Homeless no longer shock to indifference or intolerance

Outmoding statistics derives perspective about how we accept or refuse help, when realities unexpectedly change

2010-02-05T18:00:00.000-08:00

In all situations, the dumbest question is the one we don't ask. Some itches often refuse their scratch, some birds won't be caged, and some of us just won't ask for help.

There are those we know so close to desperation, or worse, close to death.

Or worse, feeling without love.

For me, I know I've faced more difficult situations than homelessness, trying or having tried every means possible to get out of such circumstances. I've learned some powerful lessons, having had to have stepped out of my comfort zone.

First or second hand, or even hands up

We can use what's facing us, the immediate, the hands-on, the direct.

I know how I've had to use applied common sense, or statistics, or historical data, especially when I absolutely need perspective that I didn't have, so I wouldn't fall into outmodedness, so I didn't feel like a failure, so that I could carry on in the outmost reaches of where my life delivered me.

With the inference of all of us as being homeless, or virtually homeless, or even nearly so, we think of those we dearly love, those we've considered as neglected or ignored, our extended family, those we acknowledge as significant. At those times, we have to assess where we are, and we remember how we equivocate or compromise or furtively sense of those we truly love, or perhaps just care about their acquaintance, when we just assume we know where they are.

We must sometimes know what we may have neglected to know.

There are, which we often forget we are among, the free birds, those who have, regardless of their flitting around like hummingbirds in our lives, an importance to us (importance measured as testament to our assessment of our lives, as we come to know, through what we do in our lives, who we choose to befriend or marry, or how we deal with conflicts or grief or any anguishing reality, or how we learn to carry on without what we've had).

With reflection and perspective, we have a different mode of evading the statistical inferences, that that we may or can come to deny, at times, with our lives.

We then meet what's important and make our lives matter.

When we are quick to while away time

When I was first to discover how I had known how sure I was of my association to homelessness, there were those who I had to ensure my capability to ensile such that I've had to endure. They knew me. They knew I didn't belong among the numbers of those who I've had as close associates or acquaintances, those who know the harsh reality of homelessness. In homeless shelters. Or dole lines. Or free food congregations.

There are those who knew I'd survive. There are those who I'd seen reconcile their desperation. There are those who trusted my will to outmode the anguish.

I met Denny two decades ago when I had been more than solvent, making more than six thousand per month, feeling guilty that I was spending several hundred dollars at a time when I was generously, in his opinion, tipping out what was more than adequate for the nominal subsistence working people expected others to provide.

Denny has always been a leveling conscience, when we'd be meeting casually in bars, or for music, or other random encounters.

A retired Marine, he's always had a grace.

This last week, Danny grew weaker and he complained, finally, how he felt close to death. Many of his friends and extended family do not want to see him dying alone, in his van, or in a veteran's hospital bed.

Visiting him in his hospital room, I felt stunned.

Anyone who knows me knows how long I've been witnessing my closeness to survival's urgings to this point of death, due to realities that always unexpectedly change.

Yet we all die, sometimes alone, without the empathy of certainty in life's misgivings.

As far as misgivings, I met Sophia this last week, inured to a libidinous neglect, and seeking comfort. Yet she was a stranger. Despite the conversations through which I'd divulged my outlook, my experiences, my current survival issues, not everything was clear. What I'd not said was to ensure that neither of us would jeopardize any sense of entertaining love.

Anyone who knows me knows how long I've been neglecting my libidinous urgings to this point of selflessness, due to realities that always unexpectedly change.

Yet we all seek love and attention, remaining alone, without the empathy of reciprocity in life's blessings.

Intolerant of loathing life's miseries, Sophia and I happily shared laughter, music, and food. We'd had physical comforting, holding each other in embraces that had a lasting quality. An all too brief and decent encounter, there was then a quick falling: having read my writing, she had an overriding comment that left me overwhelmingly upset; "my first reaction to your blog, I'll just say," she said, "so what are you, really, a total fucking loser?" She had an expression of total seriousness, yet with a diffidence tending towards an unmannerly lightheartedness.

I was speechless, yet firm in my need to react, by walking away, knowing I couldn't pretend there could ever be any relationship between us with such abject contempt, such a determined judgment, such utter rejection.

Lacking suddenly my common loquacity, I felt stunned.

She'd subsequently texted me several times: "upset with me?" ("what was your first clue?" I'd thought to reply) "honestly, I wonder why you work so hard!" "you never have any time for yourself, me, or anything else" ("besides you?" I hesitantly considered replying) "I don't understand!" ("what my silence and lack of response isn't enough of a clue?"); I never responded.

Carrying on with vital needs

On the rebound, I was met with the shock from others who I'd told of these two people so influencing my recent experiences and the resulting fortitude of my being without them. I know how to land. On my feet.

Carrying on without others can be like a constant question. Shock fades, even anger and denial fade, yet the haunting loneliness of absence and rejection fade, yet slow as pain, stubbornly numbing and hurting simultaneously, perpetuating the sense of meaninglessness that life tends to bring.

Desire is our human weakness, which demands attention, so that the will to carry on life's blessing does not fade, so that we don't distract from vitality, or suffer long the will to contribute, to sustain, to fortify.

I have learned to make do. To carry on, regardless of circumstances. I have my plans to get out of scarcity, and to follow through with strength.

What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, due to what will always unexpectedly change.

And yet we are all after pleasure, or assuaging grief, knowing how to stand up, and put out.

Even after knowing how death and love play out.

Homeless by the millions elsewhere deserve our help and empathy

2010-01-14T22:00:00.000-08:00

Heedful of how over 2 million Haitians have suddenly become homeless, just over 700 miles away from the U.S., with all our possible food, medical and emergency services available yet frustratingly overwhelmed by the devastation, I wonder how to help (with my meager existence, cooking for those who can afford the indulgence of Irish drink and its accompanying sustenance), despite knowing the usual means that exist to alleviate the misery.

Google has been most helpful in creating a center for relief.

Yéle Haiti has provided the easiest means for Web users to contribute and for cellphone users to text donations (use your cellphone to text “Yele” to 501501), along with having pulled together a group of like minded organizations and first responders in order to help coordinate the delivery of emergency services and materials needed by victims of the earthquake in Haiti (you can also text “Haiti” to 90999 for automatic billing to your cellphone carrier's plan for your monthly account to help Red Cross work). Each of the organizations will undertake their own fundraising and on-the-ground operations, and they have agreed to sharing resources, collaborating when it makes sense and avoiding duplication. The members of this new Haiti Earthquake Alliance are:

Aftershocks continue. Tens of thousands flee from the coast inland in fear of tsunami warnings, spread by word of mouth. Haiti has never had an easy life, whether you consider the poverty and oppression, the absolute tyranny that Haitians have long endured, or their rise from subjugation.

People across the world care yet don't have means to get even enough vital water to the survivors:

UN peace forces, who have only so many C17 transport planes of supplies and troops and hospital ships, trying to get to Port-au-Prince or even getting to Haiti;
Red Cross food and medical resources have limits to their capabilities;
communications inundation, so that families and loved ones cannot get even simple relief in the bottlenecked networks of social connections.

Relief has its waiting, due to plain logistics, indifference and unfortunate reality of scams

Even while many of us wanted to contribute, instead we get alerts (some scams, not surprisingly), when we had wanted to provide relief smartly or essentially to the disaster's surviving victims.

However, there are ways to help (thanks to the folks at Google):

Lastly, there are ways to get help, for those who may know of those in danger or other needs.

In whatever language or form, as the preacher always says, let us pray.

Elsewhere, homeless know the solutions that they get

In San Francisco, we can only assume how the numbers can be devastatingly horrid with respect to suffering loved ones despairing such crisis circumstances; we haven't a clue as to the magnitude of Haiti's problems or the survivor's needs and their dealing with fixes, as much as we know of AIDS and tuberculosis and the isolation of hypocrisy's nature towards indifference or intolerance (some just want to know someone else is alright or that those who'd been there are not suffering as badly as feared). Here in San Francisco, we know of the plans that mean to address the poor and those facing difficult predicaments. We don't need to have our anxiety worsen the havoc and despair.

For the worst disaster in modern times in our hemisphere, we must remember that, with all the attention given by the media and the corporate world to this Haitian crisis, that there are wars and other barbaric piracies that continue: considering the situations in Pakistan, the ways that Katrina's impacts still have not met the promises of political resolutions, and the ongoing reality of everyone's managing through the economy's worries.

And all we can do is hope.

4D homelessness makes the Web 2.0: scavenging from a gutter confronts other presentability policies

2009-11-17T01:14:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking, which is a dangerous activity for someone who'd been virtually homeless, or actually so as people who've known me know.

Containing my reality by denying the gutter, along with all the associations, the practicalities, the reproaches, the compromises, all is my privilege to appreciate. I haven't had the time to sit on a fence, and I can't keep managing the daily debris that accumulates, or keep replenishing what I've wasted, and I won't just walk past the chances to change the dichotomy I've long simplified: guttersnipes are always going to be with me.

What we've grown used to keeping is the dreamlike haunting of associations, the child that won't behave, or mature.

Escaping the circumstances of being destitute and homeless has been anything excepting ingenuous reverie for me, making me always familiar to the practicalities of the presence of managing survival and scarcity.

I know well the reproaches and the compromises I must match with dealing with a mission back to having abundance, although each day that I do have shelter is a blessing beyond abundance.

Knowing the gutter for its appreciation

Accustoming ourselves with the incriminations and discriminations humanity has known for ages ― the kings and queens always had their gardens (to have servants keep pristine) between their castle and the vulgar; all the dainty lettuces and delicate berries, the bounty of grains and the accordant mills and refineries had their roots in such blessed confines ― nowadays we have our more subtle compromises to contain what we get: supermarkets (whether Whole Foods or Safeway), farmers' markets (whether the ones who've managed to remain or the ones that have long managed a populace establishment, selling everything from the rare perfumery bergamot lemon, perhaps for ice cream, to the common tomato, for everything from a burger to a salad), specialty stores (the ones who retail a select consortium to the few who can afford the finest of the seasonal providence). We've lost the means to hunt, to forage, to harvest; we end up facing limits with obtaining what we've lost. Consequently, what we treasure of the rarities of sustenance and inducements of life, we must often sacrifice.

What we get these days is mostly little reward, and an unsatisfying perquisite for sharing with others when we do have such gifts. We've lost a propensity for sustenance beyond our indulgence of daily devices.

We live on dreams. Or recollections of dreams (mother's pie crust secrets).

What we get for all our dreams

When observing how people scavenge through urban trash, I wonder about picturing where recyclables go from San Francisco (interactivity would have been a splendid idea for this link's graphic). Of course I know where people go when they need meals or shelter or what passes for the amusements of the reasonably affordable means of a given day's passing, all the nuances of such mundane in-between contrivances of existence: showers, triage for healthiness, laundering, or fixing what's wrong with one's engagement in a bureaucratic system, or managing the aggravating consistencies of what's just plain stupid.

As much as I've always known to where people flock or insistently go for the best food or sustenance, people on the street know well why I salute the makers and producers and participants who've brought us the Web, just as much as they well know how I know the farmers, the purveyors, the select cast of where I get my bounty for providing food where I work.

Long before the Web, long since the pervasive televised instantaneous communication abilities we now endure, we had few celebrations of revolutionary acts; fifty years is no small feat for the Mime Troupe in San Francisco, for instance, to have survived, yet they were once known as the gadfly guttersnipes, the rabble rousers, the truth sayers soothing our gripes or bringing them to the public's eyes for scrutinizing: they made us laugh. Especially when all about us were crying, shouting grievances or spacing out in their miseries in some desperate denial.

When all of our society is forgetting what makes for barbaric practice, some of us tire of shaking our heads, wringing our hands, tapping our fingers. We waste time in the humility of giving up with how things are, as they've ever been, or we act as if the grievous acts of trying to do the right thing won't work, when for too long we've put up with a gallimaufry of sustenance, gallivanting through our lives with hubris.

We make do.

Getting out of the gutter

On any given day, we must face the disparagements of what we do in order to survive: someone can make some idiotic remark or some dig just to feel their uppitiness. Turning away or confronting the insistent damages can take a lifetime to learn, as if we have to make up a response anytime someone asks, utterly politely, "how do you do?" (Nowadays, it's shortened, of course to "'s-up?") I know often I reply with utmost sincerity, simply, "Fine. Yourself?" I don't go on and on with a whole litany of complaints or distracting summaries of the vivid details of what's on my mind; it wouldn't do me or the polite inquisitor a damn bit of good. However, there are ways to vent the frustrations and ways to laugh off the resentments.

Too many times I've played the stoic. Taciturn to a fault.

To those who've disparaged me, in their prideful yet repellent confidence, with their vestigial reverie, as a two-fisted drinker with ever a spry rebound last night showed by fiat, I've played the quintessential Everyman unafraid of the temerity, resolute, never cracking under pressure, never prone to insipid distractions or discombobulation, defiant to all yet not coming to blows with conflicts. That's me, taking a breath, knowing the gutter, knowing the right to bear arms, grudges, or reticence. If you can believe, I was at that time truly speechless without need for effrontery, or for matching wits or punches.

Last night, I'd finished a night cooking, with someone having just ordered food, after he'd made his assessment of his drunkenness during his sixteenth pint and thinking food would be his salvation, then abruptly puking out the three bites he'd had, only then to complain what my food had caused him to do. Sometimes one must laugh in the face of idiocy. Sometimes one must answer to the assault. Sometimes one must just disengage.

With his stench of vomit in my face, spitting out his words in a guile of contempt, I had to stomach my own assessment. And walk away, disengage, to remember the blessings of my life, to overcome the torrent of misery he'd encapsulated before me.

I could only mime back the gall with a gesture.

Childlike: two fingers down my throat, then one in each of my ears, then a subtle sideways nod to the ground, as if considering the gutter (I didn't cause his sickness anymore than I caused his indulgence; too often the imbibing can satisfy only an awakening to despair's denial).

The gutter then beckoned, with no apologies for its being there (he had enough money for feeding a dozen people, yet he chose to drink; then, suffer). Someone else had to clean up his mess, while many urchins of the night went elsewhere, never resenting the irony of his deprecation.

Where the gutter meets the road

Everyone had a good laugh. "He'd said you'd not know Kobe beef if you were sitting on it in its stirrups," one imbiber proclaimed.

"I suppose I wouldn't be riding on anything I'd intended to eat," I said.

Next morning, I'm sure all was forgotten. Yet the street-sweeper surely must've known I needed some kind of a fourth dimensional reality television with previously unknown avatars, providing me with being able to watch what I needed to watch and watch what I had to watch and watch was totally unnecessary, despite those over my shoulder who could never pay attention to what's going on around them.

The street-weeper knew what was on my mind, and the gutter would be the clue.

Odyssey of overcoming the shock of homelessness is a big laugh

2009-11-03T01:27:00.000-08:00

An alienating propensity impacts all of us, unless we change our story's intent, avoiding the unnecessary waste.

As we neglect or abandon our friends and families and the countless associates that make up our life, we see the intensity of our indifference overpower any sense of satisfaction in our common existence. Even when we've seen our way out of homelessness, like me, there is a reality to navigate, and a way to keep playing.

Instead, it's like the airwaves that reach out, letting them make a means for our happiness, such as after listening to a favorite tune on the radio and reacting to blurbs afterwards asking for support (KFOG, by example, continues to have donated over $4 million from what listeners provided for supporting San Francisco Bay Area food banks' resources). We learn how to play, or to have fun with life, even when desperation stares us in the face.

Changing our indifference changes us, when we change our scope and our intent, and changes the lives of millions of people, whether we know it or not (those who might have gone hungry, or worse, those who could be like us in the worst predicaments): $1 can provide an average of three meals, which amazes most people who grumble at the price of a meal at fast food outlets; however, when one sees how to get food, how to use volunteerism, how to make sense of the resources available to networks of people, the amazement vanishes: a little money or a little effort can go a long way for those who know how to use funds or energy.

Big dreams can have big poignant reality

I know from running a shoestring operation of a kitchen as I grow what was a bar's closet transformed into what provides means for providing sustenance while indulging.

I've had to have disciplines and creative abandon of strategies that I learned, working with so many Telemachus guides (aren't we always looking for someone, aside from our parents, for direction?), in my odyssey of outwitting my culinary plight: how do I satisfy others through the simple means of food?

My dream is to take the revenue that my food business will build and use that resource to help build a means for others (my friend, Bill, who's struggled with the reality of homelessness, has seen the help I've needed, for instance, and using his assistance as a means to help with overcoming his struggles, I keep order in my kitchen's operations, since I know I can't run things forever alone; just that strategy of getting help is a foothold to how we all can derive order in our human universal dilemmas, since we all need food from time to time). Simple work and physics compel me. Having fun with the work and the sense of overcoming the elemental physics of burnout, with humor, or lightedness, is my passion. I knew at some point that the work would become too much to handle. That it wouldn't take long at all before the few would become crowds, satisfied or wanting to be satisfied.

Just on a whim of fulfilling, actually providing, sustenance, while others were indulging, my worst reality came true: the other day, one meal that I'd put out was undeliverable, due to someone who'd overindulged too much, and, having ordered his eggs over easy with the big fry Traditional Irish Breakfast I served, when he'd almost instantaneously gotten 86'd, his breakfast fortunately became someone else's (funny how the little tragedies can have their righteous resolve; the recipient of the gift of the breakfast had only one comment: "perfect eggs, it would've been such a waste to toss them"), who told me the old joke: a chicken and an egg are lying in bed, with the chicken smoking a cigarette, a satisfied smile on his face and the egg frowning, looking a bit pissed off, to which the egg mutters, to no one in particular, "Well, I guess we answered that question!"

As I use my discipline to make my little dream build, the small potatoes of my work sustain me and show me my way through what could become resentments or griefs that otherwise might devise my downfall. Making food can get to primal instincts; after satisfying, after overwhelming, after jeopardizing any prospect of getting what can never quite live up to that last bite, that last taste, that last exquisite indulgence, the body wants the mind to forget, to yield, to comply, or to adapt.

Think oysters.

Chocolate.

Caramel.

Brie.

Once you've had the best, nothing else sustains, or confers what a righteous gift bestows. One just feels too good,

As we all learn, orgasms, savory, sweet or otherwise muskily intense, subside, even without sex.

The story completes itself over and over and over: we're only human. Irresolute, the mind still wavers. Life is too quick, otherwise, unlike an egg.

Opportunities abound for getting involved with nobody's business

2009-10-29T13:45:00.000-07:00

Our ostracizing tendencies and disinterestedness play a part in the social dynamics of our self-serving natures: when we really consider how we encounter or deal with our perplexing world, sometimes we don't know what we can trust.

Even when there are movements to organize overcoming abject poverty, no one seems to know or, perhaps, to have any need to participate (I didn't know, for instance, until afterwards, of the recent event of a Guinness World Record's 173 million people's mobilization for eradicating world poverty, and news of its lackluster "poor turnout" in San Francisco).

One needn't be a fool to know how hard it can be to escape the streets (especially for those who have low self-esteem and who honestly lack options) or to trust the systems that provide refuge from a hard life.

No matter how much we pretend to think that we have abiding love to help ourselves or others overcome desperate circumstances, and that we are in harmony with getting through tumultuous or conflicting situations, we still suffer and struggle with associations or with neglecting the stranger relationships that create aggravations or resentments and consequential reproach and loathing, many of which collectively perpetuate our singularity, our aloneness, and our world's collective problems.

We seek attention. And approval. And protection. Daily. Even when we have moments or remnants of profound realizations of how we can live in harmony and well-being, we often betray our instincts from such inclinations, ending up with a "what-about-me" mantra pervading our every thought and action.

How we regain and retain dignity in awkward realities

Carol was obviously trembling when she approached me as I was leaving my work for the day. "Buy me some food, anything?" she pleaded with a stammering in her voice.

I was immediately having to confront a stranger who was demanding something from me in my "what-about-me" mode. I shook off any self-regard, letting my parental, or friend-to-all response of reconciliation take hold.

The bridge of Carol's nose was freshly scarred, the blood still drying. As I initially suggested that, being a chef, that I'd make her something quick from my kitchen's céad míle fáilte shenanigans (out of where I'd just left, Ireland's 32, the place to which I pointed that she mistook, it seemed, for just a bar). She'd shook her head, demurred, and I suggested instead we walk a few doors up the street to a pizza place; I then bought a slice of what was ready, and she hastily devoured my meagre gift as if it was the first real sustenance she'd had in days.

Concerned about what I took for more obvious interests, I asked about her injury. "Boyfriend problems," she'd replied reluctantly, almost dissuasively, as if I'd avoid delving into the morass she may have already been presenting. Immediately I suggested places she could go (shelters, 24-hour crisis centers for domestic abuse, women's advocacy groups).

"I don't want the police involved," she answered, dismissively avoiding the issue of help. "I don't want to be a burden," she said. I wasn't about to act adamant, yet I felt a responsibility. Doubts of what to do. She'd simply refused anymore help.

She hugged me as I grievously left; I still felt her trembling.

Dismissive maladaptations continue, despite our resolve to change

Only two blocks away from encountering Carol, after what may have been only ten minutes, while I was waiting for the bus, I saw a guy sorting through trash bins for recyclables; I pointed to plastics discarded on the street to which he nodded his gratitude, picking them up as he shuffled down the street.

We live with the odd paradox that we, as a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remain largely silent when it comes to dealing with significant problems. Some get dismissive: "what a buncha nutjobs, spacecases, no good lazy sonsabitches," some say to what appears our regards to this crazy world's bafflements.

This month, NFL players are rumbling onto the field in pink cleats and sweatbands to raise awareness about breast cancer. On December 1st, World AIDS Day will engage political and health care leaders from every part of the globe. Illnesses that were once discussed only in hushed tones are now part of healthy conversation and social activism (although when it comes to bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress, schizophrenia or depression, an uncharacteristic coyness takes over, and we often say nothing: the mentally ill frighten and embarrass us, and so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance). Our homeless shelters become the only place to contain those with whom we've been unable to provide help with their socially unadaptable behaviors: self-medicating with alcohol or other substances become the commonly acceptable means for maladaptive disorders, only compounding the problems that exacerbate all of us; getting work poses the biggest obstacle for many people who have no other solution to their dilemma than the shelter systems ("The fact that you're undocumented doesn't mean you're not a person under the United States Constitution, and if we can't stand up for the Constitution in San Francisco, then where can we stand up for it in this country?" Supervisor David Campos has said, well-knowing the containment of undocumented workers in California and the U.S. from his firsthand experience).

Such thoughts of societal ideological dissonance were running through my head as I waited for the bus. Doubts of disappointments of our once great democracy's culture and its current empirical disarray distracted me.

Our story has no purpose, it seems

The guy gathering recyclables shouted, "Carol! Over here! Cross the street! What're you doing?" I realized this was the boyfriend.

"You best be kind to that woman," I said to him, using my kitchen timbre voice (familiar to anyone who must work in the din of a kitchen's business), just so he knew I meant to get his and only his attention.

"Carol, what're you telling people?" he shouted. "She's just drunk," he said to me, almost apologetically (for her behavior, of course), telling me "she fell down some stairs." He didn't want to have any confrontation with me, he'd seemed to express, yet he seemed obviously the type to be the perpetrator of her injuries, from what I gathered of his sense of protectiveness, or tentative possessiveness, of his business, which he reminded me was, as he said from some distance, mumbling "none o' anybody's business, anyway."

I wasn't ready to pursue any course to involve myself with circumstances beyond my control. Yet I was in conflict, even as I boarded the bus. My reluctance to intervene had me in a daze. Sometimes I know what I could do only results in worse predicaments. Sometimes all I can do is mind my own business, despite knowing my alternative options.

What the America dream can insist on such as us (or what's the crack in this day?)

2009-10-17T00:51:00.000-07:00

What a difference taking risks makes.

With the desperation I encounter everyday in San Francisco, the men on street corners with their empty cups wanting change, the women walking with empty stares worrying of the ravages life has made of their once dignified beauty, the youth who turn to gangs to have some empty sense of belonging, all such grievous reality leaves me wondering about the sense of hope that America once held, just a year ago. I often must pause, without uttering a word.

As President Obama rushed through San Francisco's heart of Civic Center, the Tenderloin and to Union Square's destination the other day, the different encounters of brief looks out his limousine's windows that he must have had were surely not all politics with his agenda here of fundraising.

Afghanistan and Iraq trouble him, with all the mounting and pending costs.

Simple economics of a once stalwart and proud nation must concern him.

How we ever mean to survive with issues of health care, being in trillions of dollars in debt and overdrawn, virtually destitute as a nation, and incredulous with our dissipated or depleted savings ever regaining any value within our foreseeable future, or even at best remaining with any hope, all such scope must seem to him like some parallel galaxy and some discordant time, some impossible dream.

Yet somehow he keeps a smile on a brave demeanor.

Sometimes I wish I could see that same smile on the faces I encounter as I get around San Francisco.

The poor you will always have with you

At least I do hope. Being never poor in spirit. For those who scoff at enduring or defying odds at getting beyond scarcity, getting beyond survival, getting beyond abundance, I must attest to the spirit of such as us who can endure and defy the chance to reconcile or to redeem our natures. We aren't always who we appear to be.

Out of some hard work and a blessed opportunity, I have found a way out of the homeless desperation that I have had to live.

With, again, a summertime of feeding youth at Camp Mendocino (the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco's retreat at which I cooked for over 200 people daily), I took my savings to invest in building on what I know: a kitchen sharing blessed bounties from local farmers within a setting once familiar (for over 22 years, a local bar & grill, which never really had anything to offer from its kitchen, except reheated frozen concoctions or the rare happy hour offerings), Ireland's 32, a warm, inviting wood and mirrored pub, which has been transforming into a public house, what the Irish consider a refuge from the daily encounters of sometimes grievous and sometimes serendipitous existence. Hard work and the bollix of aggravation that we always incipiently seem to have to meet.

Often the character of Ireland's 32 has the character of a museum for its heritage of honoring Belfast, the IRA and the history of fighting for Irish freedom from the British sovereignty's tyranny, exploitation and oppression; plaques representing each county's coat-of-arms hang proudly around an etched mirror behind the bar, while paintings of famous Irish writers and pro-independence paraphernalia have long been the decor in the two-story building, with additions of the more timely Irish cultural mix of sports, music and other cultural remembrances adorning the space.

"What's the craic?" the Irish will say to bewildered looks from Americans who visit the place (Americans wonder what "what's the crack?" means, though for 50 years the greeting fulfills some sense of belonging, in my opinion, conveying a polysemic welcoming for any hint of joy). For me, the community that regularly converges upon Ireland's 32 is a mix of rebelliousness in the form of heavy drinking combined with a resolute moderation of conviviality with respect for the indulgences to which everyone's subject, from time to time.

Time is a healing device, by any view.

Such as us who keep respect and dignity do understand resentment and reconciling

Joss Stone sings, "don't tell me that I can't, I can; don't tell me that I won't, I will!" Ah, America! Do we know how to work, after the healing's done? Even after the hope's had its hurt beyond what we'd expected, what we'd endured, what we'd survived?

Joy that is often missing from people's lives often seems like the crack of a grin on the Ireland's 32 regular customers. Some are Irish by heritage having grown up in the States with only a hint of the true bearing of the Irish tradition, while many are wearing the full breadth of their Irish like a pride of armor. Such as us who have grown up in America knowing its reputation and diminishing pride will always keep a sense of the immigrant marching off to ever broader frontiers. Though we may have lost touch with ourselves and our natures, we may be there for the brief drink, or the brief encounter with a perfect unbeknownst mate, or to resent some twit's idea of what they may be assessing of us, or perhaps to an operatic respect for just the existential blessedness of a day in the life. Our day, our life, our reason for being.

Or to finding our place at a bar or a restaurant at the ends of the universe.

The drinks are often flowing mightily at Ireland's 32, and now so does the accompanying food, for "sustenance while indulging," as I've set the menu's direction and scope.

I'd have likely stayed in the desperation of homeless existence were it not for the savings from working and living at Camp Mendocino along with the consequent opportunity falling into place with opening up a kitchen of my very own doing. I've been accused of being out of my element what with all the serious dire realities, which I surely do know (first hand), of running and keeping a business, especially one dealing with the subject of food.

There is likely no greater failure than dealing with a business providing sustenance. People rely on their daily bread. And beverages. On the other hand, from those who I've known while in the harshness of homelessness, who have since accused me of gloating about my circumstance, I have received some reproach for not helping them out of their situations too; I will, yet the business needs to get its feet first into the mix. When I get comments about elements that need fixing, I instantly realize it's on me, not the operations. I am the operations.

Chef, steward, stocking superintendent and top bottle washer.

A job's to be done.

Forget about the bottlenecks, make it feng shui; forget about the ego, make it blessed. Forget about what others have done to put us in circumstances beyond our control, and forget about blaming God; the fun, the craic, the blessedness is on us to derive its purpose.

Thriving on spirit

The impeccability in my kitchen is what I'm after to offer; I know my position, titled yet impecunious. I must still deliver the perfect fish, meats, cheeses, sauces, eggs, herbs or whatever the comestible needs must be. Insistently. Being a one man show means a certain accountability before I can put the burden on others to share. Even how to wash dishes or to be stewarding the customer wishes and needs. I believe I can. Surely before I can put the burden on others to help me. Yet, after I do, I believe that anyone can follow, responsibly. And thrive.

Eventually.

I realize I can't be in two places at once, or promise to one while comprising another, nor can I stay afloat in business while insisting on promises impossible to make evident. My intent above all is to prove my spirit.

I am living the homeless hope. Or I am living the American dream, the human dream, despite being even still virtually homeless.

Pariahs, pundits and people on the tightrope play their parts

2009-05-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

We see the worse getting worse with the poor populace growing in an ever worrisome peril. This isn't a lovely night at the opera.

A chill wind had been blowing.

At San Francisco's 150 Otis, about 100 of us had been waiting for a shelter bed assignment, having earlier that afternoon gotten on the signup list from the draw of numbers to get on the list and consequently getting priority ranking to get a bed; being among the 40 that evening who had the best chance, I'd been trying to be patient. I've come to accept there are reasons for the frustrating bureaucratic practices of providing daily beds. At San Francisco's main resource center, waiting for evening beds to become available, the regularly overflowing crowd inside often means for me and a few others being faced with shivering, or huddling crouched in ourselves, outside, braving the cold, turning away from the luff of the wind, hoping to get a bed, sooner than later.

With so many in my same circumstances no matter what predicament brought them here, I've learned how to be friendly yet without becoming a victim, or without becoming a preying pariah with others who also patiently or agitatedly wait. I have no spare change, no spare cigarettes, no spare bus transfer. Not much but neediness; I've learned to have only suggestions for help (since, when I was new to this predicament, there were few who directed me to the routines, which thousands have endured in San Francisco and, with the growing numbers, have had to make work for them, with no guaranteed prospects).

I watch the pundits of homelessness and learn the desolation and the survival skills.

Plurality of indigent reality

Many of the people who get into these homeless predicaments ― even if they've had work their entire lives and they are used to avoiding depending on anyone ― sometimes end up here at shelters, without a clue to its circus of characters and games. Not all of the people seeking beds in the shelters are addicts, alcoholics, mentally or socially challenged, or permanently destitute, as many of society's more cynical claim in dissuading the funds or resources or attention given the poor. Some of the poor are just ordinary people in completely dire circumstances.

Indigent types do, though, tend to need a sense of hope. Sometimes. In their dismay and with their frowzy appearances, the homeless population has its disparaging stigma that's an endless struggle.

Without the frustrations that are almost always the given, more and more of us face that we're not alone, that we're feeling temporarily isolated, yet we're all struggling with the same lack of resolve, that the divisiveness of which we play a part is often just a game. Sometimes we have no rules for the game, we just play how we've always played, like a teasing on the playground assimilating our will to outlast the worst of whatever bullies us.

Alex was being his uppity, mischievous self when a beautiful woman walked by San Francisco's main shelter resource center, 150 Otis, where we homeless get beds, or wait for them, most of us men with heads buried, and trying to distract ourselves from the purposelessness of the welfare preponderance. The woman was walking her little terrier and she seemed to know the neighborhood, ignoring the usual catcalls, or what passes for whistling in the wind. She seemed to have a confidence of her allure with a grace to her pulchritudinous aloofness.

"Très beau!" Alex shouted in his best try at French, wanting to make sure this stranger knew her attractiveness. To him. "An' I likes yer lil pups too," he added. In his hoodie and his heavy, long black leather overcoat, he can appear menacing, yet I've seen he's usually just another one of many, putting on a good face in an ominous reality.

The woman was nearly a block away before she turned around looking as if she was checking to see if she was safe, that no one followed her, while her little terrier stopped to smell a tree trunk, which was when I said to Alex, "you're scaring her."

"I is not! She know she likes it, you watch, she be makin' d'block and be back," he said in his familiar Louisiana Yat dialect. I've known Alex, and I know he's outwardly very gregarious, usually getting on with everyone. I know he's also apt to get into mischief. Yet I also know he's not one to pick fights or to take any conversation as challenge.

"Right," I said, "that's why she kept walking straight ahead and finally looked back after getting a block away, to see if she was safe."

"You 'on't know what you's talkin' 'bout," he countered, "she like th' attention."

Alex cocked his head at me as if I was disrespectfully castigating him. A half-sneer stuck on his face and then he smiled, looking me square in the eyes from 15 feet away.

Getting into other people's business

Tito had noticed Alex's sudden upset, Tito being one of the other guys who seems to hang around regularly at 150 Otis, seeming to be always scamming something, things he's found he'd sell for a quarter, the quarter in trade for a cigarette, or finding a discard ticket for the evening bed draw list, or someone's print-out for a nightly bed assignment, maybe even a bus transfer when he'd need to leave when it looked as if no beds were ever about to come up.

And Tito, being 18, loves to prove his ego's claims. He likes to spout his hiphop persona and dance about on the sidewalk as if it's his stage.

Tito has taken this section of San Francisco as his territory. He never seems to be waiting for a bed like the rest of us. And he has preyed on those of us waiting for shelter with his taunts. So it was almost too easy for him to come at me with his swagger and leer, a sillily half-diabolical murmur, coming within inches of my face, "don' be dissin' my boy, yo' ugly ass jus' jealous and he jus' be tellin' some truth." The stink of his cigarette breath gagged me, which he took for fear, as I reflexively gulped and exhaled through my nostrils.

"Truth?" I answered, "he's just hitting on some woman who's a block away now. I could see her fear from here."

"You boasting on me, cuz? 'Cause I'll take you out, sure as you're shakin'."

"For one thing, get away from me. I'm friends with Alex, else I wouldn't've said a word. And I'm not shaking out of any fear, youngster."

"You callin' me out, cuz?" Hostility wanted to rise in him, purely for the thrill. "'Cause you best not be callin' me youngster, ol' man. I'll put yo' punk-pussy-coward dumbass down."

"Pardon me, please," I said, "if you're expecting me to fall for your goading, I have no need or desire to fight. So let's just straighten that out right now." He was almost nose to nose with me, as if in some TV wrestling taunt. I was ready for the first swing or punch. "What you're doing is assault. Not battery. Assault. And that's against the law, as if you didn't know."

Alex came over to run interference. He could see us on the edge of suddenly coming to blows. "Tito, 'at's my friend, here, cuz, he not meanin' no spite. He on d'good side now. C'mon, we go make d'block, see if we can go find my girl." Alex grabbed Tito by the shoulder and directed him up the street.

Games we play when we forget frustration

Not more than 15 minutes later, Alex and Tito were back and Tito came over to me, with Alex looking on behind him. Tito made a fist pump gesture to me, "sorry, my brotha, didn' mean no disrespect. Alex be tellin' me you a good guy, 'at's cool, someone's gotta do it." He seemed to be patronizing me without intending to act forgiving, or putting on a face of one upping me without either of us acting disgraced.

"I'm just tired of the false sense of domination people try to have over others on the street," I said. "Streets belong to all of us, you know?" He nodded, with a kind of oblivious shrug.

I turned away as he walked away and I tried to get back to a sense of dignity.

The wind wouldn't let me (it knows what it is to be perpetually homeless even with direction).

Final solution to poverty gets our attention

2009-05-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

Do not attempt to adjust the controls of your PCs and televisions. An emergency requires our attention: a 21st century solution, from the powers that be.

With the socioeconomic collapse and its crisis inundating us, and with the concomitant revolution mandating martial law, with measures for supervising the masses already having manifested, as conspiracy theorists warn, all the elements for responsive solutions are in place. We no longer have to worry about the debts and the mounting worries that trouble us.

Everything's manageable, so everyone can have the assurance of protection, permanently: trains are available for transport in the guise of evacuation, once martial law takes affect, and, due to any bacterial military actions resulting from revolution, biodegradable coffins are available for mass deaths; camps are ready, for containment, concentration camps, actually, internment prisons with inward and outward pointing barbed wire to prevent escape or infiltration; best of all, the usual distractions of the media will easily provide real control (we won't want to miss the ball games or the cooking shows or the talk shows entertaining us about face lifts and weight loss and child abuse).

So foreclosures and incessantly climbing unemployment are no longer the problem. The powers that be have had a plan, we can rest assured, for the growing numbers of poor and homeless.

Legislation (HR 645) already allows executive operations to proceed.

Trusted entities like Dow Chemical, Haliburton and Union Pacific have developed all the requirements while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have full authority for every aspect of the operation's needs.

We could find out more about the control measures before the real panic arises, yet our indifference predictably distracts us. For now, we can breathe. And let the truth give us pause, calmed by how those in power have long been listening, that they were aware of our impending now certain plight.

Poverty, which we know, has its problems

We will no longer really need the daily news. We've always had other concerns anyway that had never gotten the necessary attention for solutions to our worries.

Particularly those of us living in highly urbanized populations, with practical problems like overwhelmed emergency rooms, thousands of families living in cars, petty crime, violent crime, drug crime, a revolving prison system dynamic, alcoholism, drug trades, suicide and death by exposure to toxic waste, broken families, misspent lives, malnourishment, and billions of dollars going to the bureaucracies and non-profits maintaining the day to day infrastructure (churches, shelters, soup kitchens and local government resource centers). Fraught with misery and troubles, we have sought the infinite source to the speed of darkness in which we're all too familiarly caught.

And to think our prayers had no answers, we must have been out of our minds.

Millions of us are already using the systems that the government has established, so that, while the growing catastrophes have developed the grief and avoidable predicaments, there are these prepared, nearly ready-made, solutions.

Just for us.

For how long had we assumed no one was listening?

Risking collision with pedestrians on the streets of San Francisco, I keep my eyes straight yet my vision peripherally in focus, aware of those souls of the street who seem like ghosts or ephemeral non-entities to most people.

Yet there are some, particularly artists, like Anthony Holdsworth, who manage to capture what the urban life holds, as ways to sustain the precious sights and rights of America. He doesn't just paint the architectures and the typical landmarks; he captures the people, those who most of us miss in unforgettable caricatures.

There's also Bob Okin's pictures of today's poverty, what most of us ignore.

Here, as on the streets of many great cities like San Francisco, America's ranters and mumblers and conspiracy theory pundits have provided the warnings, and sometimes, often, in my hurry to find work and other despairing concerns, I wasn't listening. "Why encourage them by paying attention, or worse, engaging?" I heard a tourist say.

San Francisco Chronicle's Kevin Fagan recently had a fractured reminiscence of 1956 Skid Row in San Francisco, comparing the current similarities. A comment to the piece made me shake my head with what a reader then offered as a consideration about what to do with the homeless population: "give them a ghetto, throw 'em in, put a wall around them and let them die and rot away from the rest of us."

Just as we thought revolution had its place, that no one in power had been listening

Then there are the powerful who I didn't see appearing in the bigger picture.

Honorable Ninth Circuit Court Judge Kim Wardlaw, from Pasadena, a likely nominee as a Supreme Court judge vetted to replace Judge Souter, wrote a 2006 opinion providing for rights to the homeless.

Jones v. City of Los Angeles (444 F.3d 1118, 9th Circuit 2006), written by Judge Wardlaw for the court, held that arresting homeless people for sleeping, sitting, or lying on sidewalks and other public property, when other public shelter is not available, violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Because of such compassion, Judge Wardlaw invites dissent.

Or circumspection, as her likelihood for the nomination is gaining consensus. As promising as she is, President Obama won't need such compassion on the highest court, since law enforcement and citizen rights groups won't need such contingencies.

We'll see, for instance, in San Francisco (especially on May 19 after a rally protesting rights for tenants), if property owners have the power they seek from the courts.

All this while we've been letting our frustrations and intolerance build, the powers that be have been listening.

With DHS, FEMA, Dow, Union Pacific and Haliburton, there are those who have long had concerns for our situation's solutions in mind.

Isolated and celebrity homeless lives: selflessness, selfishness and self-actualization make a difference in the world

2009-04-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Contradicting epiphanies about homelessness have made me more cognitive about overcoming its prevalence.

No one will argue (reasonably) there aren't enough homeless.

Today, the situation is so overwhelming and has become so pervasive due to the economic craziness with which we're all struggling. Unlike the pervasive fear that the recent H1N1 outbreak will become a pandemic, the achievement of outlasting the current socioeconomic crisis is everyone's hope and duty, whose justice will prevail.

We must endure the struggles, the costs and the shortcomings, else all is desolation.

Faces of poverty up close

Poverty eventually affects everyone. Not everyone has to deal with its harms to the extent of becoming destitute and homeless. Yet the costs of poverty and its ordeals are unavoidable.

Last weekend, I encountered His High Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet (incidentally, seeing how far security precautions are necessary for him, such gentleness personified, was intimidating: surrounding him, or following him everywhere, there were 50 police officers, a dozen sheriffs and over a dozen men in suits, likely federal marshals and private security staff; with all this entourage, he has a presence, much like President Obama, exuding a minimum of paranoia and a legitimacy aiming towards true historicity). Likely the most well-known homeless celebrity, the Dalai Lama visited Martin de Porres soup kitchen, which is a popular Sunday morning destination for healthy free food.

The Dalai Lama beamed and grinned impishly throughout his hour-long visit to Martin's (formally, Martin de Porres House of Hospitality, rooted in the Catholic Worker movement), offering words of encouragement to the approximately 100 guests and volunteers at the Sunday brunch. He joked with the folks while there about being in exile and about President Obama and the international economy.

As I came from behind him to replenish the potatoes which he was serving, "pardon me," I said. "95% of life is just showing up with good action." I had meant it with grace and humility.

He simply turned to me, putting his spoon down in the chafing dish of potatoes, clasped his hands together in a gesture of prayer, looked at me directly over the rim of his glasses, and nodded. I felt a chill, a sense almost of suddenly becoming one of the crows of reincarnation. Perhaps I even blushed.

Although he is from Tibet, the Dalai Lama actually resides in Dharamsala, India, due to China's political takeover. He remains hopeful of one day returning to Tibet.

"Our lives depend on others," said the Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso, as he was originally known). "Me too." His characteristic baritone sometimes prevents hearing him clearly, so that many of us in the crowd strained to hang on his every word. "My life depends on others. You are still in human society, human community. Please feel happy and feel dignity."

Making a difference in the world

Throughout The City, we see what makes a difference in people's isolated lives, such as the Dinner With Grace program that Yahoo! recently subsidized through its grant (a $5,000 grant from the Yahoo! Employee Foundation will help provide kitchen equipment that's vital to getting food to Tenderloin SROs).

We look to suggestions of free things to do in The City (some of us like me don't have time, since we're too busy in the panic to survive looking for income).

Some give in to desperation. Then, there are some who, despite being beaten and refused shelter after those beatings, refuse to give up.

Still, most of society simply ignores the homeless situation. Still, charitable organizations face funding cuts.

Later that afternoon after being at Martin's, I went shopping at Safeway. It felt weird to experience staff cheerleading at the front registers while seeking contributions for charity. Not cheering for larger amounts, they were cheering for any contributions. The cheering could be heard throughout the store over two dozen times in the 20 minutes I was there at the Market/Church store. It reminded me of the "Forbes 500" homeless and struggling poor Americans: those who've faced foreclosures due to sub-prime lending practices, those who've faced layoffs with huge corporate icons, those who've faced bankruptcy of their 20-year businesses, those who've faced recession-proof jobs, the many too many nurses, coal miners, construction workers, mechanics, pharmacists, real estate agents, all those who've considered their jobs secure.

Some companies are contributing to the communities with funds as well as job-shadowing, such as Levi Strauss with its May Day ("501") efforts.

Outlasting the worst of our lives

Very young I encountered Paramahansa Yogananda and his teachings of ancient shastric scriptures, where I learned not to take deference to bargain-searching or bargaining, learning to be cognitive with regards to all of life's opportunities, learning that every moment is a blessing, sometimes in disguise.

I know that we all still face having to budget for food and to find affordable shelter. I'm not saying each and every one of us will be responsible for fixing the world's disparity anymore than we will all be capable of making the planet all green and bringing back the polar icecaps; likewise, we'll all determine our responsibility yet without necessarily being accountable for the poverty situations in each of our communities.

As long as we stay isolated from our world, no one is of any help to the world in which we belong.

How a strange needy situation happens

2009-04-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

The guy in the suit stabbed Bobby, the guy who knew Bobby wasn't really a woman.

When we ask ourselves how we've ended up in such situations that we have to ask others for help, it's time that we looked at the bigger picture. No matter what we know is reality.

An ambulance rushed Bobby to St. Francis Hospital's Emergency Room. The guy who stabbed Bobby has not yet been found; "just another guy in a suit" was the description from a passerby who last saw him flee down Market Street chasing him toward Citicorp Center and watching him disappear in the crowds around Sansome and Sutter.

Societies know how grievances work and how balances of power work. Some of the neediest complain to no avail and some of the greediest complain to no avail. Some of us just seem useless.

Bobby would have discretionary rendezvouses in the financial towers or in the boutique hotels where the sex trade flourishes.

Just business as usual, that's how a strange needy situation happens.

Bobby was often working her corner in the financial district near ETrade or near the Fidelity digital ticker. She'd worked the Tenderloin yet had tired of the destitute and weary. She'd decided to maintain at Market and First, near Sansome, where all business meets the western frontier. She had her regulars.

And her business flourishes.

What we all know all too well

What she knew, according to two guys drinking at the Sutter Street Station saloon, one of whom who claimed to have written attributions about Bobby in his blog, was not easy to dismiss. How we discard people, and it's just business. How the one guy could flippantly write about Bobby without talking about the nature of the crime troubled me.

These two had been S.F. Chronicle staffers, and they had recently, so they claimed, been writing for the New York Times; seemingly sidetracked―although I knew they were speaking of society's rejective tendency―they told me about Bobby after describing a journalist's colony instituting charity for the diversity of our culture's most conflicted, showing how there was medical help or social concern for the neediest.

Even with people like Bobby, who many would say her needs were simply a matter of choice, not a necessity. Wanting to escape the reality of one's life rather than confronting one's demons and misunderstandings. We've all had our associations with escapism (52nd S.F. International Film Festival charitable contributions to the needy as an example―now, who's sidetracked?―much of it being escapism for the escaped; you have SFSU's disputes of the recent homeless count for The City's federal money allowances, like arguments of Macintosh and Windows, disputably in the eye of the beholder, there are always going to be those survive the worst, or like San Francisco's Paul Avenue cleanup of the homeless campground near the rail tracks, folks who couldn't fit in at shelters), and yet we deny our need of a place to get away from the world.

Likewise, we still need those who are the least wanted. Even among the Progressive's agenda of diversity, we find the dismissiveness: some aren't able to accept that there are transgenders across the U.S., counted among the homeless, the neglected, the loathed, the least of concern; there were those who know what it is to be destitute and deprived who themselves couldn't care less.

It hardly matters how San Francisco reacts to the saddest news, the incessant crime, the mundanity of kidnappings, the business profitings as usual (even the most powerful know of a list of banks receiving bailouts, the same bailouts destroying the U.S. economy), and how the world seems to just now be awakening to what was the same as it ever was.

Bobby had her means.

Old men. Old cultures. Old habits. No matter how strange, some realities perpetuate, despite resistance of the real world.

When we pretend we don't know the real story

How we ever came to such circumstances to get over the historical reference comes to be a human extravagance overcoming the modern contrivance (once we feel we believe our truth, we come to feel that we can convince anyone of the same truth, however much such a story departs from reality). We have another tendency to retrieve whatever we believe is our prerogative.

We have a Constitution. Despite the 27 amendments, there is still the foundation. Whoever believes we have no hope must face responsibility, to have respect for what has survived despite resistance to such foundations for change and for indivisibility.

Respect has a lot to do with hope.

Bobby had voted. She had the consternation of reconciling differences, whether differences even matter. She had enough years on her to know how to resolve street issues with regards to her history. Yet there was reality. She had to sleep at night. She couldn't at the city shelters. She was treated as if she were a man. She couldn't, even among the working realities that gave her her sustenance, get any allowances for her situation. She'd come to believe like the rest of us. In Obama. In history. In belief in America. That we could survive any affliction, any intolerance, any desperation.

Bobby knew which part of the city allowed her to sleep.

Privacy. Where no one invades or defiles you.

Any child would know. Yet there are still among us adults who avoid the intolerance that breeds the loathing, feeding the cultural depravity.

Meeting up today to catch up on all that's happened in her recent life, Bobby reacted to the television news account, to the suitcase dumped in the pond; she didn't have to be eight years old, again.

We both knew about the worst kinds of child abuse, Bobby long before me and me, having grown up with the Polly Klaas legacy having been from from Petaluma, seeing how such tragedy changed public awareness across the U.S., knowing that what Bobby knew went beyond parentage, linkage, umbrage.

As I'd listened to us in the bar, I realized there are those even in San Francisco who couldn't or didn't care in the least why Bobby deserved sympathy or plain human decency of caring.

What had happened six months before, and had culminated in the historical leadership epiphany and change just this year, with Obama, was helpful. What had happened to Bobby just six days before, and had culminated in no arrests, just more tragedy, was no epiphany. Bobby didn't have to have any Constitutional law background. She'd had enough street repercussions. Just in the last year alone, Bobby had been assaulted three times, once almost fatally.

She'd known what to know, what she'd avoided or circumvented.

Our U.S. Constitution has its foundations and the Sixth and Eighth articles provide for something we sometimes take for granted. Habeas corpus. Facing our accusers. We must never take for granted what we are, who we are, what we have become. That no one can take from us.

Life's a short story

Everyone knows a woman. By face. By presence. By a smell, or, if I may be so bold, a fragrance.

Bobby had told me one time about her life. We had emptied glass after glass. My heart's been broken enough in my lifetime to know presence. I heard her story and became a friend, without strings or reservations, without reasons or excuses, without illusions. There were these guys who'd one time broken into our conversation, when Bobby suddenly left, disturbed. They thought they could give us, or me, guidance. Of a different perspective.

Bobby had told me silly stories. Told me grief. Told me about American truth. How we must know redemption if we are truly to know reconciliation.

Diversity must have its way to change what matters.

To us all.

In the familiarities of America, we understand privacy, freedom, and value. Whether we admit we love or refuse to love.

We have a consternation about those who fight.

Else why do we have rights for what we have fought.

Our fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters understand. Justice prevails as long as those who stand up prevail.

I think that's why hope sustains people like Bobby, and what provides us with parentage when we have some disparate linkage with blood, roots, reasons, to what matters. We have what is us. Especially when linkages are long gone. Or gone to whatever we can retrieve.

Bobby's parents disowned her and all that she believed, as soon as she actually spoke out.

This morning, after I left the bar, I later found Bobby, at another bar, Chieftain's; I wasn't to have any newer, better perspective beyond the usual sense of intolerance.

We ended up leaving there, going out to the Bayview district to consider some projects (I know there are some people who always find creative ways to reuse goods):

Building Resources in San Francisco, a nonprofit focused on building and landscaping materials.
East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, an Oakland nonprofit that bills itself as "Every teacher's first stop and every artist's second home."
Resource Area For Teaching (RAFT), a nonprofit in San Jose that provides classroom materials.
Scroungers' Center for Reusable Art Parts (SCRAP), a 30-year-old nonprofit popular with teachers and artists.
Urban Ore in Berkeley, a for-profit that deals in building materials including doors and windows and general items such as furniture and appliances.

Bobby will be alright. Maybe the police might actually catch the guy. Maybe we'll have a use for what we continue to discard.

What twittering does ("face value") for the poor and disenfranchised

2009-03-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

America's average attention span allegedly has had its 15 seconds of available airtime. By summer 2009, television will no longer be as freely available a distraction as we have come to accept.

What passes for daily survival in the poorest parts of America, evident in San Francisco's North Beach, Chinatown, Tenderloin, SoMa and Mission central districts as just a microcosmic epitome, is small comfort. Soon taken, gone as modern opiate, blasted into the nether regions of the collective interest spectrum, like everything else, scarce.

People will soon require a tuner as means to get the TV signals, due to federal mandates for freeing up the airwaves for emergency services and wireless technology. The government gave out coupons by which people could claim the tuners for free; however, there were restrictions. Even the restrictions lacked reason. Nothing's ever for free.

Perhaps without TV, there's more time for upset, of which there's never a lack.

Without distraction, what will the poorest do?

Just as the poor wonder what's left to them, what goes better with no TV than no breakfast cereal? Because that's gone, too.

News for those needing food came this week with surprises, what with what Kellogg donated to S.F. Food Bank. Since Michael Phelps picture had been on its cereal boxes, with Kellogg feigning their endorsement, people were getting what usually never gets to such outlets, since it's too expensive; the real shock came when the still full boxes turned up on eBay (spoofs also provided fodder for the multitudes).

We forget what happens with the media until we become its victim, as Michael Phelps experienced going from eight Olympic medals hanging around his neck to learning about the albatross of his indiscretion, photographed, of him with a bong.

Most of his sponsors had stood by him. Not Kellogg. Phelps tells the public how he regrets his mistake, how he has no control over how the media's use of such indiscretions is out of his control, how he continues to swim. Time will tell whether history remembers his accomplishments or his indiscretions.

So celebrity continues to be the distraction, while the U.S. continues with grim reminders of being victims of AIG and the Bernie Madoff swindling hordes.

Sometimes it takes satire to blow the whistle on the talking heads of finance, as we saw when Jon Stewart interviewed CNBC's "Mad Money" financial entertainer/journalist Jim Cramer. Everyone it seems has had to endure the repetitive view of the clip from the Daily Show 12 March 2009. "I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a f---ing game," Stewart told Cramer.

How such aggravation prevents serious inclinations of repercussions only makes us forget what we can do about the real harm. There's always twittering.

What more will be taken away?

Counteracting the distractions or their lack, ironically, is more victimization.

Blessings barely serve to hinder travesties abounding across the twittering world. Some wastes we don't want to know.

With recent rains this last month came wildflowers sprouting in the spring's greening hills. We'll forget the fact that the water's main use goes to agribusiness and utility companies using the resources for profit.

Past schemes of nepotism may have undone what hope can regenerate. We can only believe we may not soon heal what toxic assets that the past created. Though we may not have much, we still have life.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in an interview on "60 Minutes" (aired Sunday), said that the U.S. recession will likely end this year, and that a recovery would hinge on the health of financial markets. "The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis," Bernanke said.

Somehow we'll manage to distract ourselves, twittering away and frittering away the small scraps that remain, making the most of what we've got.

Homelessness and writers examined: enthusiasm of perseverance is infectious, unless unfairness prevails

2009-03-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

With today's economic collapse, as more and more of us fail to make a living, we look to those with real gifts who've often questioned why they can't make more of a decent living. Everyone's looking for answers to economic survival, especially us writers.

Faced with being homeless, we know the characterization of most homeless who've become homeless while grappling with addiction, depression, and some with jail time.

Many of us have gotten used to living paycheck to paycheck, and recalling better times. Now we're lucky to have the paycheck. Typecast as losers, those who are facing poverty know their place, rejected, resented and rebuked. As we try to turn our lives around to a sense of prosperity that we once had, we use whatever we can to rise above the squalor in which we find ourselves cast.

We don't like wasting anyone's time.

Homeless writer's reality's not atypical

Some of us who are writers know what it's like to have our time wasted.

Most people rarely know about writers that we're in it for the love, such that we would suffer low pay, endless rejection and multiple side jobs, merely to follow our intent to make points of significance.

People often tend to be envious yet resentful of the fact we can express anything of value, and so we're cast as just being blowhards. And people wonder why a select few writers get so rich, which makes me wonder what happened to the myth of starving writers, a reality I've always known as no myth.

J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, Danielle Steele, Stephen King and others can attest to the real rewards: not every writer dies rich and happy.

Writers are always going to be the ones foraging, scrimping, avoiding discouragement and then enduring the disparaging stigma of being failures. Writers aren't always just seeking attention. Often they're genuinely needing to share their gifts for gathering and providing information. Rejection is a familiar experience.

Most of my life, I've used cooking work to make a living, especially when writing work wasn't available, or augmenting writing work to get a little more ahead of the game (in San Francisco, restaurants now struggling must contribute to health benefit plans for their employees, to ensure for providing the necessities that few of us, individually, can afford; I've been wanting such luxuries most of my life, often having to pay for most medical expenses out of savings or on credit). Even cooking work is hard to get, competitive and beyond demanding.

Over this last few years, I've seen the gradual demise of opportunities and the consequential reduction of decent survival standards.

Foreclosure rates across California this last year have had up to 500 people a day losing their homes.

Coupled with massive job cuts that have seen one in ten workers laid off, many people who once enjoyed a middle class existence are now forced into third world conditions.

Rage seethes in an unending darkness

During the last year, I've come to know there are those of us who don't see the figurative daylight in the economic crisis.

For some of us, hanging out on street corners in paroxysmal blathering, frittering away the time we could be out finding work with seeking friends or annoying strangers, apoplexy has been the only comfort. Losing our rights to vote can bring us to such desperate action.

Our outrage has its reasons, as one woman found who lost her home recently to the FDIC. Banks have not had such failure tendencies since the 20th century's Depression.

Imagine how it feels to many of the eldest among us who must experience an even worse looming of a 21st century Great Depression.

America has begun to seem like the pictures we see of refugee camps in Third World countries.

People survive how they can. They form communities where they can, such as Tent City in Sacramento (a gathering of tents, lean-tos and shanties pitched on the wrong side of the tracks just east of Midtown, near the American River, where the old city dump used to be; Oprah has just put the camp in the spotlight, although its presence has been an ongoing nuisance to neighbors, its recent influx is what gives the inhabitants there the attention), Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon (a growing community of chronically homeless and recently impoverished folks whose members have their own democracy and civilities to create order), and "Nickelsville" in Seattle (named after the mayor, Greg Nickels, and where residents, Nickelodeons, have established rules ― no smoking, drugs or visitors between 9 pm and 7 am ― and set up an arbitration council to mediate disputes; they have nightly gatherings around barrel fires to conduct "rights and responsibilities" assignments).

Even Warren Buffett wants to know where the $50 trillion of investments vaporized in markets worldwide in less than a year's time.

It's like an idea, about which we're speculating its value with strangers, often what we writers regularly do.

We forget we're putting into our messages not only our key ideas but all the fine details we think (or insist) are important. We forget about our readers. Even if they read, they skim. They don't see the significance to their world.

Perhaps even saving it for another day, readers'll come back yet they'll have lost the thread or the original idea's trigger, with writers emphasizing like homeless individuals ranting on street corners.

Just as rejection is a common experience for writers, we can also learn to reject the failure. Persevering through a crisis, we writers are able to share how we overcome such adversity.

Links for homeless and writers

With the Web, writers know they can share links to the world:

(For any other resources with appropriate links, please provide as comments!)

Misanthropes know their homeless solutions fit into their solipsistic Web

2009-03-04T14:43:00.000-08:00

Homelessness 101 is a Web 2.0 experience people ought to learn for themselves.

This isn't to suggest living like the homeless must live (in shelters or on the streets). It's not to suggest becoming a whore for homelessness sake. Or suggesting undertaking the desperation and the intolerance such as those who are actually experiencing the incredible survival skills of poverty.

Maybe it could be just to learn the skills used by the church or social workers who help the poor in the 21st century approach.

Sometimes we're oblivious to such a void in our universe.

A world where heuristics engages us

Lt. Col. Joe Posillico, the Golden State Division commander of the Salvation Army here in San Francisco, talked recently about needing help. The Salvation Army hadn't got what they needed in their red kettles from the usual Christmastime bell-ringing. And times have gotten worse with ever more homeless and poor wandering helpless.

Posillico used newspapers, with his message requesting donations due to the overwhelming need. His real support came from the virtual community, the Web response after the help request's online version. The Web has its infinite capacity for private donors. What Posillico got from the intractable print world was like having a red kettle outside an empty bar, a pittance compared to the virtual red kettle of the Web's permissive generosity.

Posillico saw that people online don't want the connection to the homeless; they don't want to be in the church basements, in the welfare offices, in the inner city help centers. Still, they want to help, to assuage some human longing. Homeless could be acquaintances, associates, distant cousins without help.

Such heuristics encourages solutions with a plasticity that we humans have learned we sometimes, for whatever reasons, can't fully engage.

Yet with the postings online come the necessary evil, the public commentary; by its nature, an online news item's open to any remark, and the majority of comments come from a sabotage of negativity ― an avalanche of disparaging, incendiary, agitating consternation ― those who cannot put up with any charity, any compassion, any collection that's offering no return on its investment (save getting a free set of steak knives). Most of the comments seemed to see no risk or hazard in ignoring the problem.

Sure, life would be perfectly lovely if we were always ready, willing and able to endure fulfilling the momentary needs of an indigent streetperson, as if those fulfillments were our enduring of Lazurus.

Often we're too stoic or stubborn. Or too distracted. With a self-absorption beyond expression, although morally conflicted, as if we could actually discover the redeeming value in helping others. Yet won't.

Opportunities pass us without our realizing when we lack the focus or attention to catalyze the world's gifts.

As if we're shy. Or stupid.

What controls our world besides us

Before we know it, misanthropic solipsism has its control over us.

Just as we have had to adapt to modern models, which we have used as life strategy signifiers, we aren't always ready to adapt to change: when we must abandon everything, from homes to making a living to how we educate or reeducate ourselves to having a family and friends, we are suddenly juxtaposed with being needy.

Without using technology's latest tools, most people wouldn't have a clue what to do when encountering someone who's homeless and actually getting them help, anymore than they'd know what to do in that part of the city or that part of the Web where homeless go.

We've grown up with books that have given us linear or hierarchical learning experiences that we might never have imagined 200 years ago.

And we've grown up with TVs and remote controls that have allowed us to have heuristic approaches to our learning (though usually for our relaxation experience), which we might never have imagined 100 years ago. We want what we want and we want it when we want it (usually now). Yet what we really want, and what we really could have, is dependent only on technology to keep pace with our socioeconomic thriving or its lack.

We've now, with 3G wifi radio tools, abilities that we might never have imagined just 20 years ago. Our distraction capability is pervasive.

With PDAs and laptops on their way home from work, commuters put up with compromises of power-hungry devices and eye strain. Much like the optic nerve having millions of fibers transmitting pulses of information to the retina and to the visual cortex of the brain's perception sensors, within its hippocampus and amygdala, we strive to keep up with what we see with what we experience (the cellular operation is after all binary, and a complex process still occurs); we have come to feel we should be able to have what we need forever in the evolving now.

Rather than see media devices as distraction, we have come to consider them as being solutions in our living spaces, enabling us to have freedom, which is essential to our adapting, to our survival, to our imagining beyond the scarcity and adversity we know is no illusion. Yet they could be transporting us, figuratively, literally and metaphorically (when they face the collapse of the economy, the poor must consider alternatives to what they've relied upon to survive).

History shows us as urban land values have increased, once the properties emptied and the buildings were demolished, with the displacement of people who lived in the inner cities where they've found livelihood, that SRO hotels have had exponential increases. Indigents who just can't cope on the streets must traipse from one SRO to the next every month, since there's no place else they can afford. They could no longer move to rural areas, since those have become suburban areas, not accepting anyone.

Families have recently experienced the fact that they could split (along with their belongings in storage or lost and, most significantly, their animals having been given up, adopted, or worse, euthanized). What we're recognizing in societies is lifestyles becoming more fluid, adaptive. Yet we have also become more isolating.

Posillico hopes differently.

What keeps us controlled besides us

In my lifetime, actual slumlords are hard to find, although their properties are as prevalent in the poorest neighborhoods as cockroaches and drug dealers. If you go to the civic bureaucracies to locate a property owner, you're hard-pressed to locate any individual.

In San Francisco, you'll find TNDC and CitiApartments and other entities. You won't find anyone to ask about the problems with which you live, with pest control or leaks or poor security or inadequate heating.

When you do have a property manager or someone to ask about specific fixes or needs, you risk jeopardizing your tenancy. You won't find any Shorensteins or Morgan Stanleys. What you will find are their lackeys who pass on the problems. As property managers, their reality is that they work like clerks for an agitative firebrand. Their negligence is like an act of a poster child, ready to spark any conflict or bias, yet they're someone who you can't scold for their demeanor anymore than you could scold them for their palsy.

Traditionally SROs have been populated by low-wage workers, transient laborers and recent immigrants. Today immigrants still find SROs as some of the only truly affordable housing for the low-pay jobs that await them. In many Tenderloin, Chinatown and Mission SROs, immigrant workers may be found living three or more to a single small room.

Across San Francisco, the poor have no other choices. One of the oldest hotels in San Francisco, The National, next to California's PUC headquarters and across from UN Plaza, its typical rooms are 8x10 feet. Occupants pay $725 per month for a bed, a sink and decent heating; they're lucky to have the distraction of a TV and yet they do have the politically correct wifi convenience, due to the legislative advocacy for its necessity, with which tenants can share their devices. It's likely the nicest affordable property in the city, due to its closeness with City Hall, and its base of tenants.

Such solutions have the watching eye of City Hall, or beyond, as the world watches a world class city manage its small world. Were solutions as evident as the reality principles of videocams and smartphones, what we have for our use is the capability to capture the moment that evades us.

Such an environment is an apt signifier for the news media's customer base: these nearly indigent need the news, to track scarce jobs (in classified ads ― from craigslist or other virtual network postings, which have become increasingly inadequate), to hunt for clothes (clearly bargain basement markdowns, the marketplace having had its loyalty or its sabotaging betrayal, where even the discount stores struggle to compete with rummage/secondhand stores), or the latest distractions (the Web's twitterings point the way to the cultural currents).

The world needs our collective intelligence

Sometimes, only harsh news concerns us.

Posillico hopes differently.

Stability may be missing from the lives of the poor, yet the world they contain in their culture is a nickel, a dime, or a dollar away from getting or losing their daily bread. People need to know, and sometimes they can't afford the current dire news.

Still, they know if they're not working, no matter what the time, that someone else is.

Still, they know at the end of the day, they must compete with the market.

And still, they must keep up with the latest challenge, either for themselves or for their virtual neighborhood.

With the collective intelligence that we have available with the Web, with smartphones, with networks, we can regain that which we have lost, either through indifference or intolerance. We really do live in a very small world.

When we used to loathe the misanthropes among us, consequently avoiding them, we believed their "my country, right or wrong" bullying enough to give them power. Now, with the world getting smaller every day, it is not even about "my world, right or wrong," since the universe belongs to all of us, and we must protect it: someday we'll embrace the fact that climate catastrophes and nuclear proliferation do none of us any good.

Neither does neglecting homelessness.

There must always be something handy to comfort the poor, to show them, to keep them, to help them, out of their empty red kettle void.

Some of us can't wait much longer ― since it already seems like forever ― for help with America's future

2009-02-25T20:15:00.000-08:00

Delivering his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama addressed the economic crisis that we have all inherited.

The occasion was historic, feeling like a State of the Union deliverance. In the House chambers built by slaves in which President Lincoln addressed the freeing of slaves, President Obama wasted no time on diminishing indulgence to his popularity and to get straight with the encumbrance of politics. President Obama was clearly aware of the jubilation of African Americans and, indeed, all Americans, those of us who cannot help but trust him to preside over a republic in a terrible reckoning.

Don't the homeless and the poor well know the predicament?

"We are a nation that has seen promise and peril," he said. "Now we must be that nation again. We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before."

President Obama used his charm while speaking to the nation, smiling, then sternly glaring, framing his points like a cinematographer, pointing his fingers for emphasis, hand-chopping with a deliberate equanimity, then, with ushering gestures of arm sweeps expressing inclusiveness, fully aware of a magnanimity knowing the scope of our dilemma.

"We have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity, where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter or the next election," he said.

Giving Vice President Joe Biden the responsibility of overseeing the recovery process, everyone in the chambers had to laugh when the president announced the task. "With a plan of this scale comes enormous responsibility to get it right and that’s why I’ve asked Vice President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort, ’cause nobody messes with Joe."

After all, we've spent eight long years not knowing what the federal budget comprises. We need to know who's in charge of its approbation.

Considering the homeless needs

From the just signed Recovery package, we know San Francisco will receive $19.8 million in federal grants to help the homeless and stands to gain a lot more federal funds in the coming months.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last week announced $1.6 billion in nationwide grants for homeless services, including housing, job training, health care, mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment.

That money has been infused into local governments each February for years. However, this year, San Francisco expects to gain even more due to President Obama's stimulus plan.

The president's plan includes $24 million for pilot programs in 23 cities to expedite funds to house families made homeless by the economic crisis.

Considering the needs, Compass Community Services and Catholic Charities will get the funds to provide rent subsidies for homeless families.

Indeed, seven out of 10 Latino and African-American senior citizens, and six out of 10 Asians, live below the survival standard in California's 58 counties, according to a report that I remember from a 2007 UCLA Center for Health Policy Research socioeconomic study about costs for California citizens living below poverty level.

47% of state residents 65 and older are unable to pay for their basic needs, which means 864,000 seniors, more than half of whom struggle at home alone, often go hungry in order to survive, the study from two years ago claims.

The UCLA report found the most impoverished seniors include single women, seniors over age 75, those living alone, and renters. In San Francisco, over 60% of seniors struggle.

The Elder Economic Dignity Act of 2009, a bill introduced this month by Assemblyman Jim Beall (D-San Jose), calls for the state to continue tracking seniors in poverty using new measurements. Officials have relied on a 1960s federal measure to determine who is above or below poverty. "There are a lot of hungry seniors, a lot of seniors who have suffered economically over the last decade," Beall said. "So to use a measurement that goes back to the 1950s is clearly not appropriate."

Indeed.

Deep disparities also exist for nonwhite elders, some often due to historical injustices that kept minorities from union jobs that offered pensions or steered them to low-paying manual work.

It seems time to change history, not to deny the past, more to change the course of the future. In America, we can do better than we have been doing and our children deserve a better history and a more realistic future.

President Obama and his administration have yet to detail what will happen with banks and housing foreclosures and the credit freeze and savings fragility. We hope there's intention to avoid any jeopardy of further burdens or losses or conflicts while restoring confidence. The world tires of tentativeness.

A good place to avoid that stays in our prayers

Some of America's grief never ceases, some things never change, no matter how much money or attention the problem gets.

Parts of America just never seem to change their course in history.

Some parts of San Francisco attract grief, like the Tenderloin ("TL").

Turk and Taylor, for instance, is a good place to avoid, unless you plan on scoring drugs, possibly getting busted, or maybe even ending up dead from stray gunfire.

The block is among the most violent in San Francisco, accounting for a third of the city's misdemeanors and felonies. Crime overloads the beat cops; dozens of arrests and citations occur on any given day.

Panhandlers, pickpockets, junkies, drunks and dealers cluster on Turk. As soon as cops appear, dealers vanish. They reappear minutes later and their business flourishes.

The busy intersection has a liquor store, a bar, some boarded-up storefronts, and an expensive parking lot. The area acts as a main corridor to central San Francisco, through which everyday several thousand people pass, driving, unaware of the location's attraction.

Nearby, semis regularly clog the flow of cars as roadies unload equipment for shows at the Warfield, Powell cable cars attract hundreds of tourists and a main BART station has thousands embarking.

Arterial traffic from I-280 comes north up Sixth Street, leading people in their cars to the area.

Quite likely, if you're there, you're someone lost trying to find Civic Center or shopping and theaters at Union Square.

"The potential good foot traffic from Market Street takes one look at this street and doesn’t want to come here," a police officer said.

The Turk Street scene is intolerable for any legitimate business. The Dalt, Aranda, Dahlia and Winston Arms residential hotels fail to control their sidewalks. Debris bins, double-parked delivery trucks and empty police vehicles often add to the congestion.

Stabbings and fistfights are common in front of the Aranda. And the Dalt still carries the stigma of the 2003 incident when chaos erupted with three men fatally shot in the lobby, and the assailant shooting himself in his fourth-floor room.

Monday night six people were shot, one fatally, outside the 21 Club. It was reportedly a drug deal gone bad, with several people innocently hanging out, shot, and the suspects fleeing across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. Police found a vehicle, which had been set afire, and the suspects are still at large.

A memorial sits outside the 21 Club, a bouquet of flowers, a Beyonce CD, some Mardi Gras beads, a botanica candle, a sealed DVD of "Almost Famous" and a rain-smeared grief note: "2/23/09 Big Heart, Laisses Les Bon Temps Roulez" (sic).

"Some Louisiana soul in Baghdad-by-the-Bay. Becoming too common in America," I mumbled to Pastor Rogers from the San Francisco Rescue Mission. He'd stopped Ash Wednesday to pay his respects once again. We were part of a small crowd, gathered, numb to the violence, upset by the frequency of the reality.

"And in the TL," Pastor Rogers nodded.

Jim, who owns Grand Liquor on the southwest corner of Turk and Taylor, told me he couldn't count the number of shootings outside his door. He's witnessed, in his 18 years there, that not much changes. "I do my best to hose down the blood off the cement," he said from behind us as we stared somberly at the urban tribute.

Uncertainty in America aside, I'm just glad no one's cueing the string section of Etta James' "At Last" (indeed, its association now forever ties to President Obama and the First Lady dancing at the Inaugural Ball, no longer anything of love's grief: "And here we are in heaven").

Recovery: force majeur or moral hazard and what we fail to face (on the brink of disaster)

2009-02-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

With the federal stimulus, America petulantly yet cynically complains of the inadequacies, fearing how long we must endure the economic malaise.

We want to know what we can do to change the force majeur, without becoming the public's moral hazard, dealing with the ridicule of envy and the ultimate blame for the bigger problem.

We willingly accept our responsibilities, how we must put up with imbalance. We certainly hold to a resilience through our compromise, else we face worse consequences.

Being homeless, we know what's worse: alienation, abandonment and anger beyond love.

However, we remain unsure if America's leadership neglects the complex social chaos that could result if the democratic force and its capitalist systems fail to recover.

We depend on The Recovery, since the alternative, revolution, seems a drastic and untenable solution. Yet not an inconceivable one. Mostly just displeasing and deplorable. America nearly always tires of being hesitant.

In San Francisco, even Mayor Gavin Newsom claims, while campaigning for California governor, saying his agenda has always been about pragmatic solutions to mainstream problems, that his administration has "controlled the homeless population." Revolution then can hardly seem possible when those most likely to be at the core of the uprising have no center, when they are characterized as a population rather than as individuals with a common ground.

Commonality, like the revolution, will likely be televised, yet few will care, much less watch or participate. Unless they believe "Mad Money" (there lies the moral hazard of how the few reap the rewards of compensation, while the many sow, continuing to do all the work of spreading and gathering the resources without compensation; only envy then results, feeding only more fear and resentment, much like what's behind private prisons), the scrutiny will heed only divisiveness and ignorance.

How recovery might work

For the recovery, we might consider the activist forces on whom America depends. They shape change. Consider Greenpeace or MoveOn or how President Obama came to power.

When enough people understand what they need to do, they become the force majeur behind an uncontrollable force.

There is the grassroots network that provides the basis for much of the world's political movement, the Public Interest Research Group (PIRGs), also known as "The FUND." This grassroots force provides the canvassing (door to door or on street corners and public gathering places) and the telemarketing (phone banking or public outreach through chat, IM and email), always on the frontlines, or the phonelines, of social change.

Think of the grassroots force this way: if the blogosphere is the intelligentsia of the nascent progressive movement, these fundraisers are its toiling proletariat. Vital, but nearly invisible; in dire need of empowerment. This issue might not be as glamorous as setting the progressive agenda for the next four years, but it shapes the generation of our activists and affects the health of our grassroots for the decades to come. Started back in the stone ages of networking on college campuses yet now responsible for the election of President Obama, The FUND is the strategy for making America work for the time being.

However, The FUND's management tends to be inaccessible in these grassroots organizations; we may know their faces from the media yet their workforce never sees them. The workforce is told to trust their leaders without having anyone to voice concerns directly, concerns of performance and equality and pay.

CALPIRG's Douglas Phelps tends to surround himself with a bunch of loyal sycophants that, in the words of Attorney General Jerry Brown, "all have those particularly dead PIRG eyes." What's legendary is Phelps' leadership of two key non-profit organizations, Telefund and GCI (Grassroots Campaigns Inc.); from them, Phelps makes millions. They are two privately held businesses that represent the world's largest canvass and phone operation, the basis of the grassroots networking force, enabling change. According to many people with whom I've spoken who've worked the street or the phone banks for these operations, Phelps makes a lifestyle whose basis depends on his own comfort, much to the detriment of his staff and workforce, all in the form of his fear-mongering, humiliation and bullying; yet his minions still worship him, and, meanwhile, the work of activism accomplishes huge results. It's politics like these PIRGs that America uses to fulfill change. Or empty promises.

Opportunity for recovery demands a strategy for change, yet no one seems to have the power to set such direction in progress. We're all willing to work if we just knew what to do.

Chaos depends on change to get us back to America's dream of freedom and sustainability for all of us. Else we remain in chaos.

What the future holds for the slumdog reality homeless

2009-02-10T19:32:00.000-08:00

We rarely consider the children who are homeless.

Those who we can't deny we've forgotten. Or neglected, commonly. As if it's someone else's job.

When we consider homelessness, we think of those begging on the street, selling newspapers we don't want to read, with obscene rants and lifestyles which we unequivocally loathe, the daily dread of malnutrition, shelter routines, potential drug encounters, and worse.

Between 6.5 - 10 million people are unemployed in America, and we know homeless counts will tell us soon how many there are among the unemployed in America, those who simultaneously face sudden adversities.

When we consider homelessness, we don't think of families, those working hard to escape from the predicament.

Numbering among the homeless, I'm grateful to know I've no kids to support. Yet I meet homeless kids on the street who don't know where to turn. They're tired of foster care, they're tired of abuse, they're tired of abandonment. Not that I didn't already know, yet the recent familiarization with slumdog reality informs us all of the 150 million children worldwide who are homeless. For months now, I know I've been barely making a living, by anyone's standards; yet I know I could have a worse life, and I find small comfort in that I've not known the reality of poverty all my life. Yet I know well I haven't recently been contributing to life as I'm used to knowing.

I'm now often reminded poor doesn't get any worse than dirt poor.

All over the world we learn of poverty and, lest anyone doubt, we should know Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with 49% of its people living in absolute poverty. There, I'm reminded the poor know dirt poor.

While recently all of us in America feel desperation and frustration, abandoned by our normal expectations of how to make a living, Haitians eat mud. Mothers buy bags of dirt for about $5, hauled from the mountains presumably, which they blend with butter and salt, letting the cakes sit in the sun to dry for their children to eat.

There in the Caribbean, some of the richest have their investments in the virtual reality of the actual Cayman banks or the hedge funds of the Virgin Islands. That part of the world has Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, where dire poverty is commonplace among the people that look towards America for hope for their children and families.

Have we forgotten the homeless children?

This year in San Francisco, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) received 1,500 backpacks full of textbooks and school supplies from Feed the Children, tutoring services and scholarships from Children of Shelters, gift cards and clothes from My New Red Shoes, and $7.6 million from the state of California (more school districts are applying for funds, according to Leanne Wheeler, homeless liaison for the state Education Department). Larkin Street Youth Services (LSYS) has the demographics behind the current reality, understanding there are today 1,623 homeless youth attending SFUSD schools. Organizations like LSYS, Compass, Hamilton Family Center, Raphael House or Children's Village have not forgotten nor neglected the homeless who truly need help.

As our American culture continues to worship celebrities and to esteem the hoity-toity, we feel the compelling urge to hand out awards to those homeless on the street, for Best Original Cardboard Sign, Best Use of Profanity in an Improvised Tirade, Best Track Marks, Best Use of Malt Liquor in a Leading Role.

We forget when we're being condescending. Or degrading. Or patronizing.

Everyone fears their children will eventually disappoint them. Yet we hold in high regard the television images and popular illusions that distract us from our responsibility to holding to such respect.

We forget when some families separate, how the children face foster care while still troubled by the social inequality resulting from prior parental abuse ― physical, sexual or emotional ― as well as severe parental neglect. We may shake our heads when we see the se kids on the street, abandoned, wondering how parents can let such behavior develop in theoir children.

Chances are the children have no homes. They carry around an anger as a shield to hide their abandonment.

We have all learned what we need to do to adapt to the fiscal collapse.

In September 2008 when Lehman Brothers and AIG and Bear Stearns and Morgan Chase gave us the full experience of the credit crisis, how it wasn't just our adjusted rate mortgages or home foreclosures or mounting job losses or the economic impact making us all take long breaths, how we could no longer afford such luxury, how we couldn't customarily insist on conveniences. Before we could even take that long breath and sigh with despair, we had to realize we didn't have the time or the money or the resources. We had nothing.

We've had to accept that we haven't faced the end of the misery and struggles with which we've already long suffered.

Yet we need help. And answers. And hope.

Will children in this chaos know a future without homelessness as a reality? Will their parents or caretakers get the jobs they need? Will the children just be abandoned once again?

When we stop thinking of the homeless as only those we ridicule, those exemplars who disgust us ― the mentally ill, the addicted, the chronic homeless ― then we may know the myriad forgotten, those working in the only deadend jobs they can find, those suddenly homeless, with children.

Investing in these families and their children will build infrastructure as the fiscally responsible ultimatum. If we let these families slide deeper and deeper into trouble, we will pay for it in other ways ― more shelters, foster care, and, eventually, prison.

Neglect has its consequences.

Personally, I'd rather see these children and their families be productive citizens. Else, we will turn into worse than the rest of the world's poverty stricken masses (where the only happiness comes from singing "Jai Ho!").

Pecking orders prevail with credit crisis

2009-02-03T11:29:00.000-08:00

We've all been experiencing the global economy's terrible mess. So have Cory and Fletch; once prosperous, now with shameful credit, they've become used to being urban nomads in San Francisco.

Pride can be a liability, they've learned.

Complexity gets simple, they've learned.

Edges become more and more definite, they've learned.

What was complicated and out of touch, somehow, turns around, quite naturally, and life does comprise its black and its white in the fiscal balance. In the world where we humans have seeming dominion.

Sometimes life only gives us one chance.

A shining moment.

Focus.

One day, while walking San Francisco's Embarcadero, at the foot of Telegraph Hill, Cory saw the wild parrots in flight, a dozen of them circling, finally alighting, nested in one of the date palms. "I wish sometimes I could fly," she said, as we stopped to sit there, wondering about where to live, "cities have become too crowded."

"I wish we could just nest," Fletch retorted. "Sometimes it's just people that get in the way. Politics," he said. He'd liked to argue his systems theories with people, how most anything could be explained by chemistry and physics and numbers. "We're just not thinking about sustainability, like those parrots."

Cory and Fletch had come to be homeless the hard way. They had had an easy, comfortable life.

Having weathered the worst job insecurity of their lives, Cory as a chemist and Fletch as an environmental analyst, they questioned their survival as whether they were the fittest in this crisis. Corporation after corporation posted layoffs and job losses.

Across America, worry remains

Joining Cory and Fletch (in parallel universes), feeling inept, in botched lives, with their dreams collapsed, was most of America.

Cory and Fletch had both lost their jobs in early 2006 and could no longer pay their bills by 2008 with the job market getting more and more bleak. Severance pay and reserves had evaporated with their adjustments. Like everyone with the economy, rising costs and diminishing returns meant learning how to survive not just how to sustain their reality.

Rent, food and utility expenses had Cory and Fletch at their limit.

No longer enjoying simple luxuries (unlike a year before, when they could see a movie or go out to eat perhaps once a month; in years past, such luxuries they'd do on a whim: traveling, investing, discovering the world), suddenly, they were barely able to survive.

With their combined monthly income having dwindled to the point they were paying bills when they could, they would only then come to realize the credit hoax and the problems with their delinquent debt.

They had been swindled using their own credit cards, having not understood the fine print of "universal default fees," the financial percentage rates in their agreements, which fluctuate and rise.

Due to bills paid late, universal default fees kicked in on all their accounts. It would be years before they could recover and repay with the mounting due balance.

Suddenly each month, percentage rates were going higher and higher, and with their overdue liability whose basis had been a form of usury, they could only make minimum due payments on their bills; soon, Cory and Fletch were unable to pay their rent and their utilities. They could barely afford more than $2 per day to eat.

They faced bankruptcy.

Having avoided welfare as an option, it became a reality when they could not afford rent and their belongings went into storage, their only place to live being the one-room SRO flophouses, the hotels scattered across San Francisco. Due to their ravaged credit and the policy of tenancy requirements (evictions became more difficult once they'd established tenancy), they could only stay in one hotel three weeks at a time before having to move to the next hotel. They had become urban nomads.

Once altruistic, they were not used to worrying every moment.

America bounces around its citizenry's future

In their 40s, Cory and Fletch hadn't known such real sacrifice and hardship in their lifetimes. Always paying their taxes, they'd been strong contributors to charities. Now they were seeking aid.

"Get in line," they'd hear. Charity budgets are tightening, they'd learned, with an economy that cannot afford services and resources normally coming from public not private sources.

With no children, they felt fortunate that their health wasn't of any immediate concern. When considering any diagnostic medical procedures, they'd investigated public health options.

"Get in line," they'd hear. Unless they had reasons for indicating any medical concerns, they would have to find a means to pay. Had they had any pre-existing conditions, they faced worse alternative waits.

When the meager EBT ("food stamps") aid became available, they realized their allotment amounted to about $5 per day for food expenses. They found the soup kitchens and the monthly free grocery provisions.

"Get in line," they'd hear. Often the daily lunch lines would be 300-400 people on average, depending on the time of month and other arbitrary budgetary situations; the monthly food giveaways was what had become most overwhelming, since getting there late often meant getting nothing at all.

People are the same everywhere; they can be diabolical, humorous, and they can overcome heartbreak. When struggles happen, true spirit shows: a sense of community or a sense of protectiveness prevails.

Despite the current despair, there is a hope that will not disappear.

When reflecting on their predicament, survival of the fittest for Cory and Fletch depended on how they'd find work, a way to heal their ravaged nest, and regain sustainability for the children they hope to one day have.

"Get in line," they'd hear.

America's forgotten in their very own census

2009-01-27T23:38:00.000-08:00

A count takes place this week of those that America's census knows as homeless.

From Staten Island to San Francisco, from the tent cities to the shelters, under blankets asleep on city streets, in resource centers, jails and hospitals, people will become part of what qualifies for federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding.

In San Francisco, the 400 volunteers, the city and nonprofit workers, the officials who control the census, they all know they may not count everyone who's homeless.

They may not find some encampments.

Those staying with friends or family may not make the count.

Across San Francisco, in the SRO flophouses, which individuals use for weeks at a time then being forced to move (due to tenancy regulations), some people will not make the tally.

Volunteers came Tuesday evening to the Department of Public Health building (after hearing of the means to get the jobs, since there were initial enticements of pay). They got route assignments, tally notes, flashlights, pens, and instructions on how to spot homeless people, since asking people is against the guidelines that officials established. "Look for shopping carts," a city worker instructed, "anyone sleeping in doorways or alleys." Volunteers rolled their eyes, needing no such clues.

Most homeless are apparent. Yet there are the questionably homeless, don't I well know.

HUD last year provided San Francisco with $18 million in homeless-program funds, accounting for nearly 10% of The City’s homeless-program budget, according to figures provided by Dariush Kayhan, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s homeless-policy director.

Tuesday night’s count may be available in several weeks; 2007 identified 6,377 homeless, up from 6,248 in 2005.

Beyond these figures, the federal government provides little help or direction with its work to scale back poverty. The bailout is still in Congress.

Different kind of homelessness to consider in America

President Obama's first acts in his new leadership were subtle yet significant with respect to changing the course of America's economy, its state of poverty and its growing homelessness.

One of his first was to prevent his administration from lobbyist favors and bribes along with his signing of reinstitution of the Freedom of Information Act, ensuring that there will be access once again to what happens in White House operations, not just to the rich and powerful.

He also named a Director of National Security, Dennis Blair; as the Director of Intelligence, he will be principal adviser to the President, to the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council. Admiral Blair will be responsible for closing down "Gitmo," the Guantanamo prison holding men accused of conspiracy and terrorism (a statement, which he made during his confirmation process before the Senate Intelligence Committee, was a significant change of course for America's critical intelligence concerns: "torture is not moral, legal, or effective").

America is not out of the woods, and everyone understands that there will be problems. We do not expect President Obama to do the hard work alone. We have learned we can't depend on our government. We want to do our part to protect and to build our nation's status.

Yet we wonder when the next catastrophe will arise.

We've wondered for years if we could trust the White House.

Now we wonder if the President is safe in the White House. If his family is safe. Kidnappings, assassinations, and terrorism still have ahold of our national psyche (Googling "Obama assasination" gets over 3 million hits).

Imagine the hatred that exists in places worse than Gitmo, for instance, Supermax, the solitary confinement federal penitentiary in Colorado, where the following prisoners serve time:

Matt Hale, a white supremacist who espouses racial holy war, serving time for soliciting the murder of an Illinois federal judge
Omar Abdel-Rahman, the notorious "Blind Sheik" mastermind, Mahmud Abouhalima, the Mujahideen leader, and Ramzi Yousef, the Islamic terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade center bombing
Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber" loner
H. Rap Brown, former civil rights activist, convicted of murdering a Georgia sheriff
Anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph, held for the 1996 Olympics bombings in Atlanta, implicated in bombing many other women's clinics and county facilities
Zacarias Moussaoui, conspirator in the 9/11 attacks
Barry Mills, leading member of Aryan Brotherhood.

Officially called ADX, it's not what one would expect of a place built in the 1990s that houses nearly 500 terrorists, vicious murderers and violent, disruptive escape-prone inmates, most of whom come from other federal penitentiaries. There, unlike most state and federal prisons, where inmates scream for a visitor's attention or proclaim their innocence, not a single major assault against a corrections officer has occurred since the first inmates arrived in 1994.

Conspiracy theorists think that there must be some way to overwhelm the surveillance, the aerial reconnaissance, the radar, the remoteness. Just as they insist President Obama won't last two years in office.

We hope not a chance permits such injustice, that these prisoners are there for the terms of their sentences, some for life. That hope is still alive in America.

There are some people that we like to know where they are.

Pride, again, in America, stands up, with hope and an amazing grace

2009-01-20T10:17:00.000-08:00

Again in America, we have the light of day. We are singing our National Anthem, reciting our Pledge of Allegiance, practicing our Constitution.

A new form of social grace stands, without us having to be asked to stand.

As millions of Americans experience the pride of the Inauguration of President Barack Obama, we, he says in his majestic Inaugural Speech, the "risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom," we must "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."

From the steps of the Capitol Building, across the Great National Mall, in a crowd stretching from the Lincoln Memorial beyond the Washington Monument, among over two million Americans standing for hours in the bitter cold, there were many proud to watch this humble man take an oath and then to listen to this inspiring man we can all with certainty call our President.

I was, on this bright, balmy Tuesday morning, January 20, 2009, standing in San Francisco Civic Center across from City Hall, watching a simulcast of the Washington D.C. ceremony. Here, as across America and around the world, men and women, young and old, black, white, brown, red, yellow, purple, united, some cheering, some silently sobbing, some numb, some smiling, all of us were in awe of the magnitude of an historical moment.

A nonprofit concert organizer, NextArts, arranged the Civic Center event, asking only that people bring donations of socks and underwear for the homeless. Amnesty International set up a booth near a giant screen with red, white and blue banners across from City Hall. A booth for throwing shoes at a Bush target was available near the Pioneer Monument; eccentric Frank Chu was there with his 12 Galaxies sign, taking off his shoes.

America is different now in the world

Here in San Francisco as all across America, we were experiencing the gift of grace, the promise, the dream, the realization of hope.

No canaries froze in their cages this Inauguration in Washington D.C. (as for Theodore Roosevelt's only inaugural, when it was freezing cold and they were there for their amusing twittering and chirping for citizens), no doves released (as for George W. Bush's second, as a symbol of peace and prosperity), no pigeons killed mercilessly (as for Richard Nixon's first, for his parade route, when a special toxin was sprayed on trees, to prevent any undue messiness, and instead the pigeons and many other birds littered the sidewalks, dead from the poison).

No creed of separation, no indifference of belief, no doubt of danger and dread, nothing could keep us from affirming the audacity of President Obama's magnanimity and unquestioning fortitude.

We stood for President Obama's taking of his oath (even as we laughed politely when Justice John Roberts could not provide the correct wording, at first, while Obama waited politely for the words to be said for him to follow), we stood for prayers (even when we did not practice faith and watched as others mouthed the words by heart), we stood for the flag (even when we have had doubt in its meaning over the last eight long years).

"The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small," President Obama proudly says, "but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then, can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government."

Pride and an audacity to which we can and must hold

Across America, we are proud to call ourselves Americans.

Again.

We can use our passports without incrimination or disdain or shame.

We can praise our leaders.

We can hold to "these truths to be self-evident," that all of us are equal.

Across the world, we have seen frustration, doubt and despair, and its replacement by a resolve to cooperate, to seek commitment, to make amends.

For fear and intolerance have held us too long in the imprisonment, the slavery, the fighting, over all of which we can rise up and stand strong, with confidence and hope. We can and we will have the future.

"For we know," President Obama says, "that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter, stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace."

For with freedom, President Obama reminds us, comes responsibility.

In Gaza, yesterday, Israelis and Palestinians called for a cease fire in the violence ravaging a small part of the world that many fear could erupt in all-out world war. Peace has come, perhaps, because of a new power in place, or perhaps because of responsibility.

In the Congo and Rwanda, a conflict continues over precious resources, with lives and blood lost to those who claim their rights to destroy for an old way of power that can no longer stand, in our new light of day.

In America, the men and women and children who walk or sleep or work on the streets, those who are without homes, without food, without hope, all can now face a future with accountability, respect, and trust in overcoming such adversity. A powerful few can no longer abide, simply because of legacy, while the many have no homes, no work, no future.

Celebrating America is due as a guiding demand

The last few days of celebrations in Washington D.C. brought the celebrity talent of everyone from Bono to Springsteen to Cher, performing their popular anthems for their new-found belief in America.

This morning I listened to Aretha Franklin sing "My Country 'Tis of Thee," in her glorious grey dress and a towering hat to accentuate her mettle. The Queen of Soul provided the fitting presence to the Inauguration's historical eminence.

Yo-Yo Ma (on cello), Itzhak Perlman (on violin), Anthony McGill (on clarinet), and Gabriela Montero (on piano) performed "Air and Simple Gifts" (a John Williams composition for the occasion), exacting the foundation of history in the making.

The San Francisco Boys Chorus and San Francisco Girls Chorus had already ensured history with their heavenly mastery with "An Exhortation," whose lyrics are from Obama's election-night acceptance speech.

Elizabeth Alexander read from her poem for the occasion, "Praise Song" (she is one of only a few poets to be part of a Presidential Inauguration; the others, of course, were Robert Frost, who recited "The Gift Outright" from memory at John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural, after failing with "Dedication" because of the sun's glare making him unable to read that poem that he'd created for the occasion, James Dickey read "The Strength of Fields" at Jimmy Carter's 1977 inaugural gala at the Kennedy Center, Maya Angelou read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, and Miller Williams read "Of History and Hope" at Bill Clinton's 1997 inaugural). Alexander's words are testament to what Obama's words gave us, a call to serve others, in order to make America, once again, a strong and brave home and a guide once again for the rest of the world.

"Say it plain: that many have died for this day," Alexander, 46, read, speaking of "love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance," of having love "beyond marital, filial, national." Just as the unthinkable has happened in the past, she seemed to impart, anything remains possible now: "In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,/any thing can be made, any sentence begun/on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,/praise song for walking forward in that light."

Near the end of President Obama's historic Inaugural Speech, he states: "Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may not be new. But those values upon which our success depends — honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths."

A man whose heritage has been witness and forbear to struggle, to slavery, to poverty, this man has taken an oath today to which we can be proud to salute him, to honor him, and to follow him, with grace.

No one has asked us to stand up for our pride. We do so out of instinct, with an amazing grace.

Sleeping on the street and Street Cred 101, what we all could learn, just to survive

2009-01-13T23:24:00.000-08:00

In cardboard boxes, just the right size, folded perfectly into a canopy underneath an overpass, out of sight from predators and police and passersby, two homeless find their safe night's sleep. Katie and Jess had stapled transparent polyurethane to the inner core, so that they could stay dry. They stack it with all their worldly belongings in their makeshift luggage cart, wheeling their life around San Francisco.

All they need is a place to get clean, along with a sturdy sense of resilience or perseverance or confidence that they'll survive.

Making it to Civic Center, they watch the Falun Gong and Tai Chi practitioners worshiping their craft in the plaza. They await the Main Library's opening, where they'd planned to go inside, in shifts, since they cannot bring their cart and all their belongings with them.

Invisible stress erupts and pervades

Crowds grow, with everyone anticipating the same daily routine at the Main Library, trying to grab a sink or a toilet or mirror or a computer terminal before anyone else.

A fight breaks out over territory, a place in the queue, trivialities about who gets to sit in the cherished spots. Gestures become provocations. Vulgarities become spewed poison. Frustrations become conflicts. Toxic stress is in the open. Some street people just want to get drunk and high in the early morning and that's how they live all day long, every day, hunkered in to deep depression. Whoever interrupts their progress gets what's left of a piece of their mind. Some say it's indicative of the general homeless problem, how a high percentage of most people on the street spend their days in worthless misery.

Beat cops cross the street from City Hall. Jess motions with a nod to Katie that it's time to leave. Katie shakes her head, keeping her civility and respect. "Let the beef happen, it'll play out," she says with a dignity of resolve.

"I just want to have a day when stress isn't the only reality," Jess says.

"Hon, you did get some sleep last night, I could tell. You weren't snoring."

"Yeah. Not like the shelters," Jess remembers, "guys coughing like some tuberculosis ward, snoring like it's a contest to see who's the loudest, talking gibberish. And those metal frame beds with the two inch high mats, the fear of lice, the bodies smelling of piss and sweat and somethin' close to death." He watched the cops approach the guys arguing.

"That old man got to you the other night," Katie recalls. "He might be dead." She tries to get eye contact with Jess as he looks away.

She and Jess had split up the other night, four nights ago, so they could have decent warm showers at the MSC-South shelter. Her downstairs with the women, Jess upstairs with the men, they'd been lucky to get in a place together, and their cart of belongings was safe, stored at the 150 Otis resource center.

An old man had been drunk in the men's dormitory at MSC. He'd wreaked of grain alcohol, urinating all over himself and the area where he lay. Jess had been trying to rest in a bed only 15 feet away, when the lights came on, with paramedics arriving to take care of the man, to take him away, since staff had felt he was a hazard, to himself and everyone else. Two days later, word spread how he'd died. So he had smelled of death, likely his liver giving out, his body no longer able to withstand the toxins from the grain alcohol, which he'd been likely consuming out of habit for years, likely only prolonging his life by sheer will, drinking all day long from waking until he passed out.

"Just an old coot," Jess says, cocking his head, shaking off the memory like he could still smell that night's stench. Staff afterwards had tried to clean up the mess, with spray cleansers and bleach; the stench lingered until the next morning, with a gag reflex close to many of the homeless men's senses. Everyone walked around with an expression of disgust, their nostrils flared, trying to breathe only through their mouths, unable to get the fresh air they needed to suppress the instinctual choking, swallowing, and the compulsion to vomit.

The cops have had to interfere with the altercation between three guys while they were waiting for the library doors to open. The guys had seemed to settle down for fear of arrest. Katie watches as the calm allowed Jess to breathe some relief. She looks across the street at the Falun Gong movements. The day's stress seems to disappear as suddenly as it seemed to have had a pending doom.

Stress becomes undeniable

"Give me just a few minutes," Katie says as the doors open. "I just want to use the restrooms real quick. Then you can." She joins the crowds, as they all are shuffling their feet through the doors.

"Take your time," Jess says, "I got the paper to read, the Sudoku to do if you're too long." He waves her off and opens the news, reading of the coming inaugurations, the Israeli/Hamas chaos, and the latest economy slump irritableness.

Katie is off, thinking about sleep, how little they'd been getting, all the walking they did, all the emotional and physical stress they endured. Being homeless had become hard work. Trying to disengage was a constant battle. Having any useful sleep was a triumph, having to put up with snoring being not even the least of their problems, with traffic noises, sirens, strange voices shouting nonsense, all manner of disturbances never allowing them to sleep through the night. She thought of Jess and his tendency to vigilant yet stoic guarded sleep, watching over the both of them.

One of the security guards ushering the crowds into the lobby yawns and stretches like he's just awoken. "I don't know if I slept a wink either last night," Katie says, off-handedly.

The guard recognizes Katie, smiles and nods, politely acknowledging her comment, and near blushes at his yawning gesture, like he had no reason to show any lack of refreshfulness compared to her; they'd talked, so he knew her circumstances.

"You need your sleep," he says. "Especially out on the streets." Several people look up, assessing Katie, since she doesn't look like the typical homeless, the unbathed, the ragged, the disheveled.

"Least I got some. You look like you need some coffee," Katie jokes.

She uses the restrooms, scouts the computer terminals, seeing several open, books one for the hour, scans the daily racks of newspapers, and goes back outside. Jess is deep in some story of the juvenile gangs having gotten justice for their "street cred" murder (their vengeance earning them only murder charges and imprisonment until they're 25 years old). "Your turn," Katie says, "and if you want, there's a computer booked. Up on the fourth floor, number 410."

He looks up and sighs. "Yeah, sorry, yeah, I'll use the computer, maybe check on that job for next week." Jess checks his email frequently along with craigslist and other local job boards, sometimes with futility, due to the competition for jobs and the desperation he feels when he hasn't been able to get sleep, or to stay clean and to have laundered clothes for an interview. So he tries to get any work where it's even just temporary, like the job next week, cleaning up a house for a property owner to rent to some new prospect. "Sorry, babe,"he says. "Just distracted, just reading about some 14-year-old girl, and the gang that shot her, they'll get their sentences in juvenile court later this week. Happened up Potrero Hill last year, near where we sleep."

"That's comforting," Katie says. She tucks her hair behind her ears and out of her face. "Any reason for us to worry?"

"No more than anywhere else," Jess replies. "There's been two murders in the City so far this year. Stabbings. Inconsequential wherever we go. Just have to be wary."

Survival to them wasn't just about waking hours, mostly it came down to putting up with stress, watching their backs wherever they go, and hoping for good sleep.

"Yeah. Even of cops," she says, thinking of Oscar Grant and the BART cop fiasco. "Don't be too long, sweetie," she says.

New voices for diversity and grassroots giving life to real hope in San Francisco

2009-01-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

A 2009 Board of Supervisors inauguration saw its first Chinese community activist elected as President with David Chiu, who takes over for the outgoing President Aaron Peskin, who had represented the same district for which Chiu serves.

With the support of the administrative end of its government, San Francisco, famous for its magnanimity and its respect and pride in people, may see its voices count at the grassroots level and across the diversity of the City. We can only hope.

Over the last two centuries, Chinese Americans have contributed to building San Francisco with civility, cooperativeness and tolerance for racism, despite its people never having a say in politics. Recent years have seen scandals here that have made for as much accountability or its lacking for the public welfare as in any other governmental body. Yet the people have a sense of preeminence. We can only hope.

What the homeless can expect is new hands at the helm. If fresh blood can give new life to existing problems, San Francisco like the U.S. may have credible optimism in its striving to keep itself alive. We don't want to see the fact of homelessness become a lifestyle anymore than we want to see the nation facing economic collapse. Anymore than we want to see history's worst chapters replay. We can only hope.

Members taking their oath of inauguration were Eric Mar (District 1, representing the Richmond), David Chiu (District 3, North Beach, Russian Hill, Chinatown), Carmen Chu (appointed to District 4, the Sunset after former Supervisor Ed Jew was charged with corruption and lying about his residence), David Campos (District 9, the Mission, Bernal Heights and Portola) and Mark Avalos (District 11, Excelsior, Outer Mission), all sworn in for their first full term.

Also taking the oath were Supervisors Michela Aliot-Pier (District 2, Marina), Ross Mirkarimi (District 5, the Fillmore, Western Addition, Haight-Ashbury), Chris Daly (district 6, Tenderloin, Financial District, SoMa, Treasure Island), Sean Elsbernd (District 7, West of Twin Peaks neighborhoods), Bevan Dufty (District 8, Castro, Noe Valley, Glen Park, Diamond Heights, Duboce Triangle, Mission/Buena Vista Heights), and Sophie Maxwell (District 10, Potrero Hill, Bayview-Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, Portola/Silver Terrace, Dogpatch, Little Hollywood, Portola).

Changes of faces like direction of winds in San Francisco politics, yet familiarities remain

A huge crowd had assembled in the chambers and the overflow area of the North Light Court of City Hall. Even the North Light Court had begun to bustle. The hum sounded like a foghorn.

Mayor Gavin Newsom made a rare appearance, long an adversary of the previous Board due to politics and personalities straining relations. The legislative chambers had many heads of government attending the historic meeting―District Attorney Kamala Harris, Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, newly elected School Superintendent Carlos Garcia.

After a moment of jocularity during roll call, when both Chiu and Chu answered "present" to what sounded like their names, Superior Court Judge James McBride swore in the newly elected (and re-elected) members, and Clerk Angela Calvillo then opened nominations for Board President.

Daly nominated himself, Dufty nominated Maxwell, Campos nominated Mirkarimi, Chiu nominated Avalos, and Avalos nominated Chiu.

With the Board’s moderate-to-conservative wing, those aligned with Mayor Gavin Newsom (Alioto-Pier, Elsbernd and Dufty) were behind Maxwell (she had seemed to be the strongest contender for being Board President, due to her community support and the respect by many on the Board who often don't even agree with the moderate positions she takes; yet she is a "driving force pushing for accountability in local government and increasing economic development opportunities, and, as the only African American on the Board, Sophie is committed to implementing true social and environmental justice principles in the local governance," as the City's Website states).

Mirkarimi had support yet most know he has aspirations as Mayor ("another Matt Gonzalez," many claim).

Campos had support too, although on the fourth round, he announced that, in the interests of reaching a consensus, he would be switching his vote to Chiu and urging others to do the same.

Mar supported the move, wanting to "break the gridlock," telling his colleagues: “To have the first Chinese-American as president of the Board of Supervisors would be an historic occasion.”

Alioto-Pier then gave a speech arguing for the importance of female leadership on the Board.

Public testimony had no determinate leader although the loudest sentiment of cheers was for the progressives, not Maxwell, more the moderate/progressive.

Before the seventh round of voting, Avalos announced that he was removing his name from nomination, so in that round, Daly supported Chiu, as did all the freshmen and Mirkarimi, who gave Chiu the sixth vote he needed to win the Board's presidency. When Mirkarimi cast the final vote, the Board chambers and North Light Court reverberated with applause.

What's unexpected is still no surprise

"This is a little unexpected," said Chiu, as he took the Board President chair. "I would have been honored to serve under any of my colleagues."

Chiu is a freshman, yet with his involvement in the business community and at the same time with the grassroots networks, he brings a resounding sense of unity to city government. The ability to determine who sits on Board committees is an incredible power, and Chiu's chair appointments of those committees will show the direction of his leadership, particularly on the budget and land use committees. We may see few surprises.

Whether Chiu follows Peskin's allegiances will be the ultimate telling of the direction San Francisco takes. At his last meeting, Peskin set up a special election in June to look for ways to raise new revenue to balance the $576 million deficit, almost half the City's $1.2 billion in discretionary funds. How Chiu politicizes that election will be worth watching.

Mayor Newsom's appearance in the Supervisor's chambers, to show his support for a Board that faces its most precarious and cutting budget for operations that San Francisco has ever seen, signals a cooperativeness. Working with the business community, he and Chiu may even make strides towards balancing needs of the public welfare against balancing demands for corporate welfare. Such conflicting needs may come down to improving business with corporate taxation or cutting public resources. The dilemma will show how politics proves its meddle, whether it's business as usual or the people actually getting their due.

"We have the capacity, the ingenuity and the spirit to solve this," Newsom told the Board, looking painfully alone as he stood in the chambers. "It's going to take all of us working together. It's in that spirit that I am here. The mid-year solution―difficult and painful as it is―is the easy part. The difficult part comes in the next four months."

After the meeting, Mayor Newsom had a press briefing concerning the budget, which he did not attend, yet where Controller Ben Rosenfield and Budget Director Nani Coloretti tried to provide spare details.

Across San Francisco, a clamor for progressives echoes calls for new prosperity

Socially, the homeless have no means to involve themselves politically besides their activist contrarians like SFConnect and Coalition on Homelessness. One of my associates with the Coalition on Homelessness was irate as I encountered her watching the Board's initial 2009 meeting, especially when I was apprising her of the crisis that 150 Otis alone seems to manage. She was immediately on the phone to the offices for Dariush Kayhan, the mayor’s Homeless Policy director, trying to help me get some words of encouragement to the people I know who gather daily at 3 PM. These are homeless people who are waiting for their slim chance at a low lottery number for grabbing up the overflow no-shows of nightly beds. This hopeless waiting all day needed attention.

After the Board of Supervisors meeting adjourned, I knew there would be celebrations of each member's constituencies and supporters in their offices. Prior to these political parties, I hurried to 150 Otis to spread news of hope in The City's future for change in plans.

Generally outside of word of mouth, homeless have no way of spreading the word, and they could care less who the Board President is; however, I told what I knew would be important to them―systems changing to provide faster access to beds―and then I returned to City Hall.

Weaving through each Supervisor's office crowd, visiting Mar and Mirkarimi, Dufty and Maxwell, Daly and Chiu, I heard again and again how welcoming the mood was for change. There was toasting. Comraderie. Scruples. Direction. Concern. Free food and drinks. Congratulations. Warmth. Quite the opposite of what I had just experienced not even seven blocks away at the destitute 150 Otis crowd.

People talked of how they would miss Tom Ammiano and Aaron Peskin and Jake McGoldrick (despite how their impact still has a presence).

People talked of the new feeling of unity (despite the petulance of Daly, many whispered as if in confidence).

People talked of budgets, crime and the desire for cooperation between the Mayor and the new Board President (despite the fact it's never been true in the past)

People talked of President-elect Obama and hope (despite the fact that the nation's needs have little to share with San Francisco's hopes).

People talked of Shanghai and Gaza and Iraq (despite the fact we have troubles here in this very neighborhood worthy of wars).

People talked of their voices mattering, after long knowing how their lives had lost pride and respect and protection (despite the fact that businesses always get first hearing, regardless of the politician, while homeless factions get less and less respect, losing more and more dignity).

People talked of freedom and its responsibility, and of a new-found redemption (despite the indifference and intolerance of many distinctly separate and insular communities in San Francisco).

People talked of a silver lining to the global crisis, how the Board and Mayor needed to work unilaterally to save what they can from the economic collapse (despite the fact that many have no idea what the actual trade deficit means or what the City's actual budget deficit is or where jobs will appear).

Let's wonder if there will be true progress with the new Board.

What's at the bottom of the list of demands

The Board must help with working out a realistic budget. Some demands will always be denied. For instance, when homeless people go looking for shelter daily, the progress that the Mayor's Office already tried to make ended up in disaster during November and December.

After the Mayor's reducing Tenderloin Health’s hours October 18, 150 Otis, Hospitality House and Glide Memorial United Methodist Church reported shelter reservation demand surged. Glide is now the Tenderloin’s sole source for homeless residents seeking morning shelter reservations. Glide opens for reservations at 7 AM, and within the hour, all shelter beds available get booked, which means staff have to turn away people who may have been waiting inline for hours, and any subsequent drop-in expectations are already gone. The savings of closing Tenderloin Health center to the budget was negligible. Yet the dilemma of getting beds is left without a solution.

Typically, no beds by 8 AM are available at MSC South; any of the shelter system’s open beds are miles away in the Bayview at the Providence shelter. Hospitality House often has few beds available. Late beds that become available for no-shows in the early evening at MSC or Providence are only available to those who wait at 150 Otis. The Interfaith Winter shelters are also overwhelmed, with only their 60-100 mats available, depending on the church that generously opens its doors.

Trying to find where beds are available during each day is mind-boggling and frustrating. There is no information and even the resource center staff speculate on availability.

How homeless connect to politics, while also managing to survive

To stay informed, the homeless depend on word of mouth. They have no daily updates available to them, much less hourly updates.

As everyone recalls, in 2007, Google had negotiated with the city and Earthlink to provide free wi-fi citywide, which a smaller company instead, Meraki ("Free the Net") in SoMa, took up supporting during 2008. The nonprofit, Project Homeless Connect (PHC), installed Meraki radios atop the Alexander Residence, Antonia Manor, Curran House, Franciscan Towers, Plaza Apartments, Ramona Apartments and West Hotel, and on Housing Authority apartment buildings throughout the Tenderloin and SoMa.

So far, those with wifi connections have yet to find any information available on a regular basis.

St. Anthony’s and S.F. Network Ministries’ Tech Lab is an obvious choice where people can go (outside of the few computers at the Main Library and at friends or the rare acquaintance who can offer a link).

San Francisco's Meraki citywide network gives free repeaters to anyone who will also mount Meraki outdoor gear on rooftops or windowsills, thus forming a mesh to extend the network (their Website claims its network now covers about 10 square miles and is in use by 180,000 S.F. residents, up from 20,000 a year ago), planning to blanket the entire city sometime in 2009.

What social networks the homeless have, due to Free the Net's opening up of the Webspace, have little to offer so far in 2009, besides the news of a new progressive Board of Supervisors.

Let's hope the progressive factions listen to the activist Web users who happen to be homeless who are calling for change. They need to know if they've got a bed tonight.

Rarities and a bucket of fish for the mostly harmless

2009-01-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

Oblivious to most of the Western world's sanguine view, homelessness became the people's own worst enemy all for the sake of business getting the most profit, as people shook their heads wondering where they were supposed to live, what they were supposed to eat, who they could depend on for jobs.

Profit as norm became the key, and the homeless were given the door, without even a bucket to wipe up the mess. The door's now shut, locked, and the homeless wander the streets, with mass media pointing their fingers with indifference, intolerance, and uncertainty at the epitome of America's disgrace.

I watch ships sail into San Francisco each day loaded with containers for American markets; they leave nearly empty of cargo.

All in the name of free, U.S. economy questions its reign

The mostly harmless homeless get blamed for wanting their shelter, their food, their street sweeping jobs and service industry casual work, all living essentials of which have become competitively non-existent and rarefied even to find each day.

Shelters are crowded or unavailable. Food is unaffordable. Lines for jobs are at least 100 people for every position open, at best. The jobs that are there are paying half of what they used to pay and benefits are rare.

First it was factories making auto parts taking their business outside the country borders, then it became autos, then it was magnets, then it became bomb parts, then bombs.

First it was countries like Congo Republic or Rwanda or Brazil having their resources ravaged―tin, lumber, diamonds, tungsten, cerium, lanthanum, and other rare earth metals, used in everything from cigarette lighters, laptops, televisions, microwaves, magnetized drivers (for navigational and surveying devices based on the reception of signals from an array of orbiting satellites) used in everything from cars to bombs―then it was wars over such resources at the same time as genocide and outright slavery took place in these faraway third, fourth and fifth world countries.

Funny how your competitors or your enemies figure you out and turn on you when you think they're oblivious to your new way of doing your business. Or playing the game.

Funny ironic, and not at all funny, in the sense of laughing all the way to the bank. Because look what's happened to our banks.

Enemies stay enemies only because of the tyranny of covetousness. Greed. Simple greed. Such games of business haven't mattered to hear our legislatures and Congressional leaders speak about the new rules in place, and what they can do to reconcile the damages.

What the news does and doesn't tell us

What we are able to get as news is half-truths and manipulation of the truth. Benefit cuts. Outsourcing. Enron. Worldcom. Pension funds invested in risky hedge funds. Layoffs at Christmas. Bailouts of banks, industries, non-profits, everything but sports franchises (I hope I don't speak too soon, since such franchises depend on tax dollars for their revenue). All with the U.S. trade deficit growing and the value of the U.S. dollar dwindling. Unspeakable billions if not trillions of dollars, gone.

Business hasn't cared about the people it uses for decades, centuries depending on which economic system you consider. All that matters is profit.

Loans have shifted. Percentage rates changed. Almost overnight it was an arbitrage of the work force.

Homes were at risk.

Futures became bleak.

Dependability backfired, with credit evaporating, jobs going overseas, retirement nest eggs collapsing.

Retirement seems a nightmare.

Thanks for the fish, Uncle Sam. Can I have my bucket? How much do I owe you for your renting it out to your service contractors? Oh and how much do I owe you for sleeping on this rotten pier, watching the waves?

My view is different, that's for sure. At least I have my memories, thanks to Douglas Adams and with others like him, still I have a sense of humor and pride. At the end of the decade, will I belong to China?

Same as it ever was, or what "the poor you will always have with you" know

2009-01-05T06:46:00.000-08:00

How we ever ended up in a situation where we depend on the kindness of strangers, I would say is a long story with a short premise: homelessness could happen to anyone.

Attributing blame or ascertaining causes could be as simple as the explanation of the economy.

Managing any form of legislation for the bureaucracies such as the Human Services Department in San Francisco, especially with respect to providing any detailed reports on the budgets (how money gets spent on each individual and how the recipients of such money spend the funds), is about as easy as creating legislation to stop the brothel slavery business that has a booming trade in the same areas where homeless sleep in doorways every night.

We could look at where we were a decade ago or a century ago.

We could look at where the price of gas or other intractable economic problems had us shaking our heads within the last year or we could look at the cost of living a decade ago.

We could look at where debt exists, the demographics of who has it, who's had it, and who have had it and want nothing to do with its convenience or its entitlements.

We know that the few will always maintain their wealth and power, and that the many will grow larger as their voices and strength diminish. Anytime the needs get more expensive and in less supply, the reasonable can attest to the expectant coercion of politics manipulating the social forces. We all need food and shelter and the means to provide such essentials is what empowers the few to control the ways to allow life's blessings on those who must deal with homelessness.

Letting the days go by, until recently

The plutocracy of the rich have their lobbyists to maintain control in Washington or the places of power. The corporations and private charities that invisibly hide those in power have a freedom to keep the laws in this favoring a continuing of the process that daily holds the rest of us away from influencing distributions of food and shelter and essentials. Simply, those who have power keep the power's prosperity and freedom away from everyone else.

They laugh at revolution; it'll likely never manifest. Attrition eventually could rid us all of the problems of poverty and perdition, if we accept the consequences of remaining in the dark, hungry and without resources.

The universe knows how it works; humans still try to change the reality.

For me, it's been this year when circumstances didn't hold together for my ways and means to survive. I could see the predicament developing, since I've had the blessings of abundance and the ability to overcome adversity of scarcity. I've always had work. For me, it's easier to see when I must put up with having less and less while losing more and more; I've always known how to survive. Yet I must also make the distinction that I've never felt entitled to anything more than abundance, as long as I can share.

Up until recently, I've rarely had to count pennies or days or portions.

I could say it's about politics and the war machine and the cuts in taxes.

I could say it's how it's always been: as with the teachings of Christ―"the poor you will always have with you" while providing a spiritual direction of living with the Golden Rule and believing in God in all things, has, as its modern interpretation that of its justifications for poverty rather than its justifications of inequities, or of accepting that "we will not always have Christ"―just like the teachings of any beliefs, for salvation, or salvaging, life's more than about correcting disparities.

I could say I do know differently that we will always strive towards equality. There will always be conflicts over greed or denial or inadequacies. Claiming superiority is justification for a great many immoral acts or even atrocities.

I know it's a deliberate confusion of economics that the trillions in debt and the billions in waste are part of the struggle that we all have understanding the fiscal mess. I look at my annual Social Security statement to see the patterns, most of which have nothing to do with me or my choices. I know when jobs have been fewer or more at risk of sustaining me, just as I've known when it's time to seek more security.

After us

The more obscure of the "Once in a Lifetime" lyrics (Talking Heads/Brian Eno, 1980) of "time isn't holding up, time isn't after us" are, to me, the real point of how we got here, in that we refused to see the flow. We didn't need dams or bridges. We didn't think the tap would ever run dry. We knew we'd always get what we needed somehow.

We knew the rise and fall and we trusted that nothing lasts like trust. Until it's gone.

Somehow we trust that we won't always be poor and suffering if we have a plan and objectives.

So perhaps it's about the powers that be depending on attrition.

Black swans, homeless: worthless and unworthy of respect?

2009-01-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

Shame of society is that we need solutions that work and we tend to hold those in contempt for becoming victims to the problems. Homelessness, for instance, can become a lifestyle, due to the marginalization of people. Political attempts fail to fix such situations on a macro scale without determining how people survive in their basic daily sensibility.

No one wants to find out what it is to be homeless and to live with the contempt for being in such a predicament.

People can be messy. Inconsiderate. Peripheral to norms, or downright crazy. Uncomfortable. Uncooperative. Lazy. Mean. Dumb (as compared to ignorant of circumstances).

If someone's soiled their pants, do you help them or do you just hold your nose and scold them as you walk off, disgusted?

If someone's not getting or staying in line, do you ask politely if they want to be in the queue or do you just get in front of them without caring?

If someone's jabbering away and they have no cellphone, do you engage them in a conversation or do you go elsewhere to avoid them bothering you?

If you know how to help someone even though it's obvious how they could get help, do you advise them or just let them figure their problem out for themselves?

If resources were more manageable, would the homeless problems manifest, especially with those who are chronically in need?

Questions abound with simplifying one of the most prevalent problems facing society. Our economy is in flux with many people wondering how they'll survive. Meanwhile, they have needs.

Coordinating dependencies when changing established routines

Examples abound for fixing broken systems, from free U.S. grants to Nigerian lottery scams. Sometimes it's obvious what gets a homeless person's attention, just as it's obvious what gets a philanthropist's attentions.

San Francisco likes to serve as the shining example for what works.

There, 150 Otis is one of the main shelter resources for men (there are several during the weekdays that sometimes become nothing more than time wasting hangouts); for women, Buster's Place became Women's Place as a resource center for women to locate shelters, while families use other resources like Hamilton and Raphael House. The alternative solution after waiting in these centers for one of the chairs to become available (one of 20-60 or so, depending on the weather and the space) is wandering the streets looking for income (jobs, drug dealing or whatever other scams that appear), finding shelter or leaving town.

Sometimes it seems the political systems for the homeless actually seem to discourage people as if the lifestyle is a choice.

Homelessness is never a choice.

Homelessness can be a lack of choices, a predicament.

Most homeless find the frustration and the resulting depression of the reality a waste of time. Charities sometimes don't have other more viable plans, since they do what they've always done.

There have to be better plans that doesn't cost millions, and so that the costs actually go to solutions rather than unaccountable charity based organization costs (CBOs like churches and other legally funded charities, often see funding substantially getting lost in paychecks and futile treatment).

In the winter, shelters open for a short time in church basements or halls, if they can. These are not dependable realities. The bare bones approach exists during the winter months (mid-December through late January), even in normally temperate San Francisco, where several churches do open to approximately 100 homeless (the overflow of San Francisco's political solutions).

The effort makes a large difference in dependably balancing out needs, since people don't waste their day waiting without knowing where they'll sleep each night. They are not vulnerable to the elements of cold and rain and therefore do not end up clogging the hospitals.

The routines that people face are less troublesome, providing the beds and simple meals without the aggravation of wondering where to find such simple resources. Sleeping requirements are basic mats, blankets and dry, warm rooms. Food can be simple rice, beans and frozen vegetables; with a little creativity, cooks can develop wonderful meals in no time.

There may be simple needs missing such as hot showers and resources for which other centers in the cities provide. The main point of such temporary shelters is that they are not places to establish any expectations. People still need to have dependability. Else their lives do become lifestyles.

What works and what doesn't work as homeless solutions

Anecdotes, pictures and testimonials are the kind of evidence that passionate believers in charity programs tend to find most relevant, because it vividly confirms what they already believed.

Scattered success stories can’t really capture whether a program is working. Out of 100 people in a program, the odds are that some of them will see their lives improve, just by chance―regardless of what programs in which they did or didn’t enroll.

As anyone familiar with medical trials and the "placebo effect" knows, testimonials are a far cry from evidence that a treatment works.

Simple comparisons of program participants and non-participants are other means by which to assess what's working.

Consider homeless as children, just for analogy to the vulnerability people face when suddenly or chronically . There are obvious simplifications that I'm suggesting of course. Chess-in-the-Schools is a program in New York City that introduces optional chess activities to lower-income schools. It has pointed out that students who participate perform much better in math than students who don’t, and organizations have used this fact to boast of the power of chess to shape young minds. Of course, I can think of another reason that kids who like chess do better in school than kids who don’t―odds are, they were more interested in their studies in the first place.

Many charity evaluations use criteria for assessing effectiveness along these basic lines. For example:

A child care program points to superior results for its children, compared to those whose parents chose not to enroll them; the difference could be the child care program, but I’d guess it’s often the parents.
An employment program boasts that its graduates are better able to hold jobs than its dropouts; of course, holding a job an often come down to being the sort of person who sticks with programs instead of dropping out.

Greatnonprofits.org and GiveWell.net, online charity evaluators and funding organizations that put their ranking systems online, are seen as the front-runners to bring transparency to the charity world.

When people give, they like to know if they made a difference.

For instance (even if New York City organizations may have been the examples), all the charities that GiveWell evaluated for their effectiveness in the local and larger communities had criteria that other charitable organizations could follow.

The concept of black swan theory is when such predictability of events and outcomes is suspect, that, often, such solutions come only in hindsight. We avoid the black swans or make them as outcasts unworthy of respect, even worthless.

For instance, the outbreak of the WWI and the terrorist bombings of 9/11 has been a major consideration for how to avoid tragedy. The problem with these, as with several other similar examples, is that these events were largely foreseen by many people, but these people were either ignored or marginalized, often for political reasons. Several historians have argued that there were quite a few diplomats and experts on foreign policy who recognized the likelihood of a calamitous major war caused by the instability of certain areas of Europe and the system of alliances in the early 20th century. These experts were largely ignored and their analyses excluded from history books.

If the same conceptualization for homelessness is that it will never go away, the argument could be that the economic and social behaviors demand such outcomes. Someone inevitably must become the black swan. The unavoidably worthless.

Justice Department statistics show that 93% of child victims are molested by someone they know.

"There's this mythology that you have to know who this scary man is in the neighborhood who might hurt your child, when the reality is sex offenders are often people we know and love," said Jill Levenson, an associate professor at Lynn University in Florida and a researcher on sex offenders.

That the scary stranger is the black swan is an easy speculation, sure to fail. Homeless people do not always want to scam the systems or society. They want an affordable home and a dependable job and expectations for being safe.

Such respectfulness doesn't seem to be too much to ask, yet we avoid getting to such solutions.

Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures

2008-12-25T16:05:00.000-08:00

Holidays seem the only times there's no avoiding considering those less fortunate. A galvanizing force makes the reality of charitableness change: it's not someone else's job, it becomes everyone's responsibility.

Some people on the streets are lucky to be inside of the shelters provided, due to crowding conditions, due to the marginalized there who refuse to behave, and due to an innate sense of alienation.

During any ordinary day there are countless hungry, some who have no place they know to go besides the legacy church soup kitchens and dining rooms (St. Anthony's knows the limits it's managing in San Francisco, barely, as one of the oldest charity institutions; others, like Glide, try to outsmart the street smart and still try to accommodate what they can afford).

Some destitute refuse to fight to get their food and shelter, and end up on the streets, wasting to nothingness.

Choices not realized during holidays

Homeless congregate, sometimes with no other choice, right in the middle of public spaces (parks, squares, shopping centers). Anyone can see them, every day of the year, even on the holidays when people are more generous and giving, and offering them places to go for a special meal, times like Christmas or Hanukkah, when homeless alone are at their lowest in spirits.

If you pay attention among the homeless, you'll see the gamut of society.

When you give something to the homeless (something other than money, which is momentarily forgotten), say, a warm meal or a winter coat or toys as presents for their children, the person's whole spirit changes.

A rare sigh comes from their presence and an even rarer smile graces their faces, usually followed by tears, having forgotten what contentedness or happiness, even momentarily, means.

Loneliness is second nature yet it's diminished by primary needs of food and shelter. So many thought they knew their dependable means of surviving would always last. Now they must fight to live in scarcity.

Charitable flyers and handouts show anyone where to get basics to survive, yet the reality of finding real help is much different; it takes work to figure out how to get what you need, especially when the resources keep diminishing, due to budgets, growing numbers and lack of a real plan.

Government agencies really have no idea what they face with the problems of the expanding bottom part of American society. With depleted reserves, the insularity of the bureaucracy has become its worst enemy. Saying no to the wrong person can be devastating.

Mothers become unable to provide for their children, having them put into foster care.

Once virile and stalwart workers can't do more than offer help, due to liabilities within outreach centers, when there's just no work to provide.

There are tech fringe survivors, Vietnam and Iraqi War veterans, ex-con street-tough black Muslims, immigrant laborers, gay Mormons, fiercely radical libertarians, dispirited yet adamantly loyalist Constitution-supporting right-wing extremists.

From stunned construction workers to childless mothers, from Bible-reading Deadheads to unemployed financial brokers, from sullen teens to nowhere-headed punks, the homeless are all in an even wider spectrum of cultures that never thought they'd face such circumstances.

Deliberately isolating environments are where people go to ask for help, with security guards nearly demanding a strip search because of their wand's detecting something metal (belt buckles, bra clips, and such inarguable dangers as surgically implanted devices).

In this bureaucratic system for general assistance ("GA" or welfare, as it's known), paperwork often has no purpose other than to waste time, space, energy, precious resources and trees. Manipulative waiting causes the lines and directions of lines leading only to delusions. All the paper and the longest lines cannot deter some people, their spirits not letting their confidence in hope to diminish. They trust to return their worlds to stability or dependability.

"You don't have a case worker? We can't help you today," says the woman behind the window to me on Christmas Eve morning. That's when I was told to come to get what I'd expected, in order to have something dependable, a plan, a hope, an agenda other than wasting time. "You'll have to return in January," the woman tells me. So much for expectations of a plan, I thought.

Sometimes the confusion is an administrative bureaucratic imperative to keep order in the growing homeless resource madness. Reticence with routines and deliberately unclear expectations act as deterrents to make those in need avoid such systems, seeming in many ways just like with prisons for society's safeguards.

If you don't explain your expectations, everyone has ways of getting what they need to be rid of you.

Sometimes even holidays have no surprises

We're finally ensuring something's done for requests from the fire battalions and police brigades and church elders and others who provide distribution to homeless or deprived children getting holiday presents. Still it's seldom that the loneliest homeless get even a meal, much less any recognition of presents.

We rush through life forgetting strangers since we hardly have time for ourselves and our families. Bills and mortgages and other exigencies still demand their due. Time catches up with us, passes us often, overwhelms and overtakes us in the race that we unknowingly impose upon our lives. Sometimes even families become strangers to themselves.

Kept photographs don't focus away the moments that we miss, little moments seeming suddenly so far away, friends and family now strangers who had their subtle yet significant impact on us drifting away, tasks that seemed insurmountable fulfilling most expectations before dependencies did away with so many of our lifelong dreams.

Holidays remind us what we have.

Sometimes what it takes to remind us of what we can look forward to having in that ever hopeful future, and the many more anniversaries, inevitably, are forces or choices happening to empower our actual identity's sense of its confluence of fates. Sometimes we lose our sense of self, where we can get help being meaningless, those to whom who we could turn being just as needy, and the bigger picture of society becoming an illusion of community.

We get tired of wasting time or energy. We realize what we can tolerate and what we abhor.

Love always has its loss to face.

Sometimes we're not able, ready or willing to let go of our attachments. So we try to replace such lacking with charity and holiday gifts.

When we don't even have those enticements, we look for what we do deserve. For homeless, we look for what we can get.