Facebook, Twitter, or a job? Homeless advocate chooses the first two

Eric Sheptock is a Washington DC homeless man whose self-appointed job is to utilize the internet, particularly Twitter and Facebook, to advocate for his fellow homeless. The Washington Post wrote about the 41 year-old former crack addict a few days ago informing us that "Being homeless has become Sheptock's full-time occupation." He makes a small amount of money on blog posts and public speaking gigs. But he refuses any job that will interfere with his activism He lives in a shelter.

He has over 4,000 Facebook friends, more than 1,200 Twitter followers, and of course his aforementioned blog, which you can find at EricSheptock.com.

Writing for the Huffington Post, yes, the Huffington Post, James Richardson tells us about his mother--and the importance of working for a living.

The home at which I came of age, in Sylvester, Georgia, was a twenty-five-year-old mobile home found on a dirt road and nestled on leased land between a peanut field and pecan orchard. In that rural Georgia town, where the peanut-to-person ratio was somewhere near 1,000,000 to 1, you worked or you went homeless and hungry.

It was a simple but powerful truth: No one wants to sleep in a peanut field. There was no government-aid infrastructure for the rural, overworked and underpaid mother and you can be certain there were no cosmopolitan blue bloods whose sleep that night would be interrupted lest they open their wallet for the disheveled haggards on the street.

Had my mother spent her days advocating for affordable housing -- presumably free, unrestricted housing at the expense of taxpayers -- and demanding universally free meals, the prospect of food security for her children would have been but a pipe dream. Instead, she did what is expected of responsible adults: She worked, and she worked hard.

Some truths, unless you are someone like Eric Sheptock, are impossible to hide from.

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