He calls himself “Twin Cities White Collar Homeless Man Walking,” and he describes himself as “a 54 [year-old] white collar professional with over 27 years of mkt. experience, but am now two plus years jobless, now homeless and living out of my car.” His blog is articulate and well-written – take a look at it here. Last week, he asked that his blog be featured as one of our featured blogs, and I had to say no.
Understandably, he wants to remain anonymous. He doesn’t want to embarrass his family or to jeopardize his chances for professional employment.
We don’t publish anonymous articles or blogs. All of our articles and blog posts have named authors. We even require named authors for articles or blog posts published in the Free Speech Zone.
Signing a name to a blog post doesn’t guarantee accuracy, but it does offer accountability. You may not agree with everything that Sally Jo Sorenson or Stephen Young writes. They certainly would not agree with one another. Because they are real people, with real names, you can at least decide whether and how far you trust what they say. The difficulty with anonymous blogs is that you can’t know the real people behind them, or even whether there are real (individual, non-corporate, non-advertising) people writing.
While we won’t be featuring Homeless Man Walking in our regular blog column, we will continue to cover issues of homelessness, unemployment and the need for community responses to community needs. We have that in common with Homeless Man Walking, who wrote in his first blog post that his purpose is
… to bring awareness about the homeless problem in the Twin Cities as well as across our country. I am not using this platform to seek help for myself or blame others for my problems. And to quote a line from a great movie because it’s still the perfect quote for my message…”the needs of the many far out weigh the needs of the one”. Which means, don’t focus on the messenger, focus on the message.
And remember, Nobody wants to be homeless and nobody deserves to be homeless!
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