wrote happens to be the most current,
but the most deep, is the Living with Reality.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I want to quickly backtrack because I noticed you said,
and I didn't remember when you jopped my memory about
the burnout in the movement, and I wanted to talk
take a little time to talk about that. Why was
it so necessary for you to write about it? Because
I have heard similar things, and being in the movement myself,
I could see some of those kind of markers going
(15:55):
on in the movement that I have I'm currently in now,
and I can see why. For me, you have as
a defense mechanism is to either stand back or leave
the movement entirely, or protect yourself in ways that you
don't delve too deeply. What we used to say, and
Christian circles love people at a distance. You can love them,
(16:16):
but you don't have to be so intimately involved. You
could kind of just keep a distance so it can
protect your sanity and your spirit in order to continue
doing the work.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
So yeah, I really understand what you're saying. Well, I
didn't write about that experience in the movement. I just
started writing about how we can shift consciousness. But I
can tell you, I guess I could just say this
publicly that what happened is that after devoting my life
(16:47):
to the Wages for Houseworld campaign, because it was about
women having very little power or no power because we
had no money, no wages, and you know there was
a time not that long ago, you know, when women
couldn't have a credit card by themselves. You know, we
were paid. Well, it's still in you know a lot
of income inequality between men and women. But also as
(17:10):
a dragon, men to have women to be dependent. Men
can't strike when women and children don't have enough money.
So I really believed in this movement, and after four
years there's something very weird happened. And it didn't start
with me, but the leader of the movement, who is
a brilliant woman and I really respected her, she started
(17:31):
to cannibalize she went through every Now I'm serious. I
mean this is a fact and it's documented fact. She
started to remove all the leaders of the like Shaild
there was a very strong movement in Toronto, and the
leader of the organization got rid of the leader of
(17:52):
in Toronto. She got rid of the woman who was
running the organization in New York. Actually I was the
second after the one New York. She came to me.
I was on the West coast in California. She pushed
me out. Then she did Toronto. I found out she
did similar things in London, so I had no choice.
(18:12):
They pushed me out and it was all ego. You know,
See I look at it. The oh is that the
problem is ego. It's the way that we care only
about ourselves. We think about ourselves, and it's the survival
mechanism that we developed when we were infants. You know,
(18:33):
how are we going to manipulate the world to get
our needs met? So everybody manipulates the world to get
their needs met, and that becomes associated with survival and
it's very hard for people to break those patterns. So
even though it's destroying our world, you know, people's short
term thinking all knee based thinking, you know what I'm
(18:56):
talking about it right, And then there are these gems
of people who so somehow or other, see past that
rise above that. Whether you're a Christian or you're a spiritual,
it's not spiritual, it doesn't matter. It's that understanding that
we are all one and we need to care for
one another that transcends all of that. And there are
(19:16):
people who really live that life and I really respect that.
But that's that's what happened to me. And I was
so devastated by that experience that I probably hit bottom.
And it opened me up to have a different perspective
and to start to include my spirituality, which I never
(19:39):
thought that I had.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Well to give you a brief primary about how Wedi
and How's began, Median House starts off with me starting
a podcast while I was living on the streets for
over eight years, and to that end, there has been
a concerted effort by mainstream media is to paint the
in ho house community as unsavory, violent criminals, mentally ill.
(20:08):
So to that in I basically created a show that
uplifts the voices and stories of housed people and their
issues with dealing with houselessness. Housing and security and the
realities that are faced that are intersecting with houselessness and poverty.
I started interviewing my friends at the park and then
(20:28):
I expanded outward and it started to get traction from
other in house people in other places that wish there
was a show just like what I had, and it
gave me the inspiration to continue on to keep the
show going.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
That's so amazing THEO. I mean, I so respect what
you're doing.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Thank you, thank you, And why I bring on guests
to connect the dots with the house or houses secure,
or people that are dealing in different movements, to let
them know that there is a connecting thread that's going
on that's running through particularly in these times. You know,
you're watching on the news and all of the hostility
(21:12):
that's going on with ice up against undocumented or people
that are going about their way because a lot of
sometimes these people are not just undocumented. These people are documented,
they have families, They're going minding their business. I watch
them run up on a school. I've seen them that
violently snatch a kid out of parents' arms. I've seen
them just going about just going about their day working
(21:36):
picking out in the fields, running for their lives and
things of that nature.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
It's unreal, isn't it that we're seeing that massive? Can
I throw in something that irks me?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Okay, So I love the fact that a lot of
people are up in arms against what the government is doing,
and I love a lot of people are upset about
the tariffs and the prices and all of that. But
I can't understand how you can say that the price
of goods is the most important thing when you're seeing
(22:09):
the absolute brutality that's being perpetrated against human beings, not
to speak of the fact that we just bond, you know,
of Venezuelan boat, you know. And so even though I'm
glad people are angry because of the things that impact them,
but I'm just stunned that people and there are a
(22:31):
lot of people who are angry about what you've been raising,
and you know, God bless them. But I'm just stunned
at how self centered we still are. You know that
we don't get it. For example, if the person next
to you doesn't have medical help and they cough on you,
(22:51):
you're dead. And so don't you get it, you know
what I mean that you can't you can't separate out
that you know that that we're all one, that we
all have to care for one another. And anyway, I'm sorry,
I just took a little sidetrack.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
But also well, while we're on that sidetrack, one of
the things that hurts me because I have a certain
side eye for the ones that are talking about the
terrorists and things like that, or the former magas and
things of that nature, because of the fact that this
is not the first time this person was president. This
was the second. This is the second time. So you
(23:32):
so you revote for this guy and you are so
shocked and surprised. It's just like it just it's that
that really irks me because you were, okay, we're harming
other people exactly, but when it started to get hurt
you now you are punching the air, you crying, have
ugly cried down the wall, and you know it's not
(23:52):
slinging your you know, you know, you just you just
just combobulated. I just it just bothers me. But what
really hooks Migrits is the fact that all of this
craziness is going on. It's just like the person there
was a play I saw many years ago, and chaos
was going on behind that person, and the person was
standing there presenting to the case of that wasn't what
(24:16):
was going on. It was basically a complete lie. And
and all of everyone's looking like, you know, looking like what,
that's not what's happening. And people are just going on like,
you know, hearing the leaders is saying that it's not true.
There's been multiple news reports showing the opposite of what
the government is saying. And people take that from the
(24:39):
people that are doing this, and they walk away saying, well,
they're just going after legal aliens. They're just going after
illegal if you came to the it's just seeing all
of this.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Not justgal aliens, they're going after criminal Yes, well yeah,
well THEO what about this? All upset that Trump is
in Epstein's you.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Know, birthday, while yeah, what da the hell is going on?
Speaker 3 (25:09):
And and and we we didn't have access Hollywood before
he got elected. We don't know that the guy is
a is a pervert, a womanizer, and a disgusting, amoral
human being. So people are up in arms because he
hasn't released the Epstein transcript. So it's the same thing,
(25:31):
you know, this is the thing they're gonna this is
the hill they're gonna die on. Yeah, right, not not
the abuse that's been going on.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Right, It's just like on the stage, you seeing the
whole building collapsing and they're saying that they're doing construction
and everyone, you know, just like all of this is
going on, and it's just like it's just boggling my mind,
Like and I hate this because it just makes you
question your sanity. It's like, am I really seeing this
or is this something wrong with me? That this is
(25:59):
something like there's a problem with this. It's like it's
it was initially in his first uh, his first election,
when people were like, still willfully this is saying that
doctor King says, and it it sums it up so much.
It says, there's nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity. And I don't know, and that has been
(26:23):
ringing in my head every time the topic of the
man came up. I have had countless conversation I've said,
this man is a problem, this man is dangerous, this
man is a racist, this man is all of these things.
Long before all of the hula bloo that's been out here.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
You know, we're all turned against one another and we
are one.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
I think part of it is there's there's several things
to unpack with this, but one of the things that
it comes down to is that people fed and out
of their fears. And one of the things, despite how
despicable I just test the man, it's that he does
very well is to isolate people's insecurities and fears and
(27:05):
amplify it to such a degree. Because it's not just
you know, they say these outdacious things. They have people
that will diewn the hill on it that goes out
of their way to single people out in day to
day life to hurl the most egregious and insulting things
to them or in situations where violence can take place,
(27:28):
and he's unleashed this in such a way that you know,
you see the reels you see people having to put
up on phones, people just you know, running up or
them spitting on them, punching them or attacking them and
hurling the most, like I said, the most hatefueld things.
You know, there's always has been hate in racism and
(27:51):
things of that nature, and there's no way around that.
But the point of it is he has struck a
nerve in this country that has turned the ugly side
that has been recessed in most of the population or
has been shouted down to such agreed that they've unleashed it.
They've they've let people be proud to be hateful. To
(28:12):
the question where there were blacks that were against Kamala Harris,
I have a say statement, just like the Latinos for Trump,
and that's the farmers for Trump and everyone else that
they voted for Trump that are getting their world's demolished.
Is that people become invested in their own oppression. And
(28:32):
it's similar to what you say, is the fact that
as long as someone else doesn't get the kindness and
empathy that I want and I deserve that kind of empathy,
but not you because you don't deserve it because one
your criminal, your drug addict, your you know, your mentally ill,
(28:53):
whatever it is. That it's different where someone can convince
me that the problem is you, not me, then I
can feel better about, you know, impressing you, even though
we're both going to be oppressed, but at least I'm
not just you know. And it's and sometimes this goes
on in the unhoused community. You will hear some one
house person that's been on House and then they'll look
(29:16):
and they'll lambass some other on House person that may
be suffering from issues of substance or mental health issues,
or they don't understand the full scale of what's going
on with this person's life, and they will make themselves
as the mascot. And people that don't like on House people,
will poor people anyway, will gravitate to them and use
them as the whipping post to use to justify that.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
Right. Oh yeah, that really gets me. You know, they
put up these women to defend Trump or blacks to
defend Trump. It's like, m m oh, okay, I agree
with you, but but you see, what I'm saying is
that it's fundamental to the way that human beings grow up.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
When we come back more with background, Welcome back to
Wodian House. Without further ado, here's the rest of my
talk with Beth.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
You know, I got I wrote a book called God's
Little Aphorisms, and an aphorism for somebody who might not know,
is just like a saying. And so these things would
just come to me, and there'd be a reason that
I would be going through something and this would come
to me. And one thing that came to me was
you cannot clean the air over one house in Los Angeles.
(30:37):
No matter how rich you are, the air outside your
house is going to be polluted. And so this idea
that we can build walls high enough that we can
separate ourselves out from the fate of humanity is insane.
You know. I used to ask because I because I'm
(30:58):
a counselor I'm an intuitively guided counsel or. It just
came to me, and all of a sudden, I started counseling,
and I wasn't trained as a counsel. It just I
just did it. And I just started seeing and understanding
where people were coming from on an emotional level. And
I can see into into people and I see things
from their past and relationships and so on. But it's always,
(31:20):
you know, we have to deal with our not just
what happened to us, but how we reacted to it.
And so people are exactly what you're talking about. Everybody
has trauma in their history. Everybody, I don't care who
you are, and everybody feels oppressed. And everybody is because
(31:41):
the capitalist system, in my opinion, is based on It's
not in my opinion, it's the truth it's based on exploitation.
If I pay you what your labor is worth, I
don't get any profit. And now it's gotten to the
point that there is no relayationship between what you are
(32:04):
doing and the value of what you're producing the money
you're getting, because it's all going to the top. I
heard recently that Elon Musk owns more than fifty two
percent of the American people, and that the top one
percent owns more than ninety two percent. That's the problem,
you know, that is the problem. And the scarcity doesn't
(32:26):
come from a lack of having resources or it's the
way we organize society and how all the profits go up.
And so, you know, I always have felt that if
you're a person like I've been chronically ill all my life,
it's a miracle that I am not on housed. It
really is. I mean, I've been on welfare, you know,
(32:50):
and I've been on Social Security. When Ronald Reagan came
into power in California, he threw everybody off SSI. I
was completely disabled in my twenties, completely disabled, and they
said it's just too bad. And you know, while you're waiting,
(33:10):
how are you going to live?
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Right?
Speaker 3 (33:12):
While I'm appealing, you know. The people who try to
help me said, well, you know you'll win on the appeal,
but what are you going to do in the meantime?
And so I went to the welfare department and I
had fifteen dollars in my pocket and they said how
much money do you have? And I said I had
fifteen dollars and they said that's too much.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, wow, come back in five days.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Oh yes, oh yes, come back in five days. And
then I came back in five days. By this time
I had figured out the system, right, you know, So
this time I said I didn't have any money, but
they said, well, do you have a car. I had
a gas duzzling, ancient, dilapidated car that was a piece
(33:59):
of junk during the you know, the the oil crisis, right,
and it had like the windows couldn't go up and down.
They were electric windows, but they didn't go up and down.
And I had to sit with a box behind my
but I needed it because I couldn't walk, I couldn't
get on a bus. And they said that my car
(34:23):
was worth some outrageous amount of money, which it wasn't,
and that if I had to sell my car and
use up all that money, then I could come back
to the welfare department. And so I said to I
spoke to the supervisor, and I said, this is insane.
You know, I have no money. I haven't been evicted
(34:44):
yet from this tenement that I'm living in, but it's
coming because I'm out of money. And they said, well,
it's too bad because you have to have an eviction notice,
but they are. And the supervisor said to me, the
purpose of all of this is to keep you on welfare.
She admitted it out loud. So you're not going to
(35:05):
get any help here. And I had to go to
work and be in agony, agonizing pain for several hours
a day, typing to make enough money to pay for
the tenement building that I was living in. It was very,
very hard, being disabled and being having no support living
(35:27):
in New York City. You know, it just it just
wasn't easy. And I understand how desperate you can get
and how crazy it can make you. And if people
were cheating on welfare, I understood why they were, because
you couldn't live on what they were paying you.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Again, how it's the propaganda, how language works. They're making
a stink. These people were welfare queens or millionaires living
and Park Avenue on. And it's so infuriating because you
don't understand the issues of trying to survive. And she
(36:07):
tried to make here in Los Angeles because I was
on gr and I was on the disabled part of it,
and I was good for a month two hundred and
twenty one dollars. And how is anyone going to survive
off of two hundred and twenty one dollars a month
to survive to do anything. There's no rent that I
know of, unless you know you're you know, us in
(36:30):
a cardboard condominium. But that's other than that, There's no
way you're going to survive for that and for people
to not understand that. And you've tried to explain this
tool exactly, and it used to really bug me because
there is like in that sincere ignorance of consciential stupidity.
I don't know which what it is is that to
address the scenario I'm going to show. When I was
(36:53):
in college, there was they talk about Gutenberg and printing
of the Bible and the reason why that was so
important and because up to then you got your information
from a source, and the source whatever they say is
in the book. You had to accept it, no questions asked,
(37:15):
no refutation on whatever the facts were, you know. And
it was also as a controlling agents on an economic standpoint,
because if it was they says, the guy says in
the Bible, we need to go to war because we
need more money for the king or the one percent
or whatever. That's what we're going to do. And the
(37:35):
people that were not that could not read, which was
a major part of the population, they just had to
accept it blindly and follow along. And I make this
comparison to today on the rise of add to intellectualism because
a lot I believe I believe that this is one
of the key components on why we have so much hatred,
(37:59):
but also the facts of the fact of the matter
of people pushing against education or pushing against reason, analysis, statistics, science,
the debacle with the rf Kennedy junior year, with this
craziness that he's talking about the funding of well established
(38:19):
medical protocols that fifty years ago that was not in place,
that saved the lives of people. We're going to be
going back fifty years from now trying to re establish
just because of the lunacy of the Charlatans that are
in place, and I believe, and I cannot help but
believe that it's because of the rise of anti intellectualists.
(38:40):
There's people that are proud to be I don't want
to say stupid, but proud to be uneducated, proud to
spout off opinions, and they talking about that, they doing research,
listening to some quack that know that these people are
uneducated and know that they don't know how to parse
and use critical thinking skills to be able to make
a well reasoned, logical conclusion, they'll utilize them and to
(39:04):
make sure there's a lot of emotionalism to it in
order for them to carry on. Then the ideas, which
is why you hear when you hear the people questioning
Trump supporters, their viewpoints are not thought out or there,
or it's very misinformed, or it's the statistics are not
there and it's over blown, or like the idea of
a black on black prime or all of these other
(39:27):
poorly thought out things, because they know people gradutate toward
their fears and prejudices.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Oh, I couldn't agree with you more. It's the lack
of critical thinking is astounding. It's astounding so it's more
than ignorance. It's uh, you know, you can be ignorant
and then get information. Information is available, but we are
not trained to think. Well, I am going to take
(39:55):
this another step, which is that we are not supposed
to think. We're just supposed to do what we're told,
and we will be manipulated by that and we will
be exploited emotionally. And I agree with that. There was
something I was going to say about this lack of
(40:16):
critical thinking, but well, yeah, I mean they're going after Harvard, right,
it's the symbol. I agree with you completely.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
There's nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidly,
and that's where we are, you know.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
So I would like to ask you a question. Okay,
do you have any brilliant ideas about what to do
for the unhaused.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
I don't know how brilliant they are. I do have
some ideas that I do believe that could turn the
tide and understanding unhouse people because I'm an educator, I
was a former educator. So one of the things that
I know, which is why it really really cooks my grid,
(41:00):
is the rise of intellectualism because I was trained by
old school teachers. And even though I'm coming from a
different generation, I had older school teachers that would go
to take you to task on learning basic elements of
critical thinking skills. And as I embarked on my own
(41:21):
teaching career, I noticed that skill set was slowly fading
away in the curriculums of schools. And right now, what
I see is that there's a pernicious resistant toward critical
thinking understanding basics like the civics of our country. And
(41:42):
I was telling them how old I was when I
was going to school. You could not graduate from elementary
school without you taking a Civics test in understanding the
branches of government. You could not graduate from high school.
I couldn't graduate from high school in my history class
until I took a civic lesson. And I see now
(42:04):
that people cannot understand the most basic things of our
government and how it works, the nuts and bolts. And
because of that, it's because that's that earth of aggressive
focus on the kind of thing that people can't make
the most next logical steps or make them understand how
the wheel works where. And this is and I'm going
(42:27):
to bring this back home to the house community. The
key to understanding about the unhoused community is you have
to have education. You have to understand the realities of it,
not a blanket emotionalism. Understanding how our systems create the
unhoused community, how our disdain of on house and poor
(42:51):
people motivates politicians to do the bare minimum, and also
their ability to create punitative law against dunhouse and poor people.
And once you understand that and the civics of understanding
how our systems work and we understand, we're holding more
of the politicians to task on creating humane solutions like
(43:14):
for example, support of housing, meeting people wherever they are.
But we have to have an honest conversation on how
we weaponize mental health and substance usage. They're symptoms, they're
not the solution. They're not the cause of what's going on,
and it plays a part. When you're in a patriarchy
in a capitalistic society, you're going to have things that's
(43:37):
going to go awry. But we also have to be
humane and have the impanty gene reinstituted in understanding that
we're dealing with human beings, not automatons. But you know
that's just the first thing.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, well, you know One of the things that I
that you're alluding to, which I think connects to something
that I've also believe, is that the capitalist system itself
and the government as it's hand, wants the people to
suffer if they don't fit. They want people to suffer. So,
(44:15):
for instance, if you were disabled or ill, as I
have been, the government doesn't want you to get comfortable
because they don't want everybody to say, Hey, I'm disabled.
I don't want to work all those hours. I don't
want to work fifty hours a week. I don't want
to work in a factory and lose my arm because
(44:35):
I was involved in the worker's movement. I don't want
I don't want these experiences. You know I also have needs. Well,
that's anathema that's going to make the whole system collapse
if everybody says, I will not be treated in this way, right,
the uprising of everybody. So what they do is they
make sure that the people who who are disabled or
(44:59):
who are without resources are going to be miserable, and
so that keeps everybody else in line. It's like a
whip to everybody else. You see what happened to Mary
Jane when she could you know, When I worked with
a phone company in Cleveland, the rules for the women
(45:20):
who were working there were so stringent about not taking
any days off for being sick. A one woman died
at her job. She just dropped in because she could.
She was afraid to take a sick day. The treatment
of people, it's not just the un how's it the
treatment of everybody in our system, in the factories, in
(45:42):
the offices. What people are subjected to. They want you
to shut up and just keep working until you drop
because if you just if you think that you might
be able to do better in a different way, you're
not going to go along with what's being done you.
So that's what we do, those of us who are
(46:05):
really at the bottom of society, create discipline for everybody else.
You see what's going to happen if you do this,
this is what's going to happen to you. You're gonna
end up incarcerated as an unhoused person, because it evidently
it's a crime now to be unhoused, right, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Or worth erase, that's the thing too. One of the
things that we we used to stay on the street
is that they want to believe themselves that they are
compassionate that life. For example, Mayor Basque has representatives explaining
about inside Safe. Her solution is supposed to be humane
and compassionate. She goes upon on house people in their encampments,
(46:49):
tells them that they can go to this place, this hotel.
They'll put them up, but you cannot come back here
and they'll take their things. You got to throw give
a ten or whatever, throw it away, take a photo.
You know that you are helping and you're not being
aggressive or violent against the person. The person has very
minimal choices because they know that they're going to have
(47:12):
to take it, because if they don't take it, they're
going to be facing police activity, law enforcement of harassment.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
And you can't take your dog.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Or you can't even take you know, other things that
you have. For example, you have a bike that you
might not be able to take it. You maybe only
have to take two bags. It depends on where the
hotel there is. But the reality is is once that's
done the pr campaign, you will see clips of Mayor
bass Is talking about street houselessnesses down. We're getting on
(47:41):
house people back in homes. It's not acceptable to keep
them out on the street. It's a two word it's way,
but they erase and then when you come back to
the same spot, they got these big fences there, or
they got hostile architecture put up there. The point is
that when the person gets into this place we call
housing purgatory, they don't have solutions to get them to
(48:02):
the housing that they claim or so they're staying there
in limbo, or if they're having to face stringent staff
or punitive rules. And you know, unhoused people are wanting
the solution of they want housing. They don't want to
go through all of the hoops. Give them housing, so
to help them get back on their feet, that would
(48:23):
be simple. But no, you got to go through the shelters,
you got to go through the headaches, you got to
go through disrespect, you got to go through everything. So
they can say that that they're helping you, but the
reality is that they're continually giving you on that limbo.
And most unhoused people, when you hear them say that
they don't want any help, it's because they know how
exhausting the help that they're going to receive. That's an
(48:46):
interesting point, and it's frustrating because they give up everything
because they were promised they're going to get the help
that they need, and it doesn't end up working that way.
And then you go into like what they say the shelters,
and those shelters are very unsafe, very disrespectful. The staff
is talking to you out of the side of the neck,
(49:07):
and you don't want to be disrespectful, or you don't
want to have to go through curfews, or you don't
have to go through the beating kind of treatment that
you have to go through. And people that have been
abused or have dealing in the abusive situation and are
trying to flee that that doesn't work well in their
psychic or their mental health. You know who wants to
(49:28):
go back to another abusive situation. And it's like trying
to tell these leaders that it's like they're talking to
a brick wall. The end result of that is these
people who are service resistant, we have solutions for them,
and they don't want to take the solution. They can
hear all of the horrible things that the unhoused person
is telling them and they'll walk away with that, and
(49:49):
then they will spread that to the communities who see
unhouse people. Then that creates that negative vibe that they
have and then because they got it pumped in by
people who supposedly are supposed to help them, and they'll
listen to them rather than the experiences of unhouse people.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
That's such a good point, you know. To me, the
solution to all of it is to have real democracy
in our economy and in our society, and that means
you have to have people speaking about what they actually
need instead of being told what they need and you know,
having somebody else who organize it for them. So that
(50:27):
we should have workers on the boards of directors of
every company. You know, you're working there, you know what's
going on. You should have something to say about it.
But it's the same thing. I mean if you have
conferences about people but not with them.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, you know what.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
I mean, they know you. The people who are in
these situations have way more experience and understanding of what's
going on.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
Now.
Speaker 3 (50:54):
Some of them are going to you know, be scamming.
That's a reality of the way.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
That's a human condition.
Speaker 3 (51:03):
Yeah, well, yeah, that's the human But there are people
who aren't and who really have something to offer, and
we are wasting people's gifts, you know, we're wasting their intelligence,
we're wasting their energy rather than incorporating, and then you
make them other right, So it's them, And it's in
(51:24):
my book Living with Reality, and also in the handbook
for the Interrevolution. I start out with oneness means I
am you, I am that, not I am not that,
and that's what we what our society tries to do.
It's like, well, I'm not like that? Oh really, really
are you not like that? And you know, I know
a lot of people who are not un has, but
(51:44):
not because they are any more well off mentally than
the people who are, but because they were lucky that
they had parents who supported them, or they had a
husband or a wife, or somebody rescued them. You know.
It's it's it's not like we're all we're that different.
Deep down inside, we're all pretty much the same and
(52:05):
have the same kind of games, the same kind of mentality.
And that's the oh why I believe in the Inner Revolution.
We have to change consciousness. We have to change the
way people see themselves and one another. We have to
get people to understand that we cannot benefit at the
cost of another human being, or of the earth for
(52:26):
that matter.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Well that's like I say, you know this is we
can go on and on. I think this is a
good place to in the conversation. And I would like
to invite you back to further the discussion on your
other books and to see what other developments that we're
going on in this crazy time, because I have a
funny feeling that we're going to have some more crazier
(52:48):
times with this president coming.
Speaker 3 (52:53):
Oh yeah, well, and you know it's not just him.
It's like, what are we fighting for? What are we
fighting for? We can't go back to the way it was.
It was that shit too, you know, let's get honest
about it. This wasn't any good. So I would love
to come back there. You just invite me and all.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Be there, perfect, perfect. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you so much to Beth for her time and insight.
You can learn more about her work and check out
her books and social media at the links in the description.
(53:32):
And that brings us to the end of another episode
of Weedian House. Don't forget to vote for us and
the Signal Awards. The link is in the description of
this episode, and voting will remain open until October ninth.
If you have a story you'd like to share, please
reach out to me at Wiedianhouse at gmail dot com,
(53:52):
at Wdianhouse on Instagram. Until then, may we again meet
in the light of understanding. HOWS is a production of iHeartRadio.
It is written, hosted, and created by me Theo Henderson,
our producers Jamie Loftus, Hailee Fager, Katie Fischer, and Lyra Smith.
(54:12):
Our editor is Adam Watt, our engineer is Joel Jerome,
and our local art is also by Katie Fisher. Thank
you for listening.
Previously on A Weedy Young House.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
There is such an importance to having strong, stable, local
food economies. A lot of the reasons why you spoke
about earlier is that those farmers need that support to
keep growing the food. And if we do not have
those farmers growing food, then we will all be hungry.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Regardless of your status in life.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So, you know, stabilizing those communities and then add on
to that the health and wellness that comes from eating
nutrient rich foods that haven't been traveling for miles or
been sitting in a plastic bag for days and days
on end. And we know that when there are healthy communities,
they are going to do better in all areas of life.
(00:41):
And so we are here to support those farmers and
make sure that they get support, but also support our
communities making sure that they can be part of that.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Welcome to Wesian Howse. I'm your host, Theo Henderson. This week,
we're talking about the importance of civic activism and have
the perfect guest to talk about it with in a
moment that is so desperately needed. Before we get into
today's episode, some exciting news. Weezian Howes have been nominated
(01:22):
for a Signal Award, a podcast industry award that honors
the best shows in the medium. If you have a second,
we need your vote to get to the finish line.
Go to the link in the description of this episode
and vote for Weedian Howse in the Activism, Public Service
and Social Impact category. It's an easy way to support
(01:45):
the show, and voting is open until October ninth. And
now Here's on House News. I will title this one.
No one talks about this reality anymore. The uptick of
aggressive sweeps targeting the un housed is not a new phenomenon. However,
(02:08):
the amount of targeted sweeps against the unhoused at the
direction of executive orders from California Governor Gavin Newsom and
President Trump has given inspiration to many other places. Currently,
Los Angeles is the center of an aggressive removal of
(02:28):
unhoused people. Last Monday, September twenty ninth, park rangers targeted
a long established unhoused community Arroyo Seco Parkway. Unhoused residents
have claimed that park rangers have been in menacing presence
in the past week. This tactic, known among many unhoused members,
(02:50):
is used and known as forced removal. The goal is
to get them to self evict. This is based on
the number of times an individual has had negative interactions
with law enforcement. Sweeps don't get mentioned in the light
of the unhoused perspective by mainstream media. Usually, complaints driven
(03:12):
by house residents sets in a series of motions by
the city leaders and law enforcement to swoop in and
cause more trauma to the unhoused until the next complaint
comes in. However, the residents at the Arroyo Seco Parkway
are trying to mobilize to protest against these sweeps. The
(03:34):
question I have is how can other unhoused community members
protect themselves in places such as San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco,
Omaha City, Fremont, East Hollywood, South La Pima County, Chicago, Annapolis,
or all of Oregon. These are places that have already
(03:55):
started the houseless purge. I believe this topic needs to
be explored more, and Weei and Howe's will continue to
explore this in future episodes. And that's un Houses. When
we come back, we'll chat with activists and author Beth Green.
(04:22):
Welcome back to Weedian Howes. I'm THEO Henderson. If anyone's
life is an open book, it's Beth Green's. She's a
lifelong activist who specialize in analyzing our power structure, trains
individuals to accept injustice and remain passive in the face
of oppression. From a young age, she's spoken out about injustice,
(04:46):
and she's here to tell us how to unlearned passivity
and take back control. Here's our talk. Here we are,
miss Beth Green. Can you tell us a little bit
about yourself?
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Well, you knew I was thinking, because it's you're a
title we the unhoused. I've never actually been unhoused, but
I have been living in tenements, slums, really terrible scary
places in New York City. So I can relate to
being in a building there you walk down the stairs
and there's so much urine that you could slip down,
(05:20):
or having their ceiling falling in, or you know, living
on the Bowery which is like skid row, and having
to walk past men strewn in front of my front
door with the police lock in my hand in order
to get to the bathroom in the hall. So I
know a little bit about what it's like to be underhoused.
(05:41):
Let's sort it this way, and how frightening it is
and I can only just imagine what it's like for
people who are like living in a car or even
more vulnerable situations. So I am a musician, I'm a
counselor a spiritual teacher. But I've also been activists since
I was a little girl, and I am very, very
(06:05):
dedicated to trying to make the world a better place.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
And I was reading that you auent activism around twelve
years old, if I correct, if my memory serves me correctly.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Nine Actually I started at nine. Yes, that's when they
threatened to expel me from elementary school.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Can you elaborate on why they wanted to throw you
out of elementary school?
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Well, yes, if you understand the times. It was nineteen
fifty four. Senator Joseph McCarthy was going after you know,
the government call everybody communists. People were being thrown in
prison and so and I looked at that, and I said,
there's something wrong with this picture, right. So I was
really looking into things, and I started reading about the
(06:47):
Spanish Civil War, and I saw about the lack of
justice and society. And they added the words under God
to the pledge of allegiance in nineteen fifty four. It
wasn't in there before, and I said, this is a
betrayal of our constitution, the separation of church and state,
and so I refused to salute the flag. And that's
the first time that anybody actually tried to expel me
(07:11):
from anything. But that was just the beginning of a
rather fraud career of you know, I became what I
called the socialist, you know, when I was twelve. But
that was about equality, treating people decently. It wasn't about
becoming you know, Stalin or anything like that, and that
(07:32):
was not approved of. I did get expelled actually from
college when I was just over sixteen, because of being
in the band the bomb movement at a time then
nobody much was doing it. So I'm very aware of
what it's like to be up against the authorities that
(07:54):
have or seemed to have all the power and you
seem to have none. And as a young person, you know,
there was no movement. There wasn't even a civil rights
movement to speak of, and there was nobody to protect you,
to stand behind you, all the police or men. If
(08:15):
you were raped, you were interviewed by two men who
abused you. I mean, it was there was just no power.
And that's That's what my experience was, and I had
to fight my own fear in order to just keep going.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Just a curious question, how did your parents take this up?
Because were they activists do or because I would suspect
that they had some kind of fueled bill you to
keep going or to have something to say, Particularly in
the fifties, I know that that's a very revolutionary thing
to have a nine year old child, a daughter, if
you will to be out speaking out in that kind
(08:54):
of fashion.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Well, you're absolutely right there. My parents were not activists.
They were very frightened people. I grew up in a
working class Jewish family, and you know, what they wanted
was for me to go to college. I mean that
was the dream of every Jewish parent, was go to college,
get a good job. My parents didn't graduate high school themselves,
(09:19):
so it was very difficult. But they they just didn't understand.
But they didn't try to stop me then, not then,
but later they tried to stop me. They found out
I had written a letter to the New York Times
when I was sixteen about from the band the Bomb Movement.
(09:39):
I never told them that I sent this letter. I
never expected it to be published, but instead It was
published all around the world, and it is one of
the things that got me expelled from an Ivy League
college where I had a scholarship. Right and I was
just a freshman. My parents didn't know I was going
on demonstration. They didn't know I was doing anything. When
(10:01):
I was expelled, I tried to get them to let
me out of the school because they were so prejudiced
against me. They were trying to get me. And I
know it sounds very annoyed, but it's true. I was
very ill. I had spent a year and a half
in bed or a chair from the age of fifteen
(10:22):
to sixteen and a half. When I went off to college,
they knew I was sick. They put me on a
probation where I couldn't cut any classes, which was impossible
because I was too ill to get up to move.
I've been chronically ill all my life and it just
got worse at fifteen. And so when I finally did
get expelled and the school said they would punish me
(10:44):
for being in the band of bomb movement right at
the wrong time in history, and they said they would
teach me a lesson I would never forget, and they did.
I never forgot it and I saw the iron fist
and how it can come down and crush somebody. That's
when my parents crumbled, and that they tried to hide
(11:06):
me because they didn't want the neighbors to see that
I wasn't in school anymore, you know, that kind of nonsense.
And just to add something to the parent thing, when
I was maybe nineteen years old, I met a man,
a Haitian who was black, and my parents would not
talk to me for eight years. That's I mean, they
(11:27):
would not talk to me. If I called them, they
would hang up the phone. They did unbelievably horrible things.
I won't even go into it. They were awful. And
that's just how much support they weren't able to give
me themselves.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Well, that's well shocking, you know, for you to live
that life, and so we to progress on that. You
also have written books, have you? Is that correct?
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Which one is the most current? I'll just start from there.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
The most current is a book called The Handbook for
the Inner Revolution, and that book is under one hundred pages.
Every book that I've written is on one of my websites,
Healing Artsnetwork dot org, and they're all free. And these
books came through me. Music. It's the same thing. I've
(12:15):
got six albums of music, all just came through me.
So I became a channel for the divine. I can
say when I was thirty five years old, all of
a sudden, I mean here, I had been this real
radical Marxist. And when I say a Marxist, I mean
I've read Marx. I understood what he was saying about
(12:37):
the economy. I could see how it has led to
the horrible situation of so many people in our world,
the income inequality and all of the pain. And that's
where I was coming from. And I was a West
Coast coordinator for the Waitress for Houseworld campaign because I
had discovered the absolute misogyny in the movement. You know
(13:00):
that women had no voice, couldn't say anything. We're asked
to do the coffee, you know. So I started, you know,
my own study group, and then I became a member
of the Widgess for Houseworld campaign. But I was really
burnt out on politics deal. It was so rough. There
was a kind of an anger and hostility and infighting
(13:22):
and you know this one putting that one down and
power grabs within the movement. It was not the vision
that I had of what we needed in order to
revolutionize society, to make it a more equal place, kindness
towards everybody. I believe that the purpose of a society
an economy is to meet the needs of people and
(13:46):
the earth, and that's the only reason to have an economy,
not to make profit, but to meet the need. And
don't forget the earth. And so all of this, I
was very, very burnt out and had had some terrible experiences,
many terrible traumatic experiences, and suddenly I started to hear
(14:06):
voices see things. You have to understand. I'm an atheist,
right and I'm starting to hear this inner voice. It's
a little bit shocking. And that was the beginning of
a whole flip into spirituality. But I never lost that
(14:26):
fire in my belly about making this world a better
place for people, and that the purpose of spirituality wasn't
to rise above everybody else and to go to heaven
start to speak. The purpose was to be in a
higher place of consciousness so that you could become more caring,
(14:48):
more understanding, more compassionate. And so I wrote a book.
I can say I wrote it. It's six hundred and
eighty eight pages, called Living with Reality. It's about how
we are, what we could be, and how to get there.
And it's a step by step program of consciousness evolution,
(15:08):
spiritual evolution. But three of those platforms, becoming oneness, becoming accountable,
and becoming mutually supportive is the foundation of what I
call spiritual activists of see inner revolution. And so the
shortest book that I wrote happens to be the most current,
but the most deep, is the Living with Reality.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I want to quickly backtrack because I noticed you said,
and I didn't remember when you jopped my memory about
the burnout in the movement, and I wanted to talk
take a little time to talk about that. Why was
it so necessary for you to write about it? Because
I have heard similar things, and being in the movement myself,
I could see some of those kind of markers going
(15:55):
on in the movement that I have I'm currently in now,
and I can see why. For me, you have as
a defense mechanism is to either stand back or leave
the movement entirely, or protect yourself in ways that you
don't delve too deeply. What we used to say, and
Christian circles love people at a distance. You can love them,
(16:16):
but you don't have to be so intimately involved. You
could kind of just keep a distance so it can
protect your sanity and your spirit in order to continue
doing the work.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
So yeah, I really understand what you're saying. Well, I
didn't write about that experience in the movement. I just
started writing about how we can shift consciousness. But I
can tell you, I guess I could just say this
publicly that what happened is that after devoting my life
(16:47):
to the Wages for Houseworld campaign, because it was about
women having very little power or no power because we
had no money, no wages, and you know there was
a time not that long ago, you know, when women
couldn't have a credit card by themselves. You know, we
were paid. Well, it's still in you know a lot
of income inequality between men and women. But also as
(17:10):
a dragon, men to have women to be dependent. Men
can't strike when women and children don't have enough money.
So I really believed in this movement, and after four
years there's something very weird happened. And it didn't start
with me, but the leader of the movement, who is
a brilliant woman and I really respected her, she started
(17:31):
to cannibalize she went through every Now I'm serious. I
mean this is a fact and it's documented fact. She
started to remove all the leaders of the like Shaild
there was a very strong movement in Toronto, and the
leader of the organization got rid of the leader of
(17:52):
in Toronto. She got rid of the woman who was
running the organization in New York. Actually I was the
second after the one New York. She came to me.
I was on the West coast in California. She pushed
me out. Then she did Toronto. I found out she
did similar things in London, so I had no choice.
(18:12):
They pushed me out and it was all ego. You know,
See I look at it. The oh is that the
problem is ego. It's the way that we care only
about ourselves. We think about ourselves, and it's the survival
mechanism that we developed when we were infants. You know,
(18:33):
how are we going to manipulate the world to get
our needs met? So everybody manipulates the world to get
their needs met, and that becomes associated with survival and
it's very hard for people to break those patterns. So
even though it's destroying our world, you know, people's short
term thinking all knee based thinking, you know what I'm
(18:56):
talking about it right, And then there are these gems
of people who so somehow or other, see past that
rise above that. Whether you're a Christian or you're a spiritual,
it's not spiritual, it doesn't matter. It's that understanding that
we are all one and we need to care for
one another that transcends all of that. And there are
(19:16):
people who really live that life and I really respect that.
But that's that's what happened to me. And I was
so devastated by that experience that I probably hit bottom.
And it opened me up to have a different perspective
and to start to include my spirituality, which I never
(19:39):
thought that I had.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Well to give you a brief primary about how Wedi
and How's began, Median House starts off with me starting
a podcast while I was living on the streets for
over eight years, and to that end, there has been
a concerted effort by mainstream media is to paint the
in ho house community as unsavory, violent criminals, mentally ill.
(20:08):
So to that in I basically created a show that
uplifts the voices and stories of housed people and their
issues with dealing with houselessness. Housing and security and the
realities that are faced that are intersecting with houselessness and poverty.
I started interviewing my friends at the park and then
(20:28):
I expanded outward and it started to get traction from
other in house people in other places that wish there
was a show just like what I had, and it
gave me the inspiration to continue on to keep the
show going.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
That's so amazing THEO. I mean, I so respect what
you're doing.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Thank you, thank you, And why I bring on guests
to connect the dots with the house or houses secure,
or people that are dealing in different movements, to let
them know that there is a connecting thread that's going
on that's running through particularly in these times. You know,
you're watching on the news and all of the hostility
(21:12):
that's going on with ice up against undocumented or people
that are going about their way because a lot of
sometimes these people are not just undocumented. These people are documented,
they have families, They're going minding their business. I watch
them run up on a school. I've seen them that
violently snatch a kid out of parents' arms. I've seen
them just going about just going about their day working
(21:36):
picking out in the fields, running for their lives and
things of that nature.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
It's unreal, isn't it that we're seeing that massive? Can
I throw in something that irks me?
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Okay, So I love the fact that a lot of
people are up in arms against what the government is doing,
and I love a lot of people are upset about
the tariffs and the prices and all of that. But
I can't understand how you can say that the price
of goods is the most important thing when you're seeing
(22:09):
the absolute brutality that's being perpetrated against human beings, not
to speak of the fact that we just bond, you know,
of Venezuelan boat, you know. And so even though I'm
glad people are angry because of the things that impact them,
but I'm just stunned that people and there are a
(22:31):
lot of people who are angry about what you've been raising,
and you know, God bless them. But I'm just stunned
at how self centered we still are. You know that
we don't get it. For example, if the person next
to you doesn't have medical help and they cough on you,
(22:51):
you're dead. And so don't you get it, you know
what I mean that you can't you can't separate out
that you know that that we're all one, that we
all have to care for one another. And anyway, I'm sorry,
I just took a little sidetrack.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
But also well, while we're on that sidetrack, one of
the things that hurts me because I have a certain
side eye for the ones that are talking about the
terrorists and things like that, or the former magas and
things of that nature, because of the fact that this
is not the first time this person was president. This
was the second. This is the second time. So you
(23:32):
so you revote for this guy and you are so
shocked and surprised. It's just like it just it's that
that really irks me because you were, okay, we're harming
other people exactly, but when it started to get hurt
you now you are punching the air, you crying, have
ugly cried down the wall, and you know it's not
(23:52):
slinging your you know, you know, you just you just
just combobulated. I just it just bothers me. But what
really hooks Migrits is the fact that all of this
craziness is going on. It's just like the person there
was a play I saw many years ago, and chaos
was going on behind that person, and the person was
standing there presenting to the case of that wasn't what
(24:16):
was going on. It was basically a complete lie. And
and all of everyone's looking like, you know, looking like what,
that's not what's happening. And people are just going on like,
you know, hearing the leaders is saying that it's not true.
There's been multiple news reports showing the opposite of what
the government is saying. And people take that from the
(24:39):
people that are doing this, and they walk away saying, well,
they're just going after legal aliens. They're just going after
illegal if you came to the it's just seeing all
of this.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Not justgal aliens, they're going after criminal Yes, well yeah,
well THEO what about this? All upset that Trump is
in Epstein's you.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Know, birthday, while yeah, what da the hell is going on?
Speaker 3 (25:09):
And and and we we didn't have access Hollywood before
he got elected. We don't know that the guy is
a is a pervert, a womanizer, and a disgusting, amoral
human being. So people are up in arms because he
hasn't released the Epstein transcript. So it's the same thing,
(25:31):
you know, this is the thing they're gonna this is
the hill they're gonna die on. Yeah, right, not not
the abuse that's been going on.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Right, It's just like on the stage, you seeing the
whole building collapsing and they're saying that they're doing construction
and everyone, you know, just like all of this is
going on, and it's just like it's just boggling my mind,
Like and I hate this because it just makes you
question your sanity. It's like, am I really seeing this
or is this something wrong with me? That this is
(25:59):
something like there's a problem with this. It's like it's
it was initially in his first uh, his first election,
when people were like, still willfully this is saying that
doctor King says, and it it sums it up so much.
It says, there's nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity. And I don't know, and that has been
(26:23):
ringing in my head every time the topic of the
man came up. I have had countless conversation I've said,
this man is a problem, this man is dangerous, this
man is a racist, this man is all of these things.
Long before all of the hula bloo that's been out here.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
You know, we're all turned against one another and we
are one.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
I think part of it is there's there's several things
to unpack with this, but one of the things that
it comes down to is that people fed and out
of their fears. And one of the things, despite how
despicable I just test the man, it's that he does
very well is to isolate people's insecurities and fears and
(27:05):
amplify it to such a degree. Because it's not just
you know, they say these outdacious things. They have people
that will diewn the hill on it that goes out
of their way to single people out in day to
day life to hurl the most egregious and insulting things
to them or in situations where violence can take place,
(27:28):
and he's unleashed this in such a way that you know,
you see the reels you see people having to put
up on phones, people just you know, running up or
them spitting on them, punching them or attacking them and
hurling the most, like I said, the most hatefueld things.
You know, there's always has been hate in racism and
(27:51):
things of that nature, and there's no way around that.
But the point of it is he has struck a
nerve in this country that has turned the ugly side
that has been recessed in most of the population or
has been shouted down to such agreed that they've unleashed it.
They've they've let people be proud to be hateful. To
(28:12):
the question where there were blacks that were against Kamala Harris,
I have a say statement, just like the Latinos for Trump,
and that's the farmers for Trump and everyone else that
they voted for Trump that are getting their world's demolished.
Is that people become invested in their own oppression. And
(28:32):
it's similar to what you say, is the fact that
as long as someone else doesn't get the kindness and
empathy that I want and I deserve that kind of empathy,
but not you because you don't deserve it because one
your criminal, your drug addict, your you know, your mentally ill,
(28:53):
whatever it is. That it's different where someone can convince
me that the problem is you, not me, then I
can feel better about, you know, impressing you, even though
we're both going to be oppressed, but at least I'm
not just you know. And it's and sometimes this goes
on in the unhoused community. You will hear some one
house person that's been on House and then they'll look
(29:16):
and they'll lambass some other on House person that may
be suffering from issues of substance or mental health issues,
or they don't understand the full scale of what's going
on with this person's life, and they will make themselves
as the mascot. And people that don't like on House people,
will poor people anyway, will gravitate to them and use
them as the whipping post to use to justify that.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
Right. Oh yeah, that really gets me. You know, they
put up these women to defend Trump or blacks to
defend Trump. It's like, m m oh, okay, I agree
with you, but but you see, what I'm saying is
that it's fundamental to the way that human beings grow up.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
When we come back more with background, Welcome back to
Wodian House. Without further ado, here's the rest of my
talk with Beth.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
You know, I got I wrote a book called God's
Little Aphorisms, and an aphorism for somebody who might not know,
is just like a saying. And so these things would
just come to me, and there'd be a reason that
I would be going through something and this would come
to me. And one thing that came to me was
you cannot clean the air over one house in Los Angeles.
(30:37):
No matter how rich you are, the air outside your
house is going to be polluted. And so this idea
that we can build walls high enough that we can
separate ourselves out from the fate of humanity is insane.
You know. I used to ask because I because I'm
(30:58):
a counselor I'm an intuitively guided counsel or. It just
came to me, and all of a sudden, I started counseling,
and I wasn't trained as a counsel. It just I
just did it. And I just started seeing and understanding
where people were coming from on an emotional level. And
I can see into into people and I see things
from their past and relationships and so on. But it's always,
(31:20):
you know, we have to deal with our not just
what happened to us, but how we reacted to it.
And so people are exactly what you're talking about. Everybody
has trauma in their history. Everybody, I don't care who
you are, and everybody feels oppressed. And everybody is because
(31:41):
the capitalist system, in my opinion, is based on It's
not in my opinion, it's the truth it's based on exploitation.
If I pay you what your labor is worth, I
don't get any profit. And now it's gotten to the
point that there is no relayationship between what you are
(32:04):
doing and the value of what you're producing the money
you're getting, because it's all going to the top. I
heard recently that Elon Musk owns more than fifty two
percent of the American people, and that the top one
percent owns more than ninety two percent. That's the problem,
you know, that is the problem. And the scarcity doesn't
(32:26):
come from a lack of having resources or it's the
way we organize society and how all the profits go up.
And so, you know, I always have felt that if
you're a person like I've been chronically ill all my life,
it's a miracle that I am not on housed. It
really is. I mean, I've been on welfare, you know,
(32:50):
and I've been on Social Security. When Ronald Reagan came
into power in California, he threw everybody off SSI. I
was completely disabled in my twenties, completely disabled, and they
said it's just too bad. And you know, while you're waiting,
(33:10):
how are you going to live?
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Right?
Speaker 3 (33:12):
While I'm appealing, you know. The people who try to
help me said, well, you know you'll win on the appeal,
but what are you going to do in the meantime?
And so I went to the welfare department and I
had fifteen dollars in my pocket and they said how
much money do you have? And I said I had
fifteen dollars and they said that's too much.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, wow, come back in five days.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Oh yes, oh yes, come back in five days. And
then I came back in five days. By this time
I had figured out the system, right, you know, So
this time I said I didn't have any money, but
they said, well, do you have a car. I had
a gas duzzling, ancient, dilapidated car that was a piece
(33:59):
of junk during the you know, the the oil crisis, right,
and it had like the windows couldn't go up and down.
They were electric windows, but they didn't go up and down.
And I had to sit with a box behind my
but I needed it because I couldn't walk, I couldn't
get on a bus. And they said that my car
(34:23):
was worth some outrageous amount of money, which it wasn't,
and that if I had to sell my car and
use up all that money, then I could come back
to the welfare department. And so I said to I
spoke to the supervisor, and I said, this is insane.
You know, I have no money. I haven't been evicted
(34:44):
yet from this tenement that I'm living in, but it's
coming because I'm out of money. And they said, well,
it's too bad because you have to have an eviction notice,
but they are. And the supervisor said to me, the
purpose of all of this is to keep you on welfare.
She admitted it out loud. So you're not going to
(35:05):
get any help here. And I had to go to
work and be in agony, agonizing pain for several hours
a day, typing to make enough money to pay for
the tenement building that I was living in. It was very,
very hard, being disabled and being having no support living
(35:27):
in New York City. You know, it just it just
wasn't easy. And I understand how desperate you can get
and how crazy it can make you. And if people
were cheating on welfare, I understood why they were, because
you couldn't live on what they were paying you.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Again, how it's the propaganda, how language works. They're making
a stink. These people were welfare queens or millionaires living
and Park Avenue on. And it's so infuriating because you
don't understand the issues of trying to survive. And she
(36:07):
tried to make here in Los Angeles because I was
on gr and I was on the disabled part of it,
and I was good for a month two hundred and
twenty one dollars. And how is anyone going to survive
off of two hundred and twenty one dollars a month
to survive to do anything. There's no rent that I
know of, unless you know you're you know, us in
(36:30):
a cardboard condominium. But that's other than that, There's no
way you're going to survive for that and for people
to not understand that. And you've tried to explain this
tool exactly, and it used to really bug me because
there is like in that sincere ignorance of consciential stupidity.
I don't know which what it is is that to
address the scenario I'm going to show. When I was
(36:53):
in college, there was they talk about Gutenberg and printing
of the Bible and the reason why that was so
important and because up to then you got your information
from a source, and the source whatever they say is
in the book. You had to accept it, no questions asked,
(37:15):
no refutation on whatever the facts were, you know. And
it was also as a controlling agents on an economic standpoint,
because if it was they says, the guy says in
the Bible, we need to go to war because we
need more money for the king or the one percent
or whatever. That's what we're going to do. And the
(37:35):
people that were not that could not read, which was
a major part of the population, they just had to
accept it blindly and follow along. And I make this
comparison to today on the rise of add to intellectualism because
a lot I believe I believe that this is one
of the key components on why we have so much hatred,
(37:59):
but also the facts of the fact of the matter
of people pushing against education or pushing against reason, analysis, statistics, science,
the debacle with the rf Kennedy junior year, with this
craziness that he's talking about the funding of well established
(38:19):
medical protocols that fifty years ago that was not in place,
that saved the lives of people. We're going to be
going back fifty years from now trying to re establish
just because of the lunacy of the Charlatans that are
in place, and I believe, and I cannot help but
believe that it's because of the rise of anti intellectualists.
(38:40):
There's people that are proud to be I don't want
to say stupid, but proud to be uneducated, proud to
spout off opinions, and they talking about that, they doing research,
listening to some quack that know that these people are
uneducated and know that they don't know how to parse
and use critical thinking skills to be able to make
a well reasoned, logical conclusion, they'll utilize them and to
(39:04):
make sure there's a lot of emotionalism to it in
order for them to carry on. Then the ideas, which
is why you hear when you hear the people questioning
Trump supporters, their viewpoints are not thought out or there,
or it's very misinformed, or it's the statistics are not
there and it's over blown, or like the idea of
a black on black prime or all of these other
(39:27):
poorly thought out things, because they know people gradutate toward
their fears and prejudices.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Oh, I couldn't agree with you more. It's the lack
of critical thinking is astounding. It's astounding so it's more
than ignorance. It's uh, you know, you can be ignorant
and then get information. Information is available, but we are
not trained to think. Well, I am going to take
(39:55):
this another step, which is that we are not supposed
to think. We're just supposed to do what we're told,
and we will be manipulated by that and we will
be exploited emotionally. And I agree with that. There was
something I was going to say about this lack of
(40:16):
critical thinking, but well, yeah, I mean they're going after Harvard, right,
it's the symbol. I agree with you completely.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
There's nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidly,
and that's where we are, you know.
Speaker 3 (40:32):
So I would like to ask you a question. Okay,
do you have any brilliant ideas about what to do
for the unhaused.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
I don't know how brilliant they are. I do have
some ideas that I do believe that could turn the
tide and understanding unhouse people because I'm an educator, I
was a former educator. So one of the things that
I know, which is why it really really cooks my grid,
(41:00):
is the rise of intellectualism because I was trained by
old school teachers. And even though I'm coming from a
different generation, I had older school teachers that would go
to take you to task on learning basic elements of
critical thinking skills. And as I embarked on my own
(41:21):
teaching career, I noticed that skill set was slowly fading
away in the curriculums of schools. And right now, what
I see is that there's a pernicious resistant toward critical
thinking understanding basics like the civics of our country. And
(41:42):
I was telling them how old I was when I
was going to school. You could not graduate from elementary
school without you taking a Civics test in understanding the
branches of government. You could not graduate from high school.
I couldn't graduate from high school in my history class
until I took a civic lesson. And I see now
(42:04):
that people cannot understand the most basic things of our
government and how it works, the nuts and bolts. And
because of that, it's because that's that earth of aggressive
focus on the kind of thing that people can't make
the most next logical steps or make them understand how
the wheel works where. And this is and I'm going
(42:27):
to bring this back home to the house community. The
key to understanding about the unhoused community is you have
to have education. You have to understand the realities of it,
not a blanket emotionalism. Understanding how our systems create the
unhoused community, how our disdain of on house and poor
(42:51):
people motivates politicians to do the bare minimum, and also
their ability to create punitative law against dunhouse and poor people.
And once you understand that and the civics of understanding
how our systems work and we understand, we're holding more
of the politicians to task on creating humane solutions like
(43:14):
for example, support of housing, meeting people wherever they are.
But we have to have an honest conversation on how
we weaponize mental health and substance usage. They're symptoms, they're
not the solution. They're not the cause of what's going on,
and it plays a part. When you're in a patriarchy
in a capitalistic society, you're going to have things that's
(43:37):
going to go awry. But we also have to be
humane and have the impanty gene reinstituted in understanding that
we're dealing with human beings, not automatons. But you know
that's just the first thing.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, well, you know One of the things that I
that you're alluding to, which I think connects to something
that I've also believe, is that the capitalist system itself
and the government as it's hand, wants the people to
suffer if they don't fit. They want people to suffer. So,
(44:15):
for instance, if you were disabled or ill, as I
have been, the government doesn't want you to get comfortable
because they don't want everybody to say, Hey, I'm disabled.
I don't want to work all those hours. I don't
want to work fifty hours a week. I don't want
to work in a factory and lose my arm because
(44:35):
I was involved in the worker's movement. I don't want
I don't want these experiences. You know I also have needs. Well,
that's anathema that's going to make the whole system collapse
if everybody says, I will not be treated in this way, right,
the uprising of everybody. So what they do is they
make sure that the people who who are disabled or
(44:59):
who are without resources are going to be miserable, and
so that keeps everybody else in line. It's like a
whip to everybody else. You see what happened to Mary
Jane when she could you know, When I worked with
a phone company in Cleveland, the rules for the women
(45:20):
who were working there were so stringent about not taking
any days off for being sick. A one woman died
at her job. She just dropped in because she could.
She was afraid to take a sick day. The treatment
of people, it's not just the un how's it the
treatment of everybody in our system, in the factories, in
(45:42):
the offices. What people are subjected to. They want you
to shut up and just keep working until you drop
because if you just if you think that you might
be able to do better in a different way, you're
not going to go along with what's being done you.
So that's what we do, those of us who are
(46:05):
really at the bottom of society, create discipline for everybody else.
You see what's going to happen if you do this,
this is what's going to happen to you. You're gonna
end up incarcerated as an unhoused person, because it evidently
it's a crime now to be unhoused, right, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Or worth erase, that's the thing too. One of the
things that we we used to stay on the street
is that they want to believe themselves that they are
compassionate that life. For example, Mayor Basque has representatives explaining
about inside Safe. Her solution is supposed to be humane
and compassionate. She goes upon on house people in their encampments,
(46:49):
tells them that they can go to this place, this hotel.
They'll put them up, but you cannot come back here
and they'll take their things. You got to throw give
a ten or whatever, throw it away, take a photo.
You know that you are helping and you're not being
aggressive or violent against the person. The person has very
minimal choices because they know that they're going to have
(47:12):
to take it, because if they don't take it, they're
going to be facing police activity, law enforcement of harassment.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
And you can't take your dog.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Or you can't even take you know, other things that
you have. For example, you have a bike that you
might not be able to take it. You maybe only
have to take two bags. It depends on where the
hotel there is. But the reality is is once that's
done the pr campaign, you will see clips of Mayor
bass Is talking about street houselessnesses down. We're getting on
(47:41):
house people back in homes. It's not acceptable to keep
them out on the street. It's a two word it's way,
but they erase and then when you come back to
the same spot, they got these big fences there, or
they got hostile architecture put up there. The point is
that when the person gets into this place we call
housing purgatory, they don't have solutions to get them to
(48:02):
the housing that they claim or so they're staying there
in limbo, or if they're having to face stringent staff
or punitive rules. And you know, unhoused people are wanting
the solution of they want housing. They don't want to
go through all of the hoops. Give them housing, so
to help them get back on their feet, that would
(48:23):
be simple. But no, you got to go through the shelters,
you got to go through the headaches, you got to
go through disrespect, you got to go through everything. So
they can say that that they're helping you, but the
reality is that they're continually giving you on that limbo.
And most unhoused people, when you hear them say that
they don't want any help, it's because they know how
exhausting the help that they're going to receive. That's an
(48:46):
interesting point, and it's frustrating because they give up everything
because they were promised they're going to get the help
that they need, and it doesn't end up working that way.
And then you go into like what they say the shelters,
and those shelters are very unsafe, very disrespectful. The staff
is talking to you out of the side of the neck,
(49:07):
and you don't want to be disrespectful, or you don't
want to have to go through curfews, or you don't
have to go through the beating kind of treatment that
you have to go through. And people that have been
abused or have dealing in the abusive situation and are
trying to flee that that doesn't work well in their
psychic or their mental health. You know who wants to
(49:28):
go back to another abusive situation. And it's like trying
to tell these leaders that it's like they're talking to
a brick wall. The end result of that is these
people who are service resistant, we have solutions for them,
and they don't want to take the solution. They can
hear all of the horrible things that the unhoused person
is telling them and they'll walk away with that, and
(49:49):
then they will spread that to the communities who see
unhouse people. Then that creates that negative vibe that they
have and then because they got it pumped in by
people who supposedly are supposed to help them, and they'll
listen to them rather than the experiences of unhouse people.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
That's such a good point, you know. To me, the
solution to all of it is to have real democracy
in our economy and in our society, and that means
you have to have people speaking about what they actually
need instead of being told what they need and you know,
having somebody else who organize it for them. So that
(50:27):
we should have workers on the boards of directors of
every company. You know, you're working there, you know what's
going on. You should have something to say about it.
But it's the same thing. I mean if you have
conferences about people but not with them.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, you know what.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
I mean, they know you. The people who are in
these situations have way more experience and understanding of what's
going on.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
Now.
Speaker 3 (50:54):
Some of them are going to you know, be scamming.
That's a reality of the way.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
That's a human condition.
Speaker 3 (51:03):
Yeah, well, yeah, that's the human But there are people
who aren't and who really have something to offer, and
we are wasting people's gifts, you know, we're wasting their intelligence,
we're wasting their energy rather than incorporating, and then you
make them other right, So it's them, And it's in
(51:24):
my book Living with Reality, and also in the handbook
for the Interrevolution. I start out with oneness means I
am you, I am that, not I am not that,
and that's what we what our society tries to do.
It's like, well, I'm not like that? Oh really, really
are you not like that? And you know, I know
a lot of people who are not un has, but
(51:44):
not because they are any more well off mentally than
the people who are, but because they were lucky that
they had parents who supported them, or they had a
husband or a wife, or somebody rescued them. You know.
It's it's it's not like we're all we're that different.
Deep down inside, we're all pretty much the same and
(52:05):
have the same kind of games, the same kind of mentality.
And that's the oh why I believe in the Inner Revolution.
We have to change consciousness. We have to change the
way people see themselves and one another. We have to
get people to understand that we cannot benefit at the
cost of another human being, or of the earth for
(52:26):
that matter.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Well that's like I say, you know this is we
can go on and on. I think this is a
good place to in the conversation. And I would like
to invite you back to further the discussion on your
other books and to see what other developments that we're
going on in this crazy time, because I have a
funny feeling that we're going to have some more crazier
(52:48):
times with this president coming.
Speaker 3 (52:53):
Oh yeah, well, and you know it's not just him.
It's like, what are we fighting for? What are we
fighting for? We can't go back to the way it was.
It was that shit too, you know, let's get honest
about it. This wasn't any good. So I would love
to come back there. You just invite me and all.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Be there, perfect, perfect. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you so much to Beth for her time and insight.
You can learn more about her work and check out
her books and social media at the links in the description.
(53:32):
And that brings us to the end of another episode
of Weedian House. Don't forget to vote for us and
the Signal Awards. The link is in the description of
this episode, and voting will remain open until October ninth.
If you have a story you'd like to share, please
reach out to me at Wiedianhouse at gmail dot com,
(53:52):
at Wdianhouse on Instagram. Until then, may we again meet
in the light of understanding. HOWS is a production of iHeartRadio.
It is written, hosted, and created by me Theo Henderson,
our producers Jamie Loftus, Hailee Fager, Katie Fischer, and Lyra Smith.
(54:12):
Our editor is Adam Watt, our engineer is Joel Jerome,
and our local art is also by Katie Fisher. Thank
you for listening.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.