Daring Lifestyle: Unemployed Dumpster Diving Squatters

Okay, I’ve double checked, and to quote, Dave Barry, we are not making this up. I hit the StumbleUpon button and I came on a new alternative lifestyle:

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.

Well, that sounds nice. What are some of the things Freegans do? The first topic they have is “Waste reclamation.” That couldn’t mean dumpster diving, could it?

Perhaps the most notorious freegan strategy is what is commonly called “urban foraging” or “dumpster diving”. This technique involves rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods.

Okay, dumpster diving as a way of life, well what do you do for work?:

By accounting for the basic necessities of food, clothing, housing, furniture, and transportation without spending a dime, freegans are able to greatly reduce or altogether eliminate the need to constantly be employed. We can instead devote our time to caring for our families, volunteering in our communities, and joining activist groups to fight the practices of the corporations who would otherwise be bossing us around at work.

Okay, well, if you don’t work, where do you live?

Freegans believe that housing is a RIGHT, not a privilege. Just as freegans consider it an atrocity for people to starve while food is thrown away, we are also outraged that people literally freeze to death on the streets while landlords and cities keep buildings boarded up and vacant because they can’t turn a profit on making them available as housing.

Squatters are people who occupy and rehabilitate abandoned, decrepit buildings. Squatters believe that real human needs are more important than abstract notions of private property, and that those who hold deed to buildings but won’t allow people to live in them, even in places where housing is vitally needed, don’t deserve to own those buildings.

So, you basically STEAL people’s property because you don’t think they deserve to own it. It’s one thing to dumpster dive if you’re hard up. It’s another to do it because you don’t work as a way of life.

On the bright side, at least we know where all those anti-war protestors come from.