I was asked by students at the nursing school of Lewis- Clark State College to give a four minute summary of issues that homeless people typically have when it comes to accessing health care. A more detailed account of this issue may be found on my SoundCloud involving original incidental music from one of my musicals, The Burden of Eden.
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“The Leprosy of Homelessness” was first posted to my online diary on July 14, 2016. I believe nine “followers” had access to these words.
As you may recall, on July 17, 2016, I fell to my knees, sick with a flu and suffering outside, and screamed to the heavens that Somebody would put a stop to all this homelessness. On July 27, 2016, I stepped off the bus in the city where I was born, a city where I’d not been for 63 years. On September 1, 2016, I signed a one-year-lease on my first apartment here.
I unearthed “The Leprosy of Homelessness” two days ago, while searching for the address of a guy named Barry who had me stay with him throughout December of 2010. I wanted to find it so I can pay off a $40 debt that’s been nagging at me.
I’m incredibly sick with this awful flu, more so than even at the start. I’m outside in the elements. I’m sick with a flu. Don’t people get it? They ask me things like: “If you’re homeless, how come you have a laptop?” As though a homeless person couldn’t own a laptop.
They ask me where I’m sending these messages from if I’m homeless? I tell them I’m sitting outside the Burlingame Public Library shivering with my laptop plugged into their outdoor power outlet. But they don’t believe me.
People always act like I’m trying to pull of some kind of scam — just because I’m homeless, or else the scam is that I am homeless — if like say, they know me from the Internet, and they think I’m “too intelligent to be homeless.” They further suspect me of being a liar, a scammer, a hustler, a criminal, and a crook. But why? Can people not believe that my situation is as critical as it is??
I petitioned everyone on my Facebook friends list to let me in for a few days, so I can recover. But of course nobody will let me in. I got kicked of the homeless shelter where I caught it, because they figured I would spread it. The hospital wouldn’t let me in. They said if they let me in, they’d have to let “all of us” in. I got kicked off the night bus because it was obvious I was sick–and I get it. I might contaminate somebody. But I’m only trying to stay alive — why am I getting all this suspicion and distrust? Or worse yet, indifference?
It reminds me of that scene in New York where something like fifty-one people watched a guy get stabbed to death and nobody wanted to get involved. It was a big news story when I was a kid. Or even in Berkeley a couple years ago, where that guy beat this guy to death with a tire iron for asking him for a cigarette. People stood by and watched, and I remember somebody shouted: “Somebody with a gun, shoot that guy!” But whoever might have had a gun (who knows?) nobody brought it out, nobody shot the guy. Everybody just watched as he beat the guy to death before the police came.
You guys have been following me here. You’re all in my corner. We’re all cool. But say if I were to post it on my Facebook (which I just might), people are probably only going to say: “Aw, come on, Andy! Get a grip!” But that’s because they don’t know. They can’t imagine. I put all these words together, in an effort to get people to picture what it’s like down here, but usually the only response is: “I can’t imagine what it must be like.”
I become infuriated. I want to say: “Did you even read a single word I wrote? Are my writing skills and my communication skills so God-awfully bad that after I go out of my way to describe what it’s like, all you can say is “I can’t imagine what it must be like?” It’s damned insulting! If someone’s not interested in what it’s like down here, why don’t they just say so? Or else, don’t follow me, for God’s sake.
When a number of my acquaintances died on the streets of Berkeley a while back, I would write to my brother and my remaining friends in the Mainstream trying to demonstrate how somebody would not have died had they been inside, or had they even had a dollar or two to ride all night on one of those buses. First off, people have a hard time figuring out why we have trouble coming up with a dollar or two, or why a couple bucks is going to make such a huge difference in a homeless person’s life. But I watched Darlene die overnight. She didn’t need to die! Two bucks would have saved Darlene’s life.
I told my friends about it. They offered condolences, and their condolences were accepted. But this was not about receiving condolences. I hardly knew her. I hardly knew Tom, or Jimmy, or any of them. I only know that they were outside trying to deal with medical conditions that are best dealt with inside, and that they died. I was trying to illustrate how in one guy’s case, three bucks would have spared his life. But people don’t want to hear that. They only want to shrug it off with a superficial condolence: “I’m sorry to hear of the loss of your friend.” Unless the person was of crucial closeness to them, they don’t really care how they died. And me? I care – because I’m one of them. I care – because I’m trying to get a point across.
We are a nation that has become plagued with the Leprosy of Homelessness. And it is entirely unnecessary! Services, Shelters – they will not solve the problem. They do not address the core heart of the issue. They only keep a person bound in the shame and stigma of a conspicuously visible condition that nobody wants to look at. Why? Is it because they know inwardly how soon it could happen to them? They, after all, are human too – like us. Or are we human? Do we need to be dehumanized in order for our separation from the rest of humanity to be complete? If that’s what it is going to take to ease the conscience of the Mainstream, I guarantee you, that’s what’s going to happen.
It happened in Nazi Germany. Don’t think it can’t happen here.
So I used one of the H-words and both of the S-words. “Homeless, Shelter & Services” have come out of my mouth, but not “Housing.” I shoot myself in the foot every time I use these “buzz words.” A “real human being” doesn’t seek “shelter” — he seeks a “place to live” for God’s sake! But what does it matter now? In the light of possible death, what does my recently accelerated search for dignified indoor dwelling mean now? Not much. God will provide me the dignified internal dwelling space that I need. And outside will be dogs, and adulterers, and idolaters, and every person who loves the lie more than the the truth – because their deeds are evil. — (And that’s Revelation 22:15 in case you suddenly thought I was a great poet.) Do you want to be that kind of person? Do you want to be outside the gates of the City of God?
Probably not, if you really were to stop to think about it. I know I wouldn’t want to be excluded among everybody who loved and practiced falsehood. That’s why I’m so adamant about getting a truth across, a truth that in this society, as concerned as we are with liberty and justice for all, most of us have not really paused to consider. I know I didn’t, before I was thrust into first-time homelessness back in 2004.
So consider these words of truth. These are not the rantings of a political radical with an aggressive agenda. They are the best words I can think of to describe a reality that affects me and my homeless brothers and sisters every single day of our lives. How many times has it been been pouring rain in a thunderstorm, and a single dollar got me into McDonald’s for a senior cup of coffee, to get out of the rain? Lots of times. How do I get that dollar? Well, some people called “hustlers” don’t have too hard a time running up to every Tom, Dick, and Harry saying “Spare some change? Spare a dollar? Spare a dollar? Spare some change!” But can you imagine me doing something like that? I sure hope you can’t. I can’t. And I’ve been homeless for the better part of twelve years.
Homeless – for the better part of twelve years. How many times have I had the flu in those twelve years?Exactly twice. Like I said, God bless her, the first time my friend D. was able to take seven hundred bucks off of her credit card – I didn’t even ask for it, God bless her – and that got me a hotel room for a couple weeks. When I got my check at the top of the next month, I sent her the seven hundred dollars back. That was a totally positive, one-time huge favor that she did for somebody she cared about. She can’t do it right now. Why?
For one thing, she has to take care of her mom and her brother, and have them in her house, crowded though it might have been, because they were in some kind of straits, and I don’t want to go into the personal financial details of a friend of mine, but suffice it to say she helped them out at a time when they needed to be let indoors. And this, she did while six months pregnant with her first child.
I also know for a fact that George would let me in if he didn’t have his nephew and his sister over their right now, and his wife hadn’t have broken her leg, because that’s just the type of guy he is. Hell, D would probably buy me a house if she had the money. One time when I needed to eat, George and his wife went out of their way to meet me at a Burger King near a motel I had put money down on, and make sure I ate, and make sure I had some cash. I told D about this, and she immediately quoted the Proverb: “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
That’s for sure. I don’t want to talk about my brother– and you don’t want to ask about him. I love my brother and he loves me — and let’s leave it at that. We just don’t see things the same way. He’s helped me when he could help, and I have appreciated it. But that help stops at the border marked by his front door. Now let me reiterate: I have been homeless throughout most of the last twelve years. In that period of time, exactly five people have let me so much as walk through their front doors, at a time while I was homeless. George was one of them. This guy Barry was another. And a stranger wants had me over for spaghetti and a shower. And Howard let me house-sit. And then there was Art.
And Barry – I don’t even know this man very well. I remember he and his wife were extremely cordial and accommodating. I got a lot of music written. There was some issue about my “panic attacks” but it wasn’t so bad, if I recall. Later, however, Carol had to take care of her granddaughter – so my staying over there wasn’t an option. But when it was an option, what a wonderful period it was in my life! I got so much music written. Why? Because somebody let me in, at a time when I was not able to get myself “in” – by myself. It’s that simple.
But year after year goes by, day after day. The times I’ve even been let inside somebody’s car now amount to exactly twice. The people who have let me in their cars are Paul and Cary. It might have been Paul’s girlfriend’s car, but the point is WOW! Somebody actually trusted a homeless person to sit in the back seat of their car!! I felt LOVED. Loved! You can’t imagine what it feels like to step inside somebody’s house, and feel the sense of home – the sense of protection, the sense of warmth – the sense of LOVE!!
The feeling of stepping into a MacDonald’s in the rain, of getting that single dollar – believe me, I might not feel loved by the person who let me have a dollar, but I feel loved by God when that kind of thing happens. He will not chasten me forever. He will, in the end, be merciful. And God will always, always let me in. All I need do, is knock.
Knock – and He will open. Ask – and He will answer. Seek – and He will be found. And I will seek Him! And I will find Him — in the day when I seek Him with all of my heart.
I recently reconnected with my old friend Sara, a Christian musician. I was chatting with her last night, pondering if I should remove my previous post on the matter, wondering if it was too strident, if I ought to have been more mellow, if I ought to have been less dramatic, perhaps, and most importantly, if I risked laying a guilt trip on everybody.
She instantly said: “Leave it.”
I asked her: “Why?”
She said: “You spoke from your heart. You’ve told them – the hospital does not have beds reserved for illnesses that are readily dealt with in people’s homes. You don’t have a home. Your only recourse is for somebody to let you in – or else for you to get a motel room, which costs money you don’t have. So why aren’t they letting you in? Leave it! They should feel guilty.”
Be that as it may. If my brother were to call me up, and he had lost everything, and he was out on the streets, and he asked me to please let him stay over for a few days, there would be no guilt left for me, but only the joy of being able to say: “Steve, you’re my brother, I’ll get the coffee on, you get over here right now!“
Why someone would prefer guilt to that simple surrender of love that lets their own family back in their house, is beyond me. But maybe someone has something to hide. That’s the condemnation, right? The guilt Jesus talks about in the third chapter of the Gospel of John. “And this is the condemnation: the people loved darkness more than light, because their deeds were evil.”
Evil? Am I the one who called you evil? If you’re evil, then I am evil as well. Compared to GOD, we’re ALL evil! So you don’t want me to see the messy kitchen. So maybe you watch porn and you don’t want anyone to know about it. Am I going to go about snitching you out in light of you having done something so huge as to have been the sixth person in twelve years to let me inside your front door??
Or is it me? Do I smell? That Mexican gal on the train sure didn’t seem to mind. Am I a space case? Will I rant and rave and talk your ear off? You can stick a rubber ball in my mouth for all I care. Will I space something out? Leave a towel on the bathroom floor? Leave the broiler oven on all night? Probably – but really – is the just punishment for being the Absent-Minded Professor — HOMELESSNESS???
Do I have anything to hide? I daresay I do not! I knock – and He is opening. I ask – and He is answering. I seek – and He is found. For I have sought Him, and I have found Him, in the day when I will have sought Him with my whole heart.
That day – is today.
Let me in. If you don’t, He will.
I have nothing to lose.
Andy Pope
Burlingame, CA
July 14, 2015
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I made it over to the Baldwin Grand yesterday and played a version of the song “Get Together” by Dino Valenti. You may know it. It’s a 60’s tune popularized by the Youngbloods. It has lyrics such as these:
Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love on another
Right now!
Certainly a fitting theme for the present day. To look at social media posts, one would think we’re all intent on doing the exact opposite — and hating one another.
I myself found myself in a PTSD flashback for the first time in several months yesterday. As the details were amplified, I found myself hating an entire social group, to which many of my friends belong. This amounts to nothing more than stigma and prejudice, which I decry. So while it hurts my heart to have found myself entertaining stigmatic perceptions that I abhor, it does evidence the fact that we are all human. We are all — as the song goes — “but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass.”
Interesting that in this account of the song’s history, those lyrics are referenced as “Zen-like.” Perhaps so, but it’s sad that these are direct allusions to Christian views of the human condition that were widespread back in those days, and associated with what used to be known as “Christian Love.”
As we all know, Christianity these days is less associated in the common populace with love, and more associated with judgment. Maybe the tides need to turn, yet again.
Anyway I have to take care of some personal needs and I’ll have the song uploaded later on this afternoon. Thanks for listening.
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This Wednesday’s podcast is a recording of a Zoom meeting held on October 1, 2021 involving Amber Peace, the Recovery and Special Programs Coordinator of the Latah Recovery Center in Moscow Idaho; Shaun Hogan, the Crisis Services and Volunteer Coordinator of the Center, April Hawley, an LRC employee, two young students named Laura and Ashley from Lewis & Clark State College, and myself. All incidental music is from The Burden of Eden © 1994-2008 by Andrew Michael Pope.
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Kelsey and I talked this one through two days ago. Since then, another person from the previous workshop has signed on for the summer workshop, and more money has been raised for summer honoraria. It’s a challenging time in the history of this planet — but there’s more hope than we know. Kelsey Chapman and Andy Pope do the talking on May 24, 2021.
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To start off this Thursday’s post, I’m going to spin off of something I wrote last week:
“What is being brought to light in the podcasts is how, when we were homeless, we were not in the position to be able to distinguish, among all the authority figures and “pseudo-authorities” in our midst, who were the ones who represented benign agencies whose role it was to assist us, and who were the ones who represented more-or-less adversarial institutions designed to investigate and incriminate us. All these “higher ups” were relegated into the box of our “observers from inside” – and thus it was difficult to distinguish them, one from another.
“In a corresponding way, it was difficult for those who lived indoors to discern from among those who were outside who was a legitimate candidate for genuine assistance, and who was of a criminal bent. Those in the latter camp often feigned a need for assistance in order to gain benefits. They were also often very good at it. Whatever the case, I can assure you that I didn’t look much different than any other person on the streets — at least not at first glance.”
Having become homeless, I was dealing with this dynamic from the start. Add to this the conditions under which the homelessness began; that is, that I had been subjected to a costly medical misdiagnosis that at first I embraced naively, only later to find myself headed for the streets. The further I fell, the more it appeared that people in the medical profession were assuming authority over me. This in fact was indicative of a greater phenomenon: The further one descended down the socio-economic scale, the more people began to exert power and authority over that person. The lower I got, the higher became the number of “pseudo-authorities.” As more and more people seemed to grab power over me, I literally felt myself losing my last shreds of personal power–losing my value to society–as I became homeless.
The more people assumed authority over me, the more I rebelled against them. After all, they did not know me personally and made no effort to engage me meaningfully. What authority qualified them to boss me around? Why should this particular batch of emerging new people, eminently random in my span of life experience, be the ones to whom I hold myself accountable? In the case of the medical professionals in particular, I not only ceased to hold myself accountable to them, but I went so far as to address them from an adversarial stance, sometimes even a hostile one. For it was they who had, in my view, initiated my demise.
The absolute audacity! The very sort of people whom I thought should be held accountable for my downfall were now in a position of supposed authority over me! They lived indoors; they had jobs with responsibilities and tenure; they wore badges. Mental health professionals did not differ much from security guards in their approach toward us, when we were homeless. Nor did we ourselves hold any particularly greater degree of respect for them than we did for anyone else who wore a badge.
While my previous relationship with my psychiatrist had ordinarily been pleasant as well as at least potentially helpful, my new position with respect to mental health professionals was clearly one of assumed subordination. Earlier, when I lived indoors and paid into my Kaiser health-insurance, I was happy to discuss life with my psychiatrist and more than willing to take her suggestions, since I felt she and I were on an even playing field. But now, mental health officials often showed up in cahoots with police officers and fire department personnel, in a scenario where the badges even of emergency medical technicians seemed no less intimidating than those of the chief executive officers of major corporate hospitals. The idea that any of these detached pseudo-authorities should even care to get to know me personally, let alone that I should be expected to blindly obey their uninformed commands, was absurd. There was no reasonable choice other than to rebel.
It was with such biases weighing upon me that I found myself eager to give musical and dramatic form to my emerging worldview. For one thing, the season of life was quite exciting. I was meeting other men and women who had fallen into the same predicament, and their views coincided closely with my own. In fact, our perceptions began to build and feed upon each other. Before long, I found myself overtaken by an alternate view of reality. It was as though I had become a member of an alternative society, formed by the interactions that entailed among myself and others, as we all set out to interpret what had befallen us in a way that made mutual sense.
It was in such an atmosphere that I naturally conceived of the musical that was to become Eden in Babylon. I felt an eagerness to use my particular skills to hone a medium through which a picture of youth homelessness in urban America could be presented. Naturally, the Kids in the story would hang together and be protective of one another, in an environment where they were constantly having orders barked at them by desensitized pseudo-officials. In such a scenario, an idealistic protagonist who finds himself subjected to brutal torture on the part of the “powers that be” in a psychiatric facility seemed to fit right in.
Fast forward about ten years, and we find the playwright in a quiet college town in North Idaho, having not only lived inside for almost five years now, but actually having become acclimated to an accepting community of artists and academicians. In the process, I cannot help but have gradually embraced some of the details of functioning in a healthy indoor community that, when I was outside, I would have shunned as “mainstream.” The same system of tacitly acknowledged social conventions that I disdained when I was outside now appears at worst to be a necessary evil, and at best a convenience designed to make life easier on myself and on the others with whom I come into contact.
In such a markedly different culture, the thought of finding a compatible doctor and therapist, and of exploring medications that might assist in adapting to the established social norms, does not seem very far-fetched at all. There is at least a tangible ideal of connecting meaningfully with mental health professionals who may assist me along my path. Before, it was like, “get him in, give him some meds, get him out of here.” I’d be ejected from the system turnstile just in time to have all my new meds stolen out of my backpack in a food line.
But it is not only my position with respect to medical professionals that has changed. If something unruly is taking place in the neighborhood, I am confident that I can call the local cops, give them my name, receive their assistance, and be regarded as a responsible citizen in the process. This would not have been the case when I was homeless. The menacing nature of all the “badges” has diminished since I’ve been back inside. There appear to be fewer of them now, and the ones that there are no longer hover so high above me.
Also significantly diminished is the sense of inexorable evil wrapped up in this entity we called the Mainstream. No longer do I feel that there is this giant social ogre — the Mainstream — ready to expel me from all the blessings of indoor living if I don’t abide precisely by all its confusing restrictions and demands. Because of this, I feel that the cry that was so often expressed by my homeless brothers and sisters has been heard in the affirmative. “How can we get back inside without getting caught up again in the Mainstream?” That was the perennial question.
The answer for me has been twofold. I had to first agree with myself to be genuine and authentic in my approach toward others and toward life. I had to be myself decidedly, and to believe in myself — otherwise I would construct from all my guise and façade the very Mainstream that I was trying to avoid. Life would again become a game in which I had already proven myself a very poor player, and I would risk being cast outside once again.
Secondly, I had to agree to give of myself to a community that I would serve and in which I would play a part. Here in Moscow, I have found a supportive church group, I have volunteered at a recovery center where I have found an emotional support group, I have found artists and musicians committed to my work, and I participate in theology groups with professors from both of the nearby Universities. This accountability – or connectivity – keeps me from the isolation that would occur if I were still setting myself as an entity separate from and almost opposed to the world — the natural iconoclasm that sets in when one becomes homeless.
Thus is found the construction of an authentic life within an authentic community. This differs hugely from what I experienced for years before ever becoming homeless. I remember on the Peninsula wondering if I had any friends among the many associates whom I classified as consisting of the “three C’s” — clients, colleagues, and co-workers. Many of my associations were contractual, and more money was indeed made. But few of my associations were truly meaningful. In a sense, this experience of a threatening Mainstream that sought to devour my true identity was itself only a social construct, because it was composed of the consequences of my own hypocrisy. All its many conventions and protocols were but a reflection of my own personal falsity.
That ugly scepter need not return to rear its head, for it has been dissolved in the greater reality of authenticity and community. And, as Kelsey Chapman pointed out in one of the podcasts, Eden in Babylon has evolved accordingly, in a way that parallels my own personal transformation. According to Kelsey, earlier drafts evidenced a protagonist who himself stood separate from the culture with which he was concerned, and who felt a false sense of empowerment that he could fix the situation from a detached, single-handed position. It’s possible I was a bit like that myself. In any case, the new protagonist – the new Winston – is a person who, like his creator, now merges in an even way with his community.
So the picture of the tortured Artist who ten years ago sat beneath a Starbucks awning in the dead of night while homeless, conceiving a scene in which his main character was subjected to torture in a psych ward, is no longer the prevailing picture. The Artist is no longer tortured by same.
The workshop was more than a mere musical workshop, for it awakened the desire deeply driven into all of our Actors to display how each of their characters represented a greater principle at work in today’s society. In that more holistic view, Eden in Babylon ceases to be a statement about the mental health industry or even about homelessness, for that matter. It becomes a statement about classism — and how it fosters the abuse of authority and power — as seen through the eyes of those who lack power the most.
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The second column in my five-week series on homelessness was published yesterday on the religion-oriented site Spokane Faith and Values, where I have been writing throughout the pandemic. Below is a verbatim transcript of the piece.
I recently raised a public objection to the notion that I ought to change my phraseology from “homeless” to “houseless” in everything I write. I felt a bit miffed that the person who made this suggestion had never actually lived outdoors.
But I am someone who has lived outdoors — not just for a while, but for years on end. During those years, I associated largely with others who were in the same boat. I learned how such people generally speak of themselves. As a result, I use the words “outside” and “outdoors” more than either of the other two–and I feel compelled to explain why.
In a way, I have the same motive as those who wish to replace “homeless” with “houseless.” The word “homeless” has a lot of pejorative connotations. But both of these words end with “less.” They still suggest that the person who lives outdoors is necessarily lacking something. But this is not always the case.
In my case, after struggling in and out of untenable living situations in the San Francisco Bay Area for seven years, I made a conscious choice on April 15, 2011 to join an intentional homeless community. While most of us had experienced a crisis that led to a loss of residence, we unanimously believed that to live outdoors was the lesser of evils. For one thing, we found it preferable to live outside rather than to pay exorbitant rental fees for acceptable living situations (not to mention paying decent rent for unacceptable situations).
In short, we had a heck of a time finding living situations in the Bay Area that were both affordable and acceptable. So for the time being, we were content to stay outdoors.
It was there that I found the language most prevalent among all who shared my predicament. This was a simple exchange between the words “inside” and “outside.” If someone had a roof over their head, we said they were “inside.” If they didn’t, they were “outside.” This is how homeless people speak of themselves in the Bay Area. It’s also how they speak of themselves in Moscow, Idaho. And while I have never been homeless in Spokane, I wouldn’t doubt that this parlance is common there as well.
Is there a reason for this linguistic preference? I think there is. It speaks to the essential difference between two disparate camps. Some people have roofs over their heads, and some people don’t. Furthermore, there is nothing morally wrong with sleeping outside — so long as one is not sleeping on someone else’s property. The landmark decision in Martin v. Boise would seem to support this.
This leads nicely into the second of the seven inequities I have wanted to discuss.
It was often assumed that, because we had wound up homeless, all of the conclusions we had drawn throughout our entire life span were in need of revision.
This led to an amusing observation. If a person had been a lifelong conservative, and they became homeless, that person was supposed to “become a liberal.” Why? Because the liberal social workers were feeding them.
If a person had been a liberal all their lives, and they became homeless, they were often told that they should “become a conservative.” Why? Because the Salvation Army was feeding them.
How many people in those days approached me in order to proselytize their particular version of Christianity? Very many. How many people asked me first if I already knew Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior? Very few.
This imbalance appears to have evolved from some of the preconceptions I discussed last week. It was rarely considered that someone might have become homeless due to a lack of tenable housing. It was almost universally assumed that they became homeless because there was something wrong with them.
In the rooms of 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, there are many “clichés” or sayings intended to assist people who have hit huge “bottoms” in their lives. One of these is: “Your best thinking got you here.” That statement is then followed by suggestions as to how the recovering addict or alcoholic might change their way of thinking, in accordance with the 12 steps.
I can understand how this would apply to the enormous losses one might incur through drug addiction or alcoholism. People do “drink themselves out of house and home.” Many people with drug problems wind up alienating friends and family, as well as landlords. Many do wind up outdoors. This cannot be denied.
But here I found myself having consciously chosen homelessness as the lesser of evils in a precarious life-situation that had yet to be resolved. Numerous people approached me saying, in effect:”Your best thinking got you into this position. I have suggestions how you might change your way of thinking.”
I felt like saying: “I agree that my best thinking got me into this position. But you have never been in this position; therefore you cannot advise me as to how to get out of it.”
This is how the details of homelessness differ radically from the details of drug addiction or alcoholism. The A.A. member who makes that suggestion is a recovering alcoholic and does have valuable information to share. But the person who, having always living indoors, makes such a suggestion to a homeless person, has no relevant personal experience. Therefore their suggestions, however well-intended, are not often useful.
This disparity — or inequity or imbalance — is something that can be solved through better communication. But before we can even begin to make that effort, we need to dignify, not only the homeless human being, but the homeless experience itself.
In short, there is nothing wrong with being homeless.
We need to understand this simple truth, and to have it acknowledged far and wide. Look how many people are on the streets! Despite the best efforts of all involved, that number is only bound to increase — especially now, when more people than ever are losing their homes.
We need to stop moralizing, and start accepting. We need to stop obligating people who sleep outside toward quick entries into undignified indoor living situations. Homelessness is neither a crime nor a disease. We need to stop criminalizing the homeless, and we need to stop treating them as though they are sick.
If we cannot truly help them to get inside, let us please make it easier for them to live outdoors.
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Q. Where are you coming from?
A. Why do you ask?
Q. Aren’t you a little quiet this morning?
A. Didn’t sleep well enough.
Q. Can you get more sleep?
A. Maybe a nap, maybe later.
Q. Anything going on that you want to talk about this morning?
A. Well, I’m a bit down. But I think it’s the kind of thing that more sleep will eliminate.
Q. Down about anything in particular?
A. My personality, I suppose, as usual.
Q. Down on yourself?
A. Yes and no. I’m not down on my achievements, or my work. But some of the dumb things I do kinda get to me every now and then.
Q. Like what?
A. We discussed it earlier. I put my foot in my mouth sometimes. It’s awkward.
Q. Is this that thing of “jumping the gun” again?
A. Yeah, that’s it. Jumping the gun. Speaking before I think.
Q. When was the last time you did that?
A. Oh, maybe last night.
Q. What was the context?
A. Talking to somebody from California. I mentioned a great compliment I had received. But it wasn’t to highlight the fact that I was complimented. It was to illustrate a point.
Q. What was the point?
A. A parallel between the protagonist in my musical and my own personality, me being the one who wrote the musical.
Q. Somebody compared you to the main character in your musical?
A. Yes.
Q. In a good way, or in a bad way?
A. Oh – a very good way. It was highly complimentary. But the point is — it was a factual comparison.
Q. Factual?
A. Yes – it illustrated an intriguing parallel. So I was hoping that the person from California would catch the parallel. Instead, they only caught the fact that somebody had “said something sweet” to me. The way they said it — “Ah, how sweet!” — indicated that they didn’t understand or appreciate the parallel. They related to the fact that I was complimented — not to the substance of the complimentary statement. They could have said it about somebody saying something nice about my shirt.
Q. So how did you put your foot in your mouth?
A. By calling attention to the fact that someone had complimented me, rather than to the dynamics of the intriguing psychological parallel in the first place.
Q. So the focus was on the fact that you were complimented, not on the essence of the complimentary statement?
A. You heard me! It’s like I just said. It was as though I spoke out of ego — out of wanting the Californian to know that I had been complimented — kinda like I would have done when I was still down in California. But in so doing, I missed the opportunity to get an intriguing psychological phenomenon across to them. In fact, I could have left myself out of the picture entirely, and it would have been a much more meaningful interaction.
Q. Why did you not do so? Why did you call attention to the fact that someone had flattered you, rather than to the intellectual dynamics of an interesting topic in the first place?
A. Because I was talking with a Californian.
Q. But – but — why does it matter whether they were a Californian or not?
A. Because in California, everybody was either always very critical of me, or else they were feeding my ego with inordinate praise.
Q. So you inordinately praised yourself, in order to defray their criticisms?
A. Exactly. I defended myself — even though I had not yet been attacked.
Q. Why do you stigmatize Californians?
A. I think “stereotype” would be a better word.
Q. So why stereotype them? Why stereotype anybody?
A. I don’t know. It took years for me to realize that my best possible solution in life was to simply leave the State of California. Since then, I’ve basically been raving to old friends of mine how great it is up here in Idaho. But they never receive the positive. They just think I’m down on Californians for some reason.
Q. Are you?
A. Well — I can count the number of Californians I still talk to on one hand.
Q. What is it about California?
A. You got me, man. They have this attitude — and I don’t like to stereotype people or box them in — I hate it when people do that to me — but it’s this glaring generalization that I can’t escape. They somehow — in general — put forth the attitude that they’re better than the rest of us, simply because they live in California. And it’s like whoop-de-doo. For all the problems that California has, you’d think they’d stop telling everybody in all the other States how we’re supposed to live.
Q. Are you sure you want to post these words online, where everybody can see them?
A. Not really.
Q. Then why are you doing it?
A. Because of my personality. I stick my foot in my mouth. I don’t think before I speak. I jump the gun.
Q. Can you get better at this?
A. Maybe. Gradually over time, I suppose.
Q. Say — I just thought of something — were you hurt by the way you were treated in California?
A. Hurt doesn’t even say it. I was only as though I was a piece of garbage for about twelve years, while I and a bunch of other so-called pieces of garbage were struggling to survive.
Q. You mean, when you were homeless?
A. Yes. When I was homeless. When we were homeless.
Q. But nobody’s treating you like garbage now, are they?
A. Not that I can tell.
Q. Then why bemoan the past?
A. Because I have no guard against becoming homeless again. I’m just a check or two away. One single emergency, and I’m probably out on the streets.
Q. And then what?
A. Then we’ll see how all these people who seem to like me so much will treat me.
Q. But they’re not Californians, are they?
A. No – but they’re people. And people have their ideas about homeless people. They usually don’t change them — until they themselves become homeless.
The Questioner is silent.
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I’m doing a five-week series on homelessness for Spokane Faith and Values. While I don’t like to work on the Sabbath, I figure it’s not too much work to paste each column in the series here on five successive Saturdays. The first column was published last Wednesday on this page, and a verbatim transcript of it follows below.
I recently came out and identified myself as a person who lived largely outdoors throughout a 12-year period of time in the San Francisco Bay Area. Being as I was fortunate enough to escape the situation where a one-bedroom apartment rents for up to $3,000, and alight upon beautiful Moscow, Idaho where my current one-bedroom apartment rents for $481, I consider myself to be in the ideal position to express what homelessness is actually like. That is, from the perspective of those of us who have lived it.
Being an introverted artist-type, I was naturally overjoyed to find myself in the year 2016 to be a person who had now attained to quiet enjoyment of residence. One of the first items of indoor convenience that I found myself extremely thankful for was something you might not expect:
Finally, I had my own power outlet. In fact, I had several.
When I lived outdoors, it was a constant struggle to find a power outlet where I could plug in my laptop. Outdoor power outlets were scarce, and when I found one, I dared not use it very long. The thieves and vandals who roam the outdoors would have eventually found me. In fact, five laptops were stolen from me in a three year period of time in Berkeley and Oakland alone. Two of those thefts were the results of strong-armed robbery.
No longer did I have to worry about any of that. Nor did I have to be worried about being kicked out of coffeeshops, either because of a two-hour time limit in the crowded Bay Area, or because I was “one of them.” No longer did I have to face the situation of somebody refusing to serve me because I was a homeless person. Though often they let me in, at other times they did not. There being many thieves on the streets, I can’t say that I entirely blamed them. On the other hand, I was not one of those thieves. I was only an artist, trying to do his art.
“A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is His delight.”
— Proverbs 11:1
All of this points to a “false balance” — what I call an inequity. There was an unusual schism between those of us who lived outdoors, and those who did not. So, when I finally achieved the power outlet that I had been praying for, I set about to delineate these inequities for the good of those who still live inside. I did this in a spirit of conviction, knowing that many are losing their homes these days, and even more so during the current economic crunch.
I pinpointed seven inequities — instance of imbalance, or of injustice. Seven disparities between the way the world is seen by those who live outside, and those who live indoors.
The first of these is couched within every word I have thus far written in this column. We who lived outside knew that our main day-to-day challenge was to deal with all the unusual features of outdoor living. Those who had not yet lived outdoors invariably thought that our challenge was something else.
In other words, people wanted to know what had made us homeless. In the process, the reality that we simply were homeless was often swept aside.
I can assure you that in the past five years in Idaho, I have done everything that would have “made me homeless” in California. And guess what? None of them ever made me homeless.
This stigma interfered with all our efforts to find dignified, indoor living. It was assumed that we were criminals. Surely we must be drug addicts or alcoholics. Or simply losers, with no work ethic.
At best, we were thought to have serious mental health disorders. If so, the stigma against those with mental health conditions also came into play. We found ourselves morally judged for internal mental conditions over which we had no control.
As a result, we were often directed toward living situations that we found worse than staying outdoors. Since we “couldn’t take care of ourselves,” we were referred to board-and-care homes. Since we were “drug addicts,” we were referred to rehabs. Since we were “crazy,” we were referred to psychiatric facilities. And since we were “criminals,” we were handcuffed and thrown into jails, often at the slightest of pretexts.
By no means am I trying to suggest that those elements do not entail within the realm of the many different sorts of people who live and sleep outside. The National Coalition for the Homeless has estimated that roughly one out of every four people experiencing homelessness is drug-addicted. That’s a pretty high count — but what about the other three-fourth?
It is also estimated that about one-third of people enduring homelessness have serious mental health disorders. That’s a lot of people struggling — but what about the other two-thirds?
Not to mention, what proportion of criminals live inside? White-collar criminals who get away with it? Employers who screw their workers out of wages? Addicts who can afford the designer drugs, and use those substances quietly behind closed doors? All of these play into the biggest difficulty that we had in communicating with those who tried to help us.
It was very often thought that if we could solve all those other problems, we could solve the much huger problem that is homelessness. It was very seldom thought that if we were to solve homelessness, we would be in a better position to solve all those other problems. And it was rarely thought that few of those problems even applied.
I have six other inequities to describe before this series, God willing, is over. But first and foremost, the biggest inequity was this: It was often thought that we were homeless because we had failed in some other area. It was rarely thought that we were homeless because we had failed to sustain a home.
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+-++++++++++
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Submitted this morning to Tracy Simmons, editor-in-chief of Spokane Faith and Values.
I recently learned that the word “homeless” is no longer considered politically correct among many people currently working in related services. It has been replaced by “houseless” because the word “homeless” has developed “pejorative connotations.”
Arguably, the word “homeless” replaced the word “hobo” because the latter had developed pejorative connotations. Logically, it is only a matter of time before the word “houseless” develops pejorative connotations.
But I am not here to lambaste the concept of political correctness. Personally, I think P.C. is a great idea in theory, but in practice it burns more bridges than it builds.
If this offends my lefter-leaning friends, so be it. I find myself often wishing I could be seen as a person who cares about World Peace and social justice without having to get crammed into the liberal “box” — and this is one reason why I am not comfortable identifying as a “liberal” — even though I am more than happy to identify as a “progressive.”
(Another reason is because the word “liberal” has connotations that may suggest a permissive lifestyle, which as a Christ follower is not my bag. “Progressive” works because I’d definitely like to see us build a better, more solid, less divided society.)
To the point, I am not about to change my language. For the past five years, I have been writing profusely and passionately about the homeless experience. My writings include a full-length musical about youth homelessness in urban America, as well as numerous blogs, essays, and published articles. The idea that I need to change my language is almost Orwellian. It is not as though I can pretend that we are suddenly at war with “Eurasia” and not “Europia.”
Also, in case it hasn’t been clear, my homeless rights advocacy is not the result of an unusual and unfounded compassion for those experiencing the homeless condition. I myself was homeless for years in the San Francisco Bay Area. I know whereof I speak from personal experience, and I network with others who have shared that experience. I have been trying to contact my friends from Berkeley, California who have also experienced homelessness, one of whom I have interviewed on this site. Though no one there has gotten back to me yet, I seriously doubt that this fix was effected by a homeless person, or by anyone who has ever experienced that condition.
I did learn in discussing the matter with the graveyard shift worker at the corner store that she had been homeless for several years as well. She told me she knows of no homeless or formerly homeless friend who would identify themselves as “houseless.” She also made the interesting analogy that, although she identifies as “queer,” people who do not share her orientation object to her identification. Of course, having been homeless herself, she knew as well as I do that one of the worst things about living outdoors is that people who lived indoors often told us how we were supposed to identify ourselves.
And yet, when we pleaded with them not to use words like “housed” and “shelter’ in reference to us when we were seeking residence — but to please say “found a place” or “place to live” instead – it fell on deaf ears. Why? Because we were not people. We were homeless people. A person can look can look for a place to live. A homeless person has to look for shelter.
Do you think for one moment than when I left twelve years of homeless and borderline-homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I finally moved to Moscow Idaho in a successful search for dignified, indoor residence, I told the prospective landlord that I had been homeless? Or that I was looking for “shelter?” Of course not! Think about it! He’d have moved on to the next applicant.
In fact, when I later tried to help an elderly man experiencing homelessness get an apartment in that same complex, the landlord told me: “I’m sorry, Andy. If I let him in, I’ll have to let them all in.”
While the conversation with the woman in the store was somewhat comforting, it did little to assuage my concerns. In fact, I couldn’t sleep till three in the morning, and woke up at 5:30 feeling nauseous.
That nausea persists to this moment. But I do want to make a statement in closing. That statement is simply this:
The day when we learn that it is more important to listen to the words of people who have experienced something that we have not, and that it is more important to raise awareness of that condition, than it is to label it with words that we find less offensive or pejorative, that will truly be a very great day.
The problem with political correctness in this instance is that it bi-passes the need to actually decriminalize and rehumanize the homeless individual, by choosing a different term that will be “less pejorative” rather than by dealing with the pejorative discriminations and prejudices themselves.
I’m in a lot of pain. What a sorrowful turn of events for Homeless Rights Activism.
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I have a Tuesday Tuneup planned but am foregoing it – and all other things — until this piece of social activism has been submitted. This may be a trigger for some people.
Something happened yesterday by surprise that was so emotionally wrenching, I burst into tears in the midst of all else that is going on at this time.
A few days ago I heard from Alastair (the Street Spirit editor) that they’d received a letter at the Spirit Office that was for me. They said a man had walked the letter into the office, unaddressed, and asked if they could please get it to Andy Pope.
Me being me, I naturally was fairly convinced that it was from some street hustler whom I’d offended, possibly with a threat against my life, or else contained some horrible blackmail attempt such as a photograph of the time I practically defecated in public I couldn’t hold it any longer. In fact, one of any number of high-profile formerly private activities could have been filmed or photographed — the privileges that one sacrifices when one gives up all privacy by living on the streets.
Instead, it was a handwritten letter from a dear friend named Mike. Mike and I had been homeless together for years down there, and we had a mutual friend whom I shall call “Maria.” Mike said that he had been reading my columns for “a few years” and that he especially appreciated the one I wrote about Maria.
Of course, I had been hesitant to write about a real person, and I changed her name to “Maria” when I wrote the story. I wrote nothing bad about her, but still feared it would embarrass her if it got back to her, or anger some of her friends. Still, I was moved to write a column called She Called Me Dad because this young Hispanic woman with a severe mental health condition — possibly Dissociative Identity Disorder — sat across from me where I had my spot where I flew my sign, and pretended I was her Dad so as to protect her.
As a severely disabled young woman alone on the streets, she was very vulnerable. Tweakers took advantage of her all the time, and Berkeley cops could have cared less, because people with conspicuous mental health disorders were generally lumped into the same bag as the other “losers and dirt bags” who appeared to populate the streets.
So Mike sent me two pictures of her — I wish I could scan them and show them to you — but of course I can’t do so without her consent. And like as not, I will never see her again, let alone do I know how to reach her.
In one picture she is seen holding one of two newborns in her arms, obviously caring for her baby as any mother would. In the other, she is seen at the Spot we shared, though of course without me.
He related that she had again been raped (I have no idea how many times she had been raped previously), went through with the pregnancy, and gave birth to twins. The twins of course were immediately taken from her by Child Protective Services.
I stared at the words and the pictures, and tears flooded my face. I’m not a crier, you know. That is, I don’t cry readily or easily. But it was too much for my heart not to be softened and touched.
Mike also shared that “Peaches” had died — which I had already learned from Kathy Kitzman, who was the Admin of Homeless Lives Matter at the time — and that my friend “Lillian” who had had three strokes and suffered from psychomotor impairment had come back for a while and then disappeared again. His reports brought back a panorama of a Berkeley that I’d forgotten about.
I usually think of Berkeley as this horrible place in time where a number of us did our best to look after each other while being routinely treated like shit by practically anybody who lived inside, and by at least half of the people who lived outside. I usually think of Berkeley as this horrible world. What I forget is how much LOVE there was among the decent people who had wound up homeless.
In a way, I’ve lost a lot of that love because life hasn’t been hard – I even get bored these days — which for me is inexcusable. Did I ever get bored on the streets? I remember how when we were homeless, if someone managed to score a hotel room for a week, it was a joke to say: “Wow – you might even get bored!”
Homelessness in Berkeley was a lot of hard things and a lot of good things, a lot of pain and fear and anger, and a lot of fun too. But it was never boring.
“What right have I?” I asked myself when I saw the two pictures of Maria and the vulnerable look in her eyes, “to be bored?”
I have a calling, I have a purpose. I better get on the ball.
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Anything Helps
God Bless!
When we were homeless, we did not feel we had the prerogative to process difficult feelings. If something happened that was hurtful to us, and we showed our hurt, it would have been seen as a sign of weakness. And somebody on the streets would have taken advantage of that weakness.
What we did instead was to intellectualize. What we did instead was to analyze. We would get together, four or five of us who had not only fallen on hard times, but had ceased to believe that things would ever get any better. Then, instead of facing our feelings, we made an effort to determine what factors in our society were feeding this unacceptable phenomenon called homelessness.
Since we thought of ourselves as intelligent, decent people, we hoped that these sociological analyses would one day be utilized for the benefit of humanity.
Once I found myself in the Emergency Room, again hoping for a three day stay in a psychiatric facility, for the sole purpose that I was tired of being rained on. The E.T. technicians, believing me to be a sane but manipulative man — that is to say, a scammer – saw through my none-too-subtle ploy. As they dismissed me, I asked for a blanket, that I might have covering whilst I slept in the rain.
I was given a garbage bag, as the medical personnel and security guards on the graveyard shift burst into callous laughter.
Who inhabits a garbage bag?
A piece of garbage.
Now more than ever, when 40,000,000 Americans have lost their jobs in the past three months, and the streets will be brimming with naive newbies, we really need to do something about this unacceptable phenomenon.
I have even come close to petitioning those who have escaped homelessness to consider returning, at least temporarily, to that realm. You and I might be blessed, but half of those newbies wouldn’t last five days on the more treacherous of the urban city streets. They need our guidance and counsel.
But there is a greater need than that. I hope I don’t have to tell you what it is.
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For the sake of new followers I gained shortly before my hiatus, I’ve been thinking to reiterate some themes that are essential to this blog. But for the sake of my longtime readers, I want to be careful. In approaching the tail end of the “Dangers of Liberation” series, I wish not to fall prey to repeat information. I’ve told my story so many times, in so many ways — from so many different angles — that I fear losing some of those who have followed me regularly. Hopefully, after the last three Thursday posts in this series, my fears will have proven unwarranted.
A particular sound often heard is that I ought to get over the homeless topic and resume writing on other themes about which I am passionate. This kind of sound does resonate with me. But I also need to fulfill something I started here. Hopefully I can impress upon my more longstanding followers that this is not exactly “repeat information,” but the announcement or heralding of something completely new.
After all, isn’t this the essence of liberation? It is the opposite of being locked into any kind of box. So what exactly happened after the cacophony of disturbing, disparate events described in the previous post? How did I get from a place of hurling vindictive curses at the Almighty, to a position of recognizing that He had responded to those prayers, despite my curse?
I mentioned that on June 24, 2016, I walked quietly out of the City of Berkeley without saying a word. This was immediately after buying a refurbished computer at Bill’s Computer Store on Shattuck Avenue after receiving an advance on my social security check. Given that I was essentially a marked man, and that the sight of me with a full backpack would indicate to any one of a number of thugs and gang bangers that there was no doubt a laptop inside that backpack, one might think I’d have left Berkeley first, and bought the computer later. After all, I had had four laptops stolen in Berkeley in the past four years, two of them the result of strong-armed robbery.
But the fact was, Bill had been working on an old Dell Latitude, and he was about to give me a much better deal than I’d have gotten from a complete stranger. Moreover, I would need as much money as possible to start an entirely new life, outside of Berkeley.
So, computer in tow, I headed for a small, out-of-the-way city called Burlingame, and for the all-night Royal Donuts shop, where I had some fair standing in the view of the nice Malaysian people who rolled doughnuts all night long, singing songs in their traditional fashion. Though I was very eager to begin notating all the music I had “written in my head” while walking about the Berkeley city streets, I was also aware that I had practical matters to consider. I needed to get some kind of roof over my head in a community where homeless services were few and far between.
Long story short, I found a shelter in a nearby city. I recall the rules being fairly regimented. For example, all shelter residents were required to attend daily meetings of either Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. I personally didn’t mind the meetings, because I have a reverence for the Twelve Steps and for that model of dealing with life’s difficulties. But it was a red flag to find homelessness equated with drug addiction or alcoholism, as though those were the only reasons a person could have become homeless. As one who was already painfully aware that most people in the San Francisco Bay Area were becoming homeless for socio-economic reasons entirely beyond their control, I found such stigma unsettling.
But there were some perks to being in the shelter. I began working with a caseworker who rightly determined that the best thing for me would be to move to an entirely new State. Then, as we began to work on this, I caught the flu. Clearly, I had caught the flu from other residents in the male barracks who were coughing and sneezing throughout the night. But the “mistake” I made was to let them know that I had the flu. I went to the hospital, and came back with medical information. When the people running the shelter learned of my medical diagnosis, their response was to kick me out of the shelter, lest I contaminate the other residents.
Something about this didn’t seem quite right. For one thing, my immune system is such that I had only caught a flu twice in the past fifteen years, even though I had lived outdoors throughout most of that period of time. That I had clearly caught the flu in the very shelter from which I was being expelled was obvious.
So I returned to the hospital in hopes of their letting me stay there. But their reply was that they couldn’t make a special exemption for me being homeless, otherwise they would have to make exceptions for all homeless people, and the hospital would become overcrowded. Standard procedure was to write “rest in bed for ten days” on the release form. Of course, I did not have a bed. But I couldn’t be made an exception — not in a part of the world where there are thousands of visible homeless people, night after night, lacking beds.
Next I tried the all-night bus that would run from Daly City to Palo Alto repeatedly. This bus was a haven for sleeping homeless people who had nowhere else to go. But when the homeless people saw me shivering and heard me sneezing, they too became concerned for their health. The upshot was that the bus driver kicked me off of the bus, and I had now had literally no options but to suffer a flu of some 100+ degrees with no place to lay my head, except for outdoors in the elements.
It was then that I got on my knees. Somehow, after twelve years of homelessness and borderline homelessness, it was catching a flu and being denied an indoor bed to rest in and to recuperate, due to no factor other than homelessness, that finally got to me.
I will never forget the exact words to the prayer that I prayed. Just after midnight on July 17, 2016, I hit my knees so hard on the pavement outside of the Sequoia Station in Redwood City, California, I compounded illness with injury in order to scream these words:
God!!
If there is Anybody out there,
I don’t care Who you are,
or what your Name is,
if you can feel me,
where I’m coming from, please —
I do not care about drug addiction
or alcoholism,
or mental illness,
or being a lazy bum
or a slacker or a slouch –
I care about Homelessness!
Please put an END
to twelve years of totally unpredictable,
totally unreliable,
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN,
ANYTIME ANYWHERE
HOMELESSNESS!!!
In the name of Jesus Christ I pray –
AMEN!!!!
One might argue the theological validity of a prayer worded in such a haphazard fashion – or even its internal logical consistency, for that matter. Such discussions would be another story altogether. What is critical here, from the standpoint of Homeless Rights Activism, is that it was the first time I had actually offered the heavens a petition with respect to homelessness itself, and not to all these other stigmatic things that are so often attached to that label.
Mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction and laziness are not identical to homelessness. But, much as I despised the stigma that was often thrown my way — even to the insistence that, as a homeless person, I needed to attend A.A. or N.A. meetings in order to sustain residence in a shelter — I myself suffered from the same stigmatic assaults on my identity. My true identity, as the sociologist Erving Goffman framed it, was “spoiled” by perceptions people have toward the homeless.
Had this not been the case, I’d have certainly found within me the power or presence of mind to have prayed such a prayer long ago. In fact, the practical wisdom of leaving the State of California and the San Francisco Bay Area in particular had been offered me by friends whom I knew from the Internet as early as 2004 — when I was first becoming homeless. But I did not have the ears to listen.
I did not have the ears to hear the fullness of the fact that my problem — far and away more serious than any of its associated labels — was homelessness. I had basically bought into all the very lies that I disdained.
That, above all things, is what kept me homeless for all those years. I saw the contradictory nature of what it was assumed I must be. I saw the ridiculous horrors of myself and others being treated as criminals, our true stories disbelieved by authority figures. I felt the frustration we all felt when having to face such demeaning treatment. But still, I hung on to the false notion that there must have been something about me that was innately flawed in such a way that I would never warrant a normal, self-respecting living situation such as even thieves and criminals are able to secure in our society. I never fully allowed the truth about homelessness to enter my heart.
Why not?
The short, simple answer would be low self esteem. That, combined with a certain measure of social indoctrination. When one hears something about oneself repeatedly, by people who appear to be in authority, one eventually begins to believe it.
But there’s a deeper answer than this. The dynamic of believing what one is told about oneself is most common when one is a child. In such a case, the looming figures of authority are one’s parents. Though my father had been dead since 1985, and my mother more recently deceased, they still remained the original authorities, exerting their influence upon me even as they tried to steer me away from dangerous behavior.
My mother died on October 9, 2003. That morning, I had beseeched Kaiser Redwood City to put me back on a medication called Klonopin, being as the past three years under the medication Gabapentin had been extremely challenging for me. While it is true that the combination of the med switch and my mother’s death triggered what psychiatry calls a “first time manic episode,” and it is true that I lost a $50,000 annual income, a home, a car, and all my professional accounts in the process, there is a deeper truth at work here.
The full extent to which my relationship with my mother ensured on a daily basis the type of sanity I needed to function in the workaday world of the Mainstream was something I was not to grasp until years later. Essentially, hearing of her death so soon after many of my senses were being dulled by 6mg/day of a powerful sedative — the highest legal dosage at the time — resulted in my blocking out the feeling of every interaction I had ever known with the person with whom I was undoubtedly the closest.
Like the motherless child whom I was, I then began to seek her guidance and comfort through the many disparate, detached figures of authority whom I soon found in the vast cosmic orphanage that is Homelessness. The horrible degree to which her nurturing love was cloned by the callous manipulations of an impassive band of power-hungry scoundrels was something I would have to face fully, were I ever to come to know the true identity of my actual enemy in life.
The manner in which my mother represented the Mainstream needed to be understood and embraced in completion, if I were ever to succeed in crafting a life free of her restrictions, and full of the independent identity that is mine and mine alone.
It will take me two more posts to drive the point home.
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Happy Thanksgiving — to those to whom it applies. Here’s a little talk I created yesterday. It’s about twenty-five minutes long, explaining how my recent “Inequity Series” came about, what it means, and what we probably should be doing about it. I’d be happy if you gave it a listen.
We who live indoors have a lot to be thankful for. I say, let’s give a “hand up” to those who could use it. God bless you — and God bless America.
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I found this “plea” in my Zoho Docs folder, a folder I rarely open. I had long ago forgotten writing this on March 18, 2016. I was homeless at the time, and had been homeless for quite a few years. Little did I know that my exact plea was to be answered, four months and nine days later. Not only did I receive the “lock on the door, window, and power outlet” for which I was pleading; I even received the “community of like-minded Artists and visionaries” that I was hoping would replace my homeless community. So I cannot help but post this plea — verbatim and unaltered, in all its raw and fervent appeal. The only thing that has been changed is that the words now appearing in italics were once in caps, since it was written on a Facebook timeline.
I apologize for my recent mania. Although — I’m thinking. What exactly is wrong with mania? What is there to apologize for? People tell me I “exhaust” them. But to me, almost everybody else seems to be moving in slow motion. Is it morally wrong that I think and move so quickly? Of course not. But I begin to develop a chip on my shoulder. I do not know how to express this dynamic clearly or articulately, or in a manner that would be persuasive of my case. My “apology” — such as it is — is placed before your eyes in order that it may be held distinct from the mania that was placed in another venue. I am banking on your objectivity to help me to believe that I can find words to express my position in such a way that will incur the empathy of the powerful.
This is because I, despite an empathic nature, despite an articulate presence, have been robbed of my natural power by a set of conditions and circumstances that have persisted far past the point of the conscious choices that initially set them into motion. That set of conditions and circumstances is called, in a word, homelessness. It has been going on for eleven years now. I do not know how I have made it this far. But I do know that I am not going to make it much farther without real help from someone who has the power to help and who cares to help. So: let’s get real.
I cannot live outdoors any longer. I mean – I can, but we may expect my life to end within the next two years at best. From eleven years of Homelessness I am finally breaking down. I, even I. No one can take the overwhelming conditions of homelessness for long without breaking in some way at some point. That I have endured this long is miraculous — especially in combination with the fact that every single person who is homeless understands my issue completely – whether they can articulate it or not – and every single person who lives indoors believes that my issue is something other than what it is.
Initially, this dynamic fascinated me. It fascinated me on an academic level, sociologically, as an item of analysis. But it has grown to disgust me. Not on an emotional level — but on a revolutionary level. Let me articulate my issue as clearly as I can. I know you love me – and I know you have had your own overwhelming issues. And I am proud of you. But please hear what my issue is. Every homeless person I know will echo this issue. I might as well speak in the editorial “we.” I speak on behalf of the Homeless People of the United States of America.
Our issue is that we feel unloved.
Much as I know that you love me, much as I know that my brother loves me, much as I know that my best female friend loves me – and if I have a remaining male friend who has not rejected me totally, he probably loves me too, whoever he is — I do not feel loved. None of us do. We feel unloved because it is not possible for us to grasp the disparity between the love that we see in the eyes of those who profess it – the love that I hear in your voice and in the voice of my brother and of my best female friend – and the other side of that dynamic, which is that none of the people who love us so will let us into their homes, much less agree to rent rooms to us, even in exchange for good money that we promise to pay. This is a universal homeless phenomenon.
Apparently, it is thought that we do not bathe. That our clothes are filthy. That we cannot manage. We will do something horrible in your house. If this were not the case, then why are we not in houses of our own? Although we know that the demand for affordable housing far exceeds the supply – in America – we still feel somehow blamed for the fact that we are the one who got left without residence. It’s as though we’re all in a competition, we are the ones who lost the game, and the booby prize is homelessness.
Rather than look at us as “losers,” why not view us according to reason? Because of high demand and low supply, somebody had to get left. It just happened to be us. We feel like lepers. We are the ostracized, the rejected, the pariahs, the untouchables. We are the perennial round pegs who did not fit, despite ourselves, into the square holes of the society that has discarded us.
We feel unloved because we do not understand how all these people who love us are permitting us to persist in a pattern of life that we have pleaded with them to help us to escape. For some of us, those pleas have been sent out for years. In my case, for eleven years. During that time there have been brief oases of residence that have lasted in some cases as long as six or seven months or more, before — before what? Something happened, and we are out in the wilderness once more.
What is that happened? Why did we lose those short-lived residential sites? It is because we didn’t want to sell used cars for our landlords, nor trim their marijuana plants. The housemates didn’t like the way that we paced the floors, or perhaps we were possessed of an annoying tick or snore that kept them awake at night. When asked to put something in the microwave, we who were absent-minded put it in the broiler oven instead. When it was discovered that we had been homeless, that somehow explained everything in the eyes of the potential landlord, and those eyes moved on to the next applicant — the one who had references and a credit rating, the one who either had not been homeless, or else was remarkably good at hiding the fact that they had. If the latter were the case, and one would possess that depth of discretion (I, by the way, do not), then one would probably have been shrewd enough to have avoided homelessness altogether in the first place.
In my case, after seven years of struggling, I finally became homeless by choice. That choice was made long ago. Made gladly, as you know. The problem is that it is no longer my choice. But I am having the devil of the time acting on the new choice – which is not to be homeless – because the stigmata that is Homelessness radiates from my forehead like a scarlet letter, as though warning everyone who crosses my path that I, like the others, having dabbled in the darkness that is homelessness, am thereby marked and branded. I differ from Cain only in that I have not yet killed a man. But I am just as marked, living in the awful place of confusion wherein the love of God so fills my heart that I know I am forgiven, and yet I know not what it is for which one must forgive me. I know that only God has forgiven me, and suspect that only God can. For we are those whom Man cannot forgive: The Unforgiven in the Eyes of Man. Not only that, but we do not know what we did that they won’t forgive us for. Ask ten people, we get ten different answers.
Homeless? You must be lazy. You’re not? Then you’re a loser. You’re not? Then you’re a dead beat. You’re not? Well then, shall we say, scum bag? Dirt bag? Piece of shit – that’s it! You must be a piece of shit. No doubt you are seriously drug-addicted. Hard drugs, the kind that ought never be discussed, much less indulged. You must be an alcoholic. Or severely mentally unhealthy – yes, that’s it. You’re a wing nut. Homeless? What do you mean by homeless? There’s got to be a reason for it.
Well, yes there is a reason. By definition, a person is homeless because he does not have a home. Whatever those other problems are – and believe me, if you’re homeless for long enough, you’ll encounter them all- they certainly cannot be solved until the problem of Homelessness that preempted them is solved. Otherwise, they will only recur again and again, because Homelessness feeds them. They come with the territory. We not only are homeless, but we will always be homeless, and we should always be homeless. We not only will never have a place to live indoors again, but we should not ever have a place to live again. Through the impaired vision of America, homelessness is seen not as a temporary state of affairs, but as a permanent and insoluble, incurable condition of the soul.
It is not that I happen to be able to withstand cold temperatures and inclement weather. It is not that I sleep in thunderstorms without a bedroll, shouting “Bring it On!” and exerting mighty pelvic thrusts toward the stars with each successive lightning bolt or thunderclap. It is not that I have not worn a jacket since 1985, or that I ran my half-marathon PR in 35 mph gales high on LSD flanked by local city cops. It is not that I am gonzo. True – I got exactly what I asked for, and if my book on the subject, the book that has needed to be written for years now, the book that explains the conditions from homelessness according to an author who actually is homeless and not according to some detached liberal social worker or socio-economist or some other form of clueless ivory tower bleeding heart do-gooder – but from the card-carrying, gun-toting homeless bro in dick mode, the real homeless man, AKA Yours Truly. That book is being written faster than these words are being penned, however spontaneously. And people tell me I exhaust them? Ha! They ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
That I have pleaded persistently with people who do have the power to terminate this way of living for me and help me into dignified indoor situation – not a “shelter” – nothing to do with “services” – nothing to do with a “program” – nothing to do with agencies, facilities, or institutions, but an actual living situation that entails outside the realm of homelessness, that (unlike the others) does not simply lead the homeless back to homelessness. A dignified living situation, where it will not be assumed that I am a criminal, that I plot crimes when so visibly preoccupied – I do not – where my writings of music and text and script on all levels will actually be met with a supportive environment of like-minded Artists and visionaries, rather than with further attempts to transform the vibrancy of this particularly uniquely gifted Child of the Most High into an impassive robot clone who serves the purposes of a sterile society consisting of those whose claim to fame is neither to threaten, not to make waves, not to cause wrinkles in time or similar anomalies that would disrupt the deluded flow of a culture gone awry. I refuse to join the ranks of those whose brains have been suspended until further notice so that they no longer can think for themselves but only serve the purposes of the State and of spiritual wickedness in high places when I AM A CHILD OF GOD! I AM A CHILD OF THE MOST HIGH KING! I AM BORN OF THE UNIVERSE THAT IS UNFOLDING ACCORDING TO DIVINE DESIGN, and I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE WHO I AM!
And I’m tired. Believe it or not, I — even I — tire. I exhaust even myself. So I close.
These could be the words of an asshole. But they are not. They are the words of a person who has been chosen to receive a message that he will articulate with precision and persuasive power. It is a message that America needs to hear – and that the nation, yea the world, has not yet heard. It is not that the message has not been delivered. On the contrary, it has been submitted en masse. It is that those to whom it has been spoken either have not listened, or they have not needed to hear it. Who has not listened to the message? Those of you live indoors. Who does not need to hear it? The homeless people of America who, ironically, are the only ones listening to it.
I can no longer abide the fact that only other homeless people are hearing the message that needs to be heard by those who are not. Somebody somewhere please grant me a place to live indoors that contains three prerequisites:
(1) It must have a window. I will probably need air from the outdoors at all times.
(2) It must have a lock on a single door, and a hide-a-key under a stone outside.
(3) It must have at least one power outlet.
I will provide the rest. I will pay up to $460 a month. But no more, because I will need to have a grocery chain like Safeway deliver food to my door. If somebody wants to kick down a new pair of Size 11 1/2 New Balance running shoes, it will be greatly appreciated, but not necessary to the task. I need – obviously- to write.
To write – the Homeless Message to the Mainstream of Modern American Life. What we want – is to be heard. What we want – is to be understood. What we want – is to be believed. What we want – is to be respected. We could care less if you say you “love” us — because, we cannot believe that you love us, and yet never let us in your home to so much as take a shower in exchange for money. We will believe that you love us when you begin to listen to what we have to say.
It will take me approximately five months to finish the book which currently is outlined in a 12 – page single space outline in standard outline form which I will submit to anyone interested.
My daughter, I love you. And I am proud of you. My brother, my sister, all of you — I love you. But I have something to say and I am going to get myself into the position where I will be physically and technically able to say it. Somebody get me out of the situation where I have to spend 90% of my time searching either for outdoor power outlets or chump change for North Berkeley coffeehouses with attitudes.
Here is the ninth and of last of my speeches on the Homeless Phenomenon in America. It is called “A Parallel and Opposing Culture.” Please – don’t just listen to it. Believe it.
And whoever happens to have gotten to the bottom of this, if there’s a God in Heaven or Beyond, that Power will bless you richly.
AMEN.
Andy Pope
Berkeley, California
March 18, 2016
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Below the illustration is an excerpt from my personal diary.
I’ve thought about almost nothing but homelessness in Berkeley throughout the past five days. It’s a disease; it’s a disorder; it’s PTSD; it’s been triggered. So I thought I’d take the opposite tact as oft-advised. Rather than distract myself from the triggers, I would embrace the experience completely.
In that spirit, I created this talk, called It Can’t Be Forgotten. Later I judged this effort harshly. Not the fact that I did it — that I don’t mind at all. I was happy, thrilled, and thankful that I completed the spontaneously conceived task, exciting as it was to undertake it.
What I judged was its quality. Two glaring errors stood out. For one thing, while I spoke often of the “inequality” factor, I did very little, if anything, to back up how that sense experience was valid for those of us enduring the Homeless Experience. It could just as easily have been a reflection of my own individual inferiority complex as it was an alleged manifestation of a social injustice.
Secondly, when this issue of inequality arises in the speech, I adopt a tone of voice that seems excessively strident. This could make the listener uncomfortable. The stridency could be alternately interpreted as either anger or sarcasm, something of an almost bitter outrage enters into the vibration from time to time, and the whole thing can make one very uneasy. This is especially the case if one can only tune into the upset tone of voice, and figure this guy’s got some kind of ax to grind, and then never tune in to the actual content of the dissertation, due to the fact that the ostentatious style has stood in the way.
I just now listened to the whole thing for the first time this morning. I don’t find it nearly as objectionable as I did during yesterday’s listen, but that may be because as a listener, I’m simply getting addicted to the repetitive playing of an interesting piece, and I’m getting into the groove of it. But it also may mean that my original objections are not so objectionable, because to remove that element of anger as well as the component of vagueness as to what exactly made us all feel so unequal and so dehumanized when we were all together back then on the streets, would be in essence to assault the very concept of the piece. It is what it is. If it makes you uncomfortable, good. What does this say about you?
That question asked, the speech, on that level, succeeds. What might be a distraction from that success, however, is if a certain kind of listener jumps to the conclusion, based on early, as yet undeveloped information, that the piece is “about” Internet trolling, trolls, etc. But it’s not. It’s about homelessness, inequality, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The troll is only used as a device, to serve as a trigger.
8:06 a.m. – 2019-08-10
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Attached is a verbatim transcript of the first story I had published in my new column in the new Street Spirit. My column is called “Homeless No More,” and my story is entitled “How I Got Inside.” This is based on a blog post called Bigger and Better than the Streets, also written on request of Alastair Boone, the new editor-in-chief of Street Spirit. However, this version involves signature edits and additions. As such, it stands on its own.
Note also the illustration provided. The caption reads: “A drawing of Andy getting on a bus and leaving the Bay Area, soon to be housed elsewhere.” Outside of being an outstanding illustration in its own rite, the work of one Inti Gonzalez, portions of it are charmingly telling. Note how the homeless Andy is haggard, with a more unkempt beard, wearing a helmet, carrying a sack on a stick, eagerly boarding the bus for greener pastures.
And then, on his arrival! Suddenly his beard is trim, his hair short and styled – he’s even wearing a Hawaiian shirt – as he bounds into his pristine new place of residence with a shit-eating grin on his face. I see “white male privilege” reflected all over, which makes sense in the context of my having moved to a largely all-White State. But the white male couldn’t have felt too privileged a few weeks back, flying a sign on a Berkeley city sidewalk all those years.
In any event, here’s the text. You can see for yourself what I wrote on the subject.
When I was homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area, I relied to a large degree on the moral support of lifelong friends and family who were not. For one reason or another, it was not feasible for any of them to let me stay in their homes for any substantial length of time. Still, they frequently provided me with encouragement, and on occasion sent me money. While I was often upset that nobody was “letting me in,” I nonetheless was dependent on their emotional and financial support in order to endure the ongoing conditions of homelessness.
One of the reasons why I delayed the decision to leave the Bay Area for so long was because I was attached to my support group. I felt that my old friends and family members were just about the only people who knew that I was a competent guy who had landed on the streets as the result of a costly medical misdiagnosis. They were the ones who knew that a mistreated health condition had led to a mental breakdown, as my inability to properly manage a health condition threw me into first-time homelessness at the age of 51. They were the ones who watched in horror, as one by one I lost all my accounts, and could no longer keep up with the high cost of living on the S.F. Bay Area Peninsula. But still, they believed in me, and they did what they could to help me get back on my feet. Of course I needed their support!
The only thing they didn’t do was to let me stay with them. Ironically, to have offered me housing, even temporarily, would have been the only thing that could possibly have helped me to get back on my feet.
But they could not do this. They had their own concerns. Meanwhile, I watched while the sordid conditions of homelessness gradually transformed me from a naïve, overweight singing teacher to a scrawny fraction of my former self. Gradually, I got to be half-crazed from protracted sleep deprivation. Often, I became fully crazed from feeling that I was treated like a sub-human mutant, rather than an equal. Passersby sneered at me in disgust.
In order to cope with this massive sense of ever-increasing dehumanization, I turned at first to marijuana, though I’d smoked no more than twice since the 80’s. Then, during the last three years of my homeless sojourn, I turned to a harder drug. I used speed to desensitize me from the cold—both the physical coldness of temperature, and the spiritual coldness of the condescending mockers in my midst. One by one, my old friends and family members, with rare exception, abandoned me. One of them recently told me: “We were all just waiting to read your obituary.”
Finally, in June of 2016, I picked up my social security check and walked out of the city of Berkeley without saying a word. “If the drugs won’t kill me,” I told myself, “the thugs who dispense them will.”
For a month I wandered the other side of the Bay in search of a permanent answer. But nothing seemed to work. In a shelter, I caught a flu, and was kicked out for that reason. The hospital wouldn’t let me in, because if they let me in, they’d have to let all of us in. I got kicked off of the all-night bus for fear of contaminating the other homeless people, who relied on the all-night bus as a shelter.
In desperation, I got down on my knees. I told the Universe that all I wanted was “a lock on a door, a window, and a power outlet.”
Then I took action. I began googling keywords until I found a place in the Pacific Northwest that rented for only $275/month—something that would easily have gone for $900/month in the Bay Area. It was a tiny room in a converted hotel—but it would do the job. I called an old associate, someone whom I’d worked with long ago when he was a music teacher at a middle school. Hearing my story, he agreed to front me $200 for a one-way Greyhound ticket to a new life. After that, I told my story to the prospective landlord, whom I called while still in San Francisco. To my amazement, he agreed to hold the place for me until I got there.
Forty-eight hours later, I was sleeping in my new room. It had a window, two power outlets, and three locks on the door. Four days after that, I signed a one-year lease. Three weeks later, after years of being considered unemployable in the San Francisco Bay Area, I landed a part-time job as a piano player at a small-town church.
A part of me wishes I had made the decision earlier. It would have spared me the last three years of psychic hell. But had I made the decision earlier, I would have abandoned the bulk of my support group. For me, leaving my support system and moving out of town was what it took to lead me to housing. However, it is a common misconception that the homeless crisis would be solved if homeless people just picked themselves up and moved out of town. This is not always the case, nor is it always readily possible.
I was lucky to have found a sympathetic person who would front me the money for a one-way-ticket to another state and help me with an apartment deposit and a few other odds and ends. Not everybody can find such a benefactor. Also, we cannot deny the obvious fact that I am a white male brimming with the semblance of “white privilege”—even while living on the street—if only for the ability to decide to move to a state largely composed of other white people. While I obviously did not possess a whole lot of privilege per se, I looked as though I could conceivably be, or become, a privileged person. Let’s face it: Had I been Black or Hispanic, to show up in a largely white neighborhood would not have worked to my advantage.
So in a way, I had it easy. At the same time, however, I believe that there is a way out for everyone. Though the sheltered world does not know it, homelessness is not the same thing as alcoholism, drug addiction, or incompetence. It’s not the kind of thing where one needs to “change their ways” in order to overcome it. In order to overcome homelessness, what one needs is dignity. We are all created equal; we are all endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are all bigger and better than the streets.
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This is one of a series of pieces written on request of Alastair Boone, the editor-in-chief of the social justice newspaper, Street Spirit.
Our society seems to be obsessed with putting people into boxes. Rather than take the time to actually get to know an individual for who they are uniquely, we like to make snap judgments about them according to their appearance. For example, if a man is seen flying a sign on a sidewalk, we think: “That guy’s a lazy bum.”
But what if that man is not a lazy bum? What if he’s someone who, for one reason or another, needs to fly a sign on that particular day, in order to raise money quickly for some certain necessity that he lacks? For all we know, he could be raising money for transportation to a distant town where someone has offered him a job. In that event, what would make him a “lazy bum?”
Erving Goffman
Sociologist Erving Goffman refers to this phenomenon as “social stigma.” He defines social stigma as “the extreme disapproval of (or discontent with) a person or group on socially characteristic grounds that are perceived, and serve to distinguish them, from other members of a society.”
Many people are socially stigmatized in this fashion. A cop might be stigmatized, thought to be brutal or inhumane, only because some cops are inhumane. Naturally, those are the cops who attract the public eye. But we’ve all met good cops, haven’t we? When I was homeless, I encountered cops who treated me more humanely than some of the social workers whose job it was to help me.
Religious people are also often stigmatized. Some people think that just because I identify as a Christian, it means that I must be sexist, anti-gay, and a proselytizing Bible-thumper, ready to cram my theology down their throats. But anyone who actually takes the time to get to know me will readily tell you that I am none of those things.
In my personal experience, I have never been stigmatized more than when I was a homeless person. I was lumped into the same box as virtually every one of my fellow homeless people. And when solutions were offered to end my homelessness, I found that there was an alarming “one size fits all” approach. My personal story, if even listened to, was disregarded completely.
“You’re homeless?” one would say. “Here’s what you do. I’ve got a lead on a live-in drug rehabilitation program.”
Now, there are a number of flaws with that kind of reasoning. First of all, it presupposes that homelessness and drug addiction are synonymous. This is folly. Many homeless people have never used illegal drugs at all. On the other hand, many people who live indoors are severely addicted to all kinds of drugs. They just don’t let anyone see it.
Secondly, suppose a person is a drug addict. Is a “live-in drug rehabilitation program” necessarily the solution for them? There are twelve-step programs, sober living environments, a program at Kaiser called LifeRing, and a program called Rational Recovery. Similarly, if one is homeless, one might be directed toward a board-and-care home, a live-in psychiatric facility, a halfway house, or transitional housing. And those options will work for many people.
I spoke with a formerly homeless woman who enrolled in transitional housing and spent seven months in a group facility, giving them a percentage of her disability check every month. At the end of the seven months, she had enough money to pay the first and last months rent and security deposit on a studio apartment. She seemed quite content with her situation the last time I saw her.
I myself received a call from someone at the Berkeley Food and Housing Administration shortly after I had left Berkeley for another State. It turned out that my name had come up on a list of senior housing options, and they were willing to offer me my own one-bedroom apartment near Lake Merritt. While that might sound wonderful, it would also have kept me in a part of the world where I had developed far more detrimental associations than beneficial ones. Although I was tempted to drop everything and move back to the East Bay for sentimental reasons, I knew deep down that it would be a backward move.
I have had two places of my own since I left Berkeley. The first was reached by googling keywords such as “college town,” “small town,” “affordable rent.” Those and other keywords eventually pointed me toward a place of my liking. But if another homeless person were to start googling keywords, their keywords might not be something along the lines of “big city,” “multicultural,” “low unemployment rate.” One size does not fit all.
Until we, as a society, slow ourselves down enough, and open ourselves up enough, to listen to the plethora of unique stories that homeless people generally tell truthfully, we will not come close to solving the “homeless problem.” In my case, the first person to listen to my story was a retired music teacher. He knew I was truthful because he recognized a fellow music teacher when he saw one. For another person seeking to escape the throes of homelessness, the first person to listen to their story might be a construction worker or a restaurant owner.
So, while transitional housing programs and halfway houses have their place, a true solution to the homeless predicament will never be reached until we recognize that the homeless person is an individual, endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness no more and no less than anyone else on the planet. As long as the wall of division that separates a “person” from a “homeless person” still stands, no lasting solution will be attained. But once that wall is broken down, the solution will be plain to see.
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This post is an expansion on the fourth “buzzword” cited in my previous post, The Homeless Buzzwords. I wrote it on request from Alastair Boone, the new editor of Street Spirit, whose fine editing is already evident in this piece.
Once, before I had gained more savvy in the realm of outdoor living, I asked a man if he were “homeless.” He replied: “Homeless is just a word.”
His answer still sticks with me. Homeless is just a word, one that is over-used to describe the experience of somebody who, for one reason or another, does not have a place to call their own. It fails to capture any of the individual characteristics that make the homeless person, well, a person.
In the twelve years when I lived outside, this word had a way of making me feel that I was in some way distinctly set apart from the rest of the human race. At times, the word suggested that possibly I was not even fully human. I quickly learned that in this over-generalization, the “H-Word” carries with it so much stigma that its usage actually had the power to actively work against me in a number of different ways.
I often found that avoiding the label of “homeless” was the only way to reach my personal goals. For it would be from that label that all the other distracting labels would spring. Drug addict. Nut case. Lazy Bum. Loser. If instead I somehow managed to be seen only as a fellow human being, and not as a “homeless” person, then my chances of achieving my goals were greatly enhanced.
Not the least of these goals was to find dignified dwelling. Not just any old place to live, but a place that I could truly call my own, where I could attend to all the things that make me the human being who I am—not just the homeless guy, but the human guy—the unique individual who goes by my name. Too often I had seen landlords reject a prospective tenant after learning that they had been homeless at some earlier point in time.
Even recently, a 65-year old man came to the Recovery Center where I work, and was extremely open about his having become homeless at the first time in his life. He had received assistance from St. Vincent DePaul and another charitable organization in the area, and was referred to me to help him find a room at a local residence hotel, where I was on good terms with the manager.
However, by the time I contacted the manager on his behalf, the manager had already heard about the man through the grapevine, this being a very small community, and the man in question a very outspoken fellow. The landlord explained to me simply:
“No, Andy — if I let him in off the streets, I will have let them all in. And I’m sorry, I just can’t take that risk.”
I had hoped to head off his reputation at the pass, but unfortunately it preceded me. I then remembered how another landlord of my acquaintanceship had once told me, point blank:
“If there are ten people on my rental application, and I find out that one of them has been homeless, there will soon be only nine people on that application.”
Sadly, all of this corroborates with my overall experience with the homeless condition. Not only landlords and apartment managers, but people in general do not like to have homeless people on their premises. There seems to be a prevailing notion that if a person has become homeless, then they must have somehow “messed up” their living situation somehow. “Therefore,” continues the line of thought, “let’s not have them mess up mine.”
So, at the end of my homeless sojourn, when I finally did find a place that was to my liking, what do you think I did? I found a landlord who had no reason to see me as anything other than a fellow human being, in a place where nobody would have any knowledge of my homelessness, and I basically started afresh from scratch—just to get my foot in the door. Literally. The H-Word in no way entered into the process.
The H-Word, after all, is divisive. Its essential function is to cause division. The person to whom this word applies—the “homeless person”—is pitted against the person to whom the word does not apply; the “housed person,” if you will. From that moment on, it’s: “You stay in your camp; I stay in mine; never the twain shall meet.” By categorizing all the vastly disparate reasons that one might live outside under the umbrella of “homeless,” society gives itself permission to ignore these stories altogether. If the H-word doesn’t apply to you, then you can put those people in a box and carry on your way.
People who have been so privileged as to always have lived indoors often don’t grasp that the H-word is not just a neutral label used to describe one’s state of living. It also packs a punch that has the power to keep you from finding a place to live, and from leaving the experience of homelessness behind. Simply put, this word carries in it a certain violence. Because of this, I prefer to talk about those who live “outside” or “outdoors,” rather than “the homeless,” whenever possible. I feel called upon to emphasize that the main difference between those who are homeless and those who are not is that the homeless person lives outdoors—exposed and vulnerable to all kinds of external influences, human or inhuman, foul or fair. Whoever is not homeless lives inside and as such is protected from the vast array of such external elements.
Acutely aware of such disparities, many people struggling with homelessness will do everything they can to conceal their homelessness from those who live indoors. They become driven into the realm of invisibility in order to avoid the stigma that arises as soon as the question is posed: “Hey – are you homeless?” When spoken, the flood of unwanted connotations and generalities comes rushing in. In the midst of all this, the truth of the actual person who is happens to live outside—their individual and unique story—is forgotten.
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“Does the crackhead become homeless,” someone asked, “or does the homeless person become a crackhead?” This question was posed on the site Quora, where I am an infrequent volunteer contributor.
I took the question to be indicative of a certain social perception; i.e., that the usage of illicit substances is so widespread in the homeless populace that it is difficult to discern which came first: the drug addict or the homeless person. I have observed that both can happen, but that the latter occurs a lot more often than many people are inclined at first to believe.
This is because people have a way of wanting to find out why someone has become homeless. If they can pin their homelessness on a secondary issue, unrelated to the defining factor; viz., that a homeless person lacks a roof over their head, then they can effectively deflect attention away from concern over homelessness by replacing it with concern over that secondary issue. But that issue, be it drug addiction or what-have-you, is only secondary. The primary issue is homelessness — and people don’t want to look at it. So they look at the “why” instead.
This is because it is easier for most people to live with the perception that a person became homeless because they were a “crackhead” (or drug addict, alcoholic, etc.), than it is with the sense that a homeless person may have become homeless for reasons that were completely beyond their control, and that cannot possibly be attributed to any kind of behavioral flaw or defect of that person’s character. The homeless person needs to somehow be blamed for having gotten themselves as far low as they’ve gotten themselves. This is so that the focus can become on what they ostensibly did wrongin order to result in their homelessness; and not on the homelessness itself.
The situation is further complicated by the widespread misconception that drug addiction and alcoholism are behavioral flaws, rather than as spiritual maladies that can be arrested through faith in God or a Higher Power. So it becomes easy to say: “Well, that guy became homeless because of his crack addiction.” A perception like that can easily soon morph into: “If he would just deal with his crack habit, he would be able to get out of homelessness.”
However, it is not true that if a person could deal with their “crack habit,” they could necessarily find a roof over their head. It may make it easier for them to find their way out of homelessness, but homelessness is a pretty deep hole, with many elements besides drug addiction obscuring the way out of it.
If, however, a person didn’t start using street drugs until years after the overall conditions of homelessness began to gnaw away at their better judgment, that person is less likely to be believed. This is because people don’t like the idea that homelessness might have resulted from anything other than a supposed “behavioral flaw or character defect.” If it was revealed that homelessness were the result of situations entirely beyond the individual’s control — for example, a foreclosure, an illegal eviction, or a costly medical misdiagnosis — then one would be forced to absolve the homeless person of any sense that they had “deserved” their homelessness, or that “bad choices” they had made were at its root.
In that case, one would be faced with the challenge of having to show compassion for the homeless person, rather than levying judgment upon them. Unfortunately, it is easier for most of us to judge others than to have compassion toward them.
For this reason, more people are likely to believe that the “crackhead became homeless” (as a result of their addiction) than that the “homeless person became a crackhead” (as a result of their homelessness.) Therefore, there are more homeless people in the latter camp than many are willing to believe.
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This morning please find the third in our Talks 2018 series of talks on the Homeless Experience. This talk is intended to demonstrate how, even if a person has made a conscious choice to be homeless, that person is likely to soon find themselves entrenched in a condition from which it is almost impossible to escape.
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If you are a person who knows what it’s like to be poor, have you ever noticed how quick people of privilege are to attribute aspects of poverty to something that has absolutely nothing to do with your financial situation? Such as, for example, your mental health?
I live in a city of approximately 26,000 people, 30% of whom are at poverty level. Most of the poor people in this city are reasonably happy and healthy. This is one reason why I enjoy the unique city in which I live. But it appalls me how readily some of my wealthier friends will assume that my current poverty must have been caused by a mental health problem, a drug or alcohol problem, or (quite simply) a moral failing.
Although I will be the first to admit that I have mental health issues requiring treatment, I find it disturbing how often these issues will be cited as the reasons for my impoverished condition. Many of the wealthier people who say such things would become much crazier than I am, if they, too, were to suddenly lost their shirts as quickly as I did in the year 2004.
The people who most often allude to this fallacy will usually make no attempt to actually understand my condition. They are clearly looking for a scapegoat — something beyond the scope of their experience that they can use to shift the blame away from the realities of poverty that they do not wish to look at.
“Hey Bob, I really hate to bother you for another loan. I know you’re busy, but my car just broke down terribly. I need it to get to work, and I just can’t afford the bill. Is there any way at all you can help me?”
“Well, Bill, I know you always pay me back, but I’m getting to be a little bit bothered by the fact that you’re not many progress. Don’t you think it’s high time you dealt with your mental health, so that you won’t be so chronically down on your luck?”
Once again, this is classism – pure and simple. It can be incredibly frustrating when one is doing their best to maintain a healthy relationship to society, and the frequent setbacks endemic to poverty are dismissed as signs of poor mental health. Of course one’s mental health suffers when encountering such setbacks. But poor mental health does not cause those setbacks. This is only an assumption on the part of those whose lives are such that they never have to experience such setbacks, and thus don’t know what those setbacks are like.
In short, they don’t know what it’s like to be poor.
Now here’s another thing I’ve noticed. It is often assumed that someone who experiences a life crisis that hurls them into abject poverty — or even homelessness — has gotten there as the result of a moral failing.
“Obviously, Bill screwed up. Nobody gets from where he was to the streets that fast without having done something wrong. That being the case, I have no sympathy for Bob whatsoever.”
“Amen, Brother Bob.”
But the reality is that many people of privilege are extremely slow to let go of what they’ve got. In many cases, their natural stinginess is the reason why they’ve managed to accrue so much in the first place. But many poor people, knowing what it’s like to be poor, will give another poor person the shirt off their back. I myself have been known to give my last twenty dollars to another poor person if I felt they needed it more than I do. When I do so, I am confident they would do the same for me, if the tables were turned.
A lot of people become poor as the result of something good that they have done — something that a rich person, under the same circumstances, might not do. For example, if one’s mother or father is in poor health, perhaps dying, a person who is lower middle class might have their parent come live with them, despite having to take on added medical expenses. A rich person, under the same circumstances, will often send their parent to a retirement home.
Granted, the richer person can afford to send Mom or Dad to the retirement home, and the poor person cannot. But if you were aging, ailing, and dying, where would you rather be? In a retirement home among total strangers? Or with your kids whom you love, knowing that they love you too? Where would you rather die? With your children by your side? Or not?
It is not a moral failing to take care of an ailing parent. It is actually an act of self-sacrificial love. Love, in its purest form, involves sacrifice. When one sends one’s dying mother to an “old folk’s home,” what sacrifice is involved? Only money. But when one invites their dying parent to come live with them, that is a Sacrifice of the Heart.
I find it ironic that people of poverty often are more giving and more loving than people of wealth, and yet in our society it is often assumed that poverty is an effect of moral failing. While moral laxity can certainly lead to poverty, it is definitely not the case that poverty necessarily results from it.
When Jesus appeared on the earth, who did he generally hang around? Rich people or poor people? Anyone with a cursory background in Scripture will know that he hung around the dregs of society, the outcasts, the lepers, the pariahs, those who were so dirt poor they were ostracized and vilified by the Pharisees and Saducees of their day.
If the first arrival of Jesus Christ were to have occurred today rather than two thousand years ago, you know who He would hang around?
The homeless people. For my homeless brothers and sisters are the lepers of today’s society. Let them in! Let all of us in — before it is too late.
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In my blog, I often discuss how homeless people are stigmatized in our society. I have also identified myself as a Christian. But the identity of a Christian is spoiled by stigmatic perception every bit as much as the identity of a homeless person is thus spoiled. Therefore, I think it’s about time I did my part to diffuse a few of these stereotypes.
I almost fear telling others I’m a Christian, because I am often assaulted immediately with accusations of being a sexist and a homophobe. But what is more germane to the present-day purpose of this blog is how much classism seems to run rampant in American Christianity. This is especially evident in what is often called the Prosperity Gospel.
The Prosperity Gospel, in short, is a particularly inviting deception that equates spiritual blessings with material success. Of course it is entirely conceivable that once a person decides to live according to spiritual wisdom rather than careless foolishness, one might find oneself advancing in material gain. If one, for example, has been blowing all of one’s money on drugs, hookers, and other forms of escape, one would naturally notice a pleasant increase in one’s financial status once such expenses have ceased. The Proverbs of Solomon are all about that distinction. However, we find such wisdom in many sources other than the Bible; and I for one would submit that most of the Proverbs are merely common sense.
Besides, it is also quite plausible that a person can be extremely happy living a minimalistic lifestyle with very few possessions at all. In fact, in Matthew 19 and Mark 10, we read of a young man who had “great possessions” who walked away from Jesus in sorrow when advised that he should give up all he owned in order to inherit eternal life. Does such denial of worldly goods equate spiritual blessing with prosperity? Obviously, the opposite is the case.
Consider also these very famous Scriptures: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:24) “The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10). And without bothering to quote every word, passages such as James 5:1-11 and Luke 16:19-31 hurl severe warnings in the direction of the wealthy. But where in the Bible are such warnings thrown in the direction of the poor? Nowhere.
To the contrary, Luke 6:20 includes the words: “Blessed are you who are poor.” Where in the Bible do we find the words, “blessed are you who are rich?” Again, we find them nowhere.
A proponent of the Prosperity Gospel will almost always cite Jeremiah 29:11 from the New International Version of the Bible, as follows:
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord,
“plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
plans to give you hope and a future.”
Jeremiah 29:11
N.I.V.
Although it is true that the word “prosper” figures in this translation, a quick scan of several other popular translations will reveal nothing of the kind. In the English Standard Version, for example, the phrase “plans to prosper you” reads “plans for welfare.” The same phrase in the time-honored King James reads “thoughts of peace.” So this single verse, taken completely out of context in a modern American translation, is hardly a valid rationale for a deception as extreme as the so-called Prosperity Gospel.
In the Bible, once again, where exactly are material acquisitions equated with the kind of provision that brings real fulfillment, inner peace, personal happiness, and eternal security? Nowhere, really. The only time when material gain is cited as a blessing from God is in a context where the greater blessing would be the evidence of God’s love; for example, the last chapter of the Book of Job. And love, according to 1 Corinthians 13, abides forever. Material blessings vanish at the grave.
In conclusion, I would contend that we who are spiritual ought to set our affections on the things that are above and beyond our material disposition (Colossians 3:2), rather than on the passing pleasures and comforts of this world. The expression, “you can’t take it with you,” ought not to have been coined in vain.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,
where moths and vermin destroy,
and where thieves break in and steal.
But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
where moths and vermin do not destroy,
and where thieves do not break in and steal.
For where your treasure is,
there your heart will be also.”
Matthew 6:19-21
N.I.V.
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In the sixties and early, pre-Watergate 70’s, we heard a lot about the Generation Gap. It seemed that the schism between those who represented the Establishment, and those who had “dropped out” or represented what we called the counter culture, was much too wide for the sake of constructive communication. Much tension occurred as a result, and it often morphed into violence.
That gap was called the Generation Gap because those who comprised the Establishment were substantially older than those of the emerging counter-culture. But today, I find ourselves immersed in an even more serious gap than the age-based gap — a gap that is based on class.
Speaking in general terms, it has not been uncommon for there to be a millionaire in office. But a cabinet composed largely of billionaires? That’s a new one on me, as of 2016. And I’ve been watching this kind of stuff go down since the sixties – since before Watergate – since before the War on Drugs.
And what about on the other side? Poverty has abounded forever. But for so many poor people to lack roofs over their heads? For poverty to engulf the disabled and the developmentally challenged? The Class Gap has never been so wide.
There has always been division – but not like this. There has always been tension – but this is unprecedented. And what about communication? It’s almost impossible for those in the privileged classes to even understand what the impoverished are trying to say. This creates frustration among the underprivileged, and frustration turns to anger, turns to outrage, turns to hate. I see a lot of outright hatred emerging from those who struggle, as they turn to those whose material and monetary wherewithal make them better equipped to help balance the scales, and receive only insensitivity and indifference in return.
I have lived almost sixty-five years, and I have watched this trend worsen. We tend to frame our differences around race, gender, culture, ability, sexual orientation and age. But seen through a lens less often considered, many of these differences really boil down to differences in socio-economic class.
I have worked for the wealthy, and I have generally found them to be very nice people: courteous, accommodating, and caring. I have also been down and out, and have lived on the streets, where the tension is much more intrusive, and etiquette is held to be unnecessary — so much so that any use of it is often viewed to be hypocrisy. On the other hand, the language that is commonly used for communication on the streets is often regarded as crass or even abusive among those for whom such communications are unnecessary.
A poor person who is broke, who finds five dollars on the street, will naturally see it as gift for which to be grateful. But when I told a person who was wealthy that I had found five dollars, that person literally shouted: “Shut the f—k up!” Once when I was renting a room from a very wealthy landlord, he came down and saw me counting the pennies on the table. Scowling in disgust, he shouted: “Stop that!” When I was in a similar position, and I asked a friend for five dollars, he replied: “Five dollars is not going to solve your problem, Andy.” But five dollars could have kept me alive another day.
I saw five homeless people die overnight, having preexisting medical conditions, unable to withstand one more night in the cold. Had any of them had but five dollars, they could have gotten inside a bus and slept throughout the night. Granted, the problem of homelessness would not have been solved by five dollars. But a far greater problem might have been solved — the problem known as death.
This is why frustration mounts, for that same person was perfectly magnanimous toward me when he wasn’t hung up on needing to “solve my problem.” Nor was I asking him to provide a solution, as though nothing but a detailed plan to get me off the streets would be satisfactory. I was only requesting a small amount of money, fearing an overnight death in the cold, as I had seen my other friends die. So naturally, it is easy to rage and roar at the rich in light of such a constant cold shoulder. But to do so does little good for the cause, for some have done so with violence.
I have written a musical that explores the effects of classism, social stigma, and homelessness on the youth of today’s America. I conceived of this musical because I have been there. The impoverished may not be able to afford tickets to this musical once it is finally produced. But the impoverished, the homeless, and the underprivileged, are not the ones who need to see this production. Those who need to see it — at least according to its author’s intent — are those who have never experienced the energy of the streets, nor of the outdoors, of Nature, and the terrifying adventures thereof. I write from a position of one unsheltered, and I write to the sheltered – not to shatter their shelter, nor scatter the remains of their relics abroad to destruction, but to show them the shamelessness of those who are without, that they might be moved, and share of the shelter that is within.
The gap created by class distinctions and social stigma in America has always been wide. Throughout history, it’s been very wide, and a very difficult one to bridge. But it can be bridged — and it must be bridged — if America is to endure. After all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. But we do nothing to strengthen our weak links. We throw our elders into poorly run board-and-care homes, rather than care for them ourselves. And some of the shelters into which we throw our homeless are little more than glorified prisons. Should we really be that quick to discard from our company those who have lost their homes?
Viktor Frankl
Many of us who have escaped the horrors of continuous homelessness seem driven, or even desperate, to convey a message that at first may appear to be unintelligible. A similar dynamic took place, on a much more grotesque, grandiose scale, when those who survived the Nazi concentration camps emerged with a sudden upsurge of vigor. Viktor Frankl reports that many such survivors entered immediately into massive consumerism, guzzling beer and gobbling down huge helpings of their favorite foods, of which they’d been deprived. In Frankl’s case, he launched wholeheartedly into the book that became Man’s Search for Meaning. They who have survived the conditions of homelessness often display a similar spike of renewed motivation, drive, and sense of purpose.
The gush of enthusiasm with which we who have survived the conditions of homelessness often seek to reveal the hidden secrets of the Homeless Experience can be off-putting. But the message itself is little more than a restatement of time-honored principles that have helped hold this nation together for over two hundred years. I did not coin the phrase: “United We Stand; Divided We Fall.” Still, because of the frustration we tend to express when we feel we are not being heard, and the violent, hostile nature of a conspicuous minority among those who seek to express it, they who have the power to do something about the matter quite naturally turn their ears to more appealing voices. If only they knew that in so doing, they are shunning the voices that count.
Eden in Babylon 