Summary Of Camping For Their Lives By Scott Bransford

When thought of camping is referenced the idea of families going hiking through the woods having a blast telling stories by the fire comes to mind. Camping is viewed to the public as recreational event families and friends take part in to get away from society for a short period of time. Scott Bransford author of “Camping for Their Lives” sees camping in a completely different manner. Homeless are colonizing in areas around or outside cities; the government refers to these areas as “tent cities” rather than the slums, in which they resemble. Scott Bransford stresses the addictions, living situations, job market, and the role government assist has little to no help towards rehabilitating and getting the homeless off the streets. His article

is very well structured but the credibility seems to be a very corrupted and one sided argument; he tends to leave out crucial statics such as the homeless’ education level, reason for not being financially stable, and the addictions some may have. Whenever Scott Bransford references government assistance it is a negative event; he never mentions support or aid given to the homeless into a successful career without calling a tent a home.
Scott Bransford begins his article interviewing a married couple just outside of Fresno California; he goes into grave detail about a place they call home, a weather battered tent.

Scott Bransford continues to discuss throughout the essay the struggles the homeless face daily. When the government intervened, they raided a tent city to sweep out the homeless. After the brute force was over the homeless filed a class-action suit against the city and received $2.3 million in damages. Ontario officials started a campaign to punish squatters for making makeshift homes on land the clearly did not posses. Officials soon built a chain-link fence around the camp and established rules that the homeless must follow. It was ultimately compared to a prison for the homeless and after a few months less than half remained inside the fence. When Scott Bransford interviewed a person who had escaped Mexico to start a new life he said it was better in Mexico and he was trying to head

back.
The overall tone Scott Bransford achieves is sympathetic. He attempts to appeal to emotional side of a person by showing the struggling times the homeless face. When he interviewed a homeless a woman who did not graduate from high school he says “ashamed of a learning disability that got in the way of her reading.” This line appeals to the emotional side because it shows how this woman did not pass because she had a disability and because of it the world had shut her off forcing her into a tent city. Scott Bransford later in his article refers to these tent cities as Hoovervilles and slums. This allows the connection with the environment to compare the historical past of America to give a better sense of understanding to add a connection with the Great Depression. The slums reference also allows a connection to be made by how the American society resembles a struggling nation rather than the stable nation it portrays to be.
The intended audience for Scott Bransford’s article is society as a whole; he wants to educate the public on how difficult the lives of the homeless and how they receive little to no assistance.

He emphasizes their struggles when he refers back to the married couple and how they are forced to cook on top of the oil barrel to survive. This placed a visual image in the reader's mind seeing a struggling couple barely able to survive a day because homeless shelters are overcrowded and society has given up on them. Even though the homeless are in a challenging situation Scott Bransford makes a hasty generalization; when he discusses the involvement of government assistance and their little help he profoundly states “if they are neglected, they will be lost to crime, addiction, and illness”(p.396). This statement indicates that without the government getting involved in a positive faction a tent city will fall to corruption. The corruption of these tent cities are evident because Scott Bransford points out that in a proven static approximately 41 percent of the homeless have been incarcerated. He later closes his article with a quote from a homeless man abruptly saying “sometimes hunger can make a person do crazy things” (p.397). This is a subtle hint towards the crime involved with living in these tent

cities.