Homelessness and shoplifting. Ask Joey, Part II

Joey Garcia

My favorite columnist, relationships-genius Joey Garcia who writes "Ask Joey" for the Sacramento News & Review, has posted a follow-up Q&A on the matter of a homeless person shoplifting, in the latest edition of the tabloid-size weekly.

In her Dec. 2 column, Joey offered advice to a person who witnessed a homeless woman shoplifting in a grocery store.  Joey's advice was spot-on right, I thought and think:  be compassionate toward the homeless woman, but also alert the store owner or manager that a theft had been attempted.  [I wrote about that earlier column a month ago.]

In Joey's column in the current, Dec. 30, edition  of the SN&R, a homeless person writes in, saying that "[i]f someone is shoplifting in front of you, it's none of your business."  This argument is justified, politically, thus: "[I]f the store is part of a corporation that rakes in money from tax breaks, who cares? They're ripping us all off."

Joey's response is this:

I care. Plus, I believe that if something happens in public, it’s my business. So if you were at a mom-and-pop shop and I observed a pickpocket stealing from you or a cashier providing incorrect change, I would speak up. It’s just my nature to treat you as a friend.

But I can’t support your eye-for-an-eye argument to justify stealing from corporations. As Gandhi pointed out, that kind of revenge makes us all blind.

Yes, yes, brilliant, Joey!!  Right on.

And yet, while I, too, cannot buy into the homeless writer's politics, I would not quite expect a homeless person to act as responsibly as others when seeing another homeless person ripping off a store.  My sentiment is not brought up in the Q&A but it is a part of the surreal problem of being homeless in Sacramento.

If a homeless person informs on another homeless person it can possibly result in an act of retaliation.  For many of us, our belongings are often open to theft and, as a result, we must be particularly careful not to antagonize our sisters and brethren in the community.

Unhappily, the homeless community, being the undercaste, has a high concentration of antisocial people and narcissists and persons for a variety of reasons who are prone toward being violent.  While by the sound of this description it may seem I am talking about highly unsavory folk, for the most part they are not unsavory.  Most homeless people, including those that are personality disordered, are charming and interesting and a great many are very bright.  Still, a homeless person has to be careful who he crosses.

The homeless-help organizations in Sacramento aren't much help at lifting the homeless community to a higher standard of association.  This has been a great disappointment to me and was something I wrote about early on when I was first rended homeless, in a piece called "Phobos and Thanatos."

Here, several core paragraphs from that long-ago blogpost, for what it's worth [with emphases added]:

"…Thanatos is Agape in flight from the higher instead of expressing the higher. It preserves the lower but refuses to negate it (and thus remains stuck in it). And as Phobos is the source of repression and dissociation, Thanatos is the source of regression and reduction, fixation and arrest. It attempts to save the lower by killing the higher."

At Loaves and Fishes there are side programs that are meant to address people's misery and unmet needs, but the facility, in the main, is a reservation where homeless culture, with its queues, dirtiness, childishness and craziness is preserved. The administration of L&F takes on a parential role where they address their wards as children they choose to protect.

L&F's Friendship Park was surely conceived as an oasis for the homeless where they might comfortably rest and socialize and 'just be' without being harrassed by police or snorted at by society. But in its operation today, the Park is more like a neglected zoo where the homeless denizens wallow in a pit of meaninglessness, their time isn't valued and there is no real expectation for them to act responsibly.

The Loaves & Fishes Grinch that stole Christmas

Loaves & Fishes — the soup kitchen with a $1.7 million warehouse to store stale pastries — didn’t give out $5 McDonald’s giftcards on Christmas to those who came for its Christmas meal.

At its website, you can see that the McDonald’s card tops the list of those things Loaves & Fishes asked to be donated¹ as “Christmas Stocking Giveaways.” The first line of text reads: “Each year, as part of our holiday meal, Loaves & Fishes offers each of our guests a Christmas stocking.”

Now, what people are wondering is What happened to the giftcards that Loaves & Fishes begged to have donated, but weren't in the stockings and are now — poof! — gone?

Did Loaves & Fishes misdirect its donors and take the valued items to use for another purpose? [Yeah, like, what else is new in LibbyLand.] Did the cards go to employees?

I have been given the information that hundreds of cards were received or paid for at Loaves & Fishes' administrative office. What was done with the cards, which had a specific designated use, is a mystery, and another brier in the hide of often-frustrated users of Loaves & Fishes’ services.

It is known that homeless people are often enticed to "volunteer" to do tasks at the Loaves & Fishes facility and are "tipped" [that is, paid] with McDonald's cards. Such tasks include offloading trucks that arrive with donations to be placed in the warehouse.

A best guess is that Loaves & Fishes' top administrator took all the cards as future "tips" for the warehouse manager and other employees to use to, you know, grease operations.  What donors are led to believe be damned.
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¹ In case the page of the link is disappeared, like the McDonald's cards, I've posted a copy-paste job of the webpage here.

The Warehouse: Emblematic of Loaves & Fishes' follies

Loaves & Fishes' new warehouse, pictured last month while in the middle of being constructed.

A new warehouse is under construction at the Loaves & Fishes Mall of services 'for the homeless and otherwise poor' that costs an astonishing $1.7 million.

The new warehouse will replace rented warehouse services across the street from the Loaves & Fishes Administration building, that was costing the homeless-services nonprofit $5,000/mo. That rented space also included space for Loaves & Fishes’ library; and Genesis, a homeless counseling service staffed by a pair of social workers.

The library will move to space at the Delany Center, a building L&F owns at 12th & Ahern, and Genesis will be moved into new space in or adjacent to the new warehouse.

An apothegm this year by L&F's Safe Ground has been "House Keys Not Handcuffs." 

While the new warehouse will be spiffy, with amenities not available in the rented space, it is hard to see how the new arrangement makes economic sense for the charity, nor how the loss of rental income would be beneficial to Moe Mohanna, the landlord of the old warehouse. $1.7 million would pay for the rent of the old warehouse and space for Genesis and the library for over 28 years — which is multiple times longer than the ten-year time-frame when homeless people are supposedly going to disappear as the undercaste, trading in their raggedy clothes, tent and sleeping bags for “house keys.”

Surely the enmity that L&F CEO Libby Fernandez and Moe Mohanna have for one another¹ should have been overcome by seeking arbitration on the rent charges such that the best, most-equitable arrangement could have been found, benefiting both the charity and Mohanna and, all-importantly, homeless people [Remember them?].  It also would have shown proper respect to donors to Loaves & Fishes who deny themselves when giving money intended to help the poor, in acts that are compassionate or meet Scriptural demands.

Graphic from Charity Navi­gator website shows degree to which Loaves & Fishes fails to spend dona­tions and interest reve­nue on home­less services.  Green bar repre­sents "primary revenue" while blue bar repre­sents "program expenses" for each calen­dar year.

By constructing a new building, Loaves & Fishes adds to its empire — even as claims are made that it is contributing toward putting itself out of business with implementation of policies that take a new tact at restoring homeless people’s lives. [See the Sacramento Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness 2007-2017.]

Loaves & Fishes is a very curious organization: While the economy was in the tank, it raised money from suffering Sacramento citizens, while bulking up on its asset base and denying services to homeless and otherwise impoverished Sacramentans. [See bar graph.]

But, this happens.  Like any self-involved bureaucracy [and L&F is perhaps the ultimate self-involved bureaucracy], the "mission" of 'growth and defending itself' fully supplants any wholesome justification for existence. And Loaves & Fishes long long ago forgot its original mission — to help the homeless — which it trots out only when it's in donations-grab mode.

A recent article in Fast Company magazine, "Why Charities Should Have an Expiration Date" makes the case that for-profit companies come and go — they don't live forever … like vampires.  Whereas not-for-profit organizations just attach themselves to a new mission when what they are doing turns sour, for one reason or other.  Nonprofits, thus, are created on the "vampire principle": suck blood for the purpose of sucking yet more blood out of people so that it can go on to suck more blood and continue to exist to suck more blood.

It's a bloody business.

The article concludes thus [emphases, mine]:

The broader principle here is that companies and organizations don't exist simply to exist. A not-for-profit should ideally be not-for-perpetuity. [They] should not be donor-funded jobs programs. People give not because they believe in [charities as places with] employable human beings but because they believe in what nonprofits do. Once [the nonprofit's mission is accomplished, its employees] should wear a termination notice as a badge of honor.

In other words, it's time we all invested in wooden stakes.

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¹ When Mohanna created a woman's shelter in space adjacent to, and in the same building, where warehouse, library and Genesis space was being rented to Loaves & Fishes, this was done without consultation with Libby Fernandez. When the shelter was 'revealed' to some in the press, Fernandez was fully left out. That shelter is not now being utilized, to my knowledge. Loaves & Fishes, which has a stated mission to shelter people [the subheading at its webspace is "feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless"] has failed to add any shelter space during the economic downturn. Instead, while it 'bulks up' its assets in the form of property, Libby Fernandez pumps her fists in the air demanding money from others for sheltering purposes. O, the hypocrisy!

Decriminalizing Poverty

This comes from an opinion piece titled "Decriminalizing Poverty," written by Bruce Western, in the Dec. 27, 2010, issue of The Nation [emphases mine]:

In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity, particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has become our surrogate social policy. For all the billions spent on draconian criminalization, addiction remains a scourge of the disadvantaged in inner cities and small towns, drugs are still plentiful and the drug trade remains a ready but risky source of casual employment for low-education men and women with no legitimate prospects. Though drugs are at the center of an array of serious social problems in low-income communities, things are made worse by a dysfunctional policy in which arrest, imprisonment and a criminal record have become a normal part of life.

The most important lesson policy-makers can take from this historic failure of social engineering is that the drug problem depends only a little on the narcotics themselves, and overwhelmingly on the social and economic context in which they are traded and taken.
…
The drug war made an enemy of the poor. A successful ceasefire must do more than lift the burden of criminal punishment. It must begin to restore order and predictability to economic and family life, reducing vulnerability not just to drugs but to the myriad insecurities that characterize American poverty.

Drug dealing and addiction is perhaps the center of a majority of what makes homelessness rampant in Sacramento and plays the starring role in what brings misery to people's lives in Homeless World.  Doing something other that what society is now doing to combat addiction is necessary.  We've created a significant subculture that creates lives that are meaningless, cruel, narcissistic and asocial.

And worse still, the dominoes fall from one generation to the next.  The costs of continuing what we are doing are enormous, both economically and in lives made painful and purposeless.

Last night's lunar eclipse

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse from William Castleman on Vimeo.

In case you didn't stay up for it, here's last night's lunar eclipse (speeded up to save you about four hours), filmed by a fellow in Florida.

Fat is not the problem; Loaves & Fishes is

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

The above is a much-quoted quote, today, from an article titled "A reversal on carbs," by Marni Jameson in the Tribune-owned newspapers.

The story tells us "a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension."

The article quotes Dr. Stephen Phinney, "a nutritional biochemist and an emeritus professor of UC Davis who has studied carbohydrates for 30 years", saying that, over time, our bodies get tired of processing high loads of carbs, which evolution didn't prepare us for. This results in insulin resistance.

"The first sign of insulin resistance is a condition called metabolic syndrome — a red flag that diabetes, and possibly heart disease, is just around the corner."

The new Loaves & Fishes $1.7million warehouse, pictured about a month ago as it nears completion.

Of course, I bring this to the attention of y'all who read this homelessness blog because homeless people subsist almost exclusively on "potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks."

It is time for Loaves & Fishes to stop poisoning homeless people. And for other nonprofit organizations that feed people solely from what food is donated to do better. But, certainly, Loaves & Fishes is the most loathsome organization in this realm, by far. They are completing construction on a new, $1.7 million warehouse to help, effectively, poison homeless people with the "potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks" that is their feed-all, end-all. They not only knowingly feed people crap, they add buckets of salt and serve their food in grotesquely overabundant heavy-weighted tray-loaded quantities.  And all the while they add to their empire while snookering donors.

The adminis-traitors and slumbering Bored of Directors of L&F should be chained to a chair and forcefed what they push into others' mouths.

Life in the Valley of Angst

When things start to get so good that even Sacramento begins to emerge from the world’s economic doldrums, the nature of work available to Sac’to seekers (both homeless and housed) — like those in the U.S., generally — is going to be fundamentally changed.

Businesses have been hit on the head with the baseball bat of a realization that the future is not secure and they are going to configure their workforces accordingly. Workers, like the businesses they work for, are going to have to permanently adapt to an ever-nervous work climate.

What does this mean? General instability in the workforce. More temporary employment. No unions. Fewer benefits, and a rattier rat race. People’s resumes will have far fewer records of decades-long associations with one company, and far more entries of one-, two- and three-yearweek stints and being constantly on the move.

More businesses will emerge from nowhere, and more will be boarded up.

Stress. Dynamism. Mobility.

Great Recession or no Great Recession, this shake up that will have everybody being constantly shaken up was coming, anyway. Future Shock is Now.

Future Shock was a book in 1970, written by Alvin Toffler, that’s time has fully arrived. Quoting wikipedia,

Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also popularized the term "information overload."

The predicted implications from all this? More fear and depression and more substances out there to medicate and self-medicate against all the turmoil.

All those things and those people which we used to have and know in our lives will seem rented and just visiting. We will be constantly up-in-the-air, except during those times when we’re splattered on the concrete.

As homeless people, we have a jump-start on the future. The mayor and homeless-services industry in our “burg at the convergence of two rivers” have it wrong: The homeless in the future won’t get housed and become, again, “normal.” The housed and established will, instead, become more like us: shell-shocked and subjected to the unflagging cruel winds.

As forerunners of the Great Untethered Mass that everyone will soon be a part of, we homeless can be guides and mentors.

So, here, you working people, trembling in your little homes. A Freebie. Words of guidance to help you when first out on your walk in the Valley of Angst.

The world is horrible and corrupt, much more so than the news media ever let you know, and only now for you in dire circumstances does it really matter. And it matters a damn lot.

Much else that you thought was good never was. Your comforter, now, through all this is only the knowledge that your eyes are open and you can see. It’s a faux spiritual awakening.

Life is fragile, but only those in the Valley of Angst know this.

Little things are wonderful and all the more so when you don’t have them. But when you don’t have them and know they're wonderful, you feel an intense sense of deprevation.

And, finally, for those of you trembling in your little houses in the Wonderland Development Complex: “Swallow, this.”

Jesus is a Liberal Democrat

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jesus Is a Liberal Democrat
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> March to Keep Fear Alive

Thanks to Dean Brian Baker's blog for this gem from the 12/16/10 Colbert Report. Yep, the hypocrisy, inanity and pure crap coming from the conservatives is unbearable.

The conservatives have never been more toxic. I wish America would 'wake up.'

I confess that I winced when in the viddy baby Jesus, in the mythical birth story, was turned into a ham. Hilarious, but in a way that conservatives and fundamentalists are unlikely to appreciate - to say the least.

By the way, note how Colbert's Jesus has gotten a hair-color job, as compared to the Jesus icon I am using in my "Weather and Whatnot" sidebar as an indicator of Jesus's birthday. It's either that, or I have the traditional [from the 50s] Scandinavian Jesus, as opposed to the Jewish, Middle Eastern Jesus of history.

Here is text of the ending of the viddy [Remember that comedian Stephen Colber 'plays' a conservative TV-show host in his show in order to satarize conservative punditry]:

It hurts me to say this, folks, but if Jesus really is a liberal, it's time to get the Christ out of Christmas [the face of Christ in a graphic behind Colbert changes to that of Frosty the Snowman].

Now, listen, listen, listen, you know me, you know me, I'm no fan of the term Xmas, or X-anything. I make my kids play Christ-box 360. And if they break a bone, they get Christ-rays. But it is time to take baby Jesus out of the manger. Replace him with something that is easier to swallow. How about a honey-baked ham? [Baby Jesus in a graphic changes to that of a baked ham in the manger.]

Because if this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor either we've got to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

Connectedness and Health

When you are homeless [at the bottom of society; the least and the last and made to know that you are], there is little to hang onto. What there should be, and usually is, is support from others in the same circumstance. Basically, what you should have are friends, to keep your spirits up and help guide your way.

Certainly, when I was laid low, kicked in the teeth, massively robbed and met with homelessness, the friendships I have made with 'the guys' have been all-saving. I am grateful, humbled, unworthy, and all that.  Most of 'the guys' (and gals, thought they are here in much-diminished number) are tremendous good good people.

God knows, what the government [Fed, state, county & city] provides has been a run-around nightmare most of the time, (bless their rocky, bureaucratic hearts). The homeless-services nonprofits can be giving or stinting or psychotic. The citizenry in Sacramento can be amazing, [Sacramentans, truly, are Saints!] except when, some of them, write hateful comments to newspaper articles about homeless people, using well-worn stereotypes from the 50s [i.e., "those lazy drunken bums!"].

Yesterday, an item in this month's Berkeley Wellness Letter got my attention [emphases, mine].

Unless you’re a misanthrope, you know the value of friends, family, and other social relations. Not only do they add immensely to your quality of life, research has shown that they also tend to add years to your life. This was clearly seen in a recent review, which looked at 148 studies involving more than 300,000 people. It linked stronger social relationships with a 50% increased chance of survival, on average, over the course of the studies. And the effect was consistent across a number of factors, such as age, sex, and health status.

Most health organizations don't recognize lack of social relations as a risk factor for mortality.  For one thing, the term is seen as fuzzy — there are many different kinds of relationships and social networks, and they aren't always good.  Moreover, it's not clear how social relations affect health.  One theory is that social support "buffers" against stress — that is, provides emotional and tangible resources to help us deal with adverse events and illness, according to the Brigham Young researchers.  Family and friends may also encourage us, directly or indirectly, to take better care of ourselves.  And being part of a social network often gives us meaningful roles that boost self-esteem and purpose of life which in turn can improve health.  "We take relationships for granted — we're like fish that don't notice the water," said Timothy Smith, one of the researchers.

Hooray, that in mild Sacramento, the homeless community has a lot of friendliness going on.  In that respect, the Sacramento metropolis' homeless community is top-of-the-heap, whipping the socks off any other US metropolis!  You rule, Sacramento homeless community!  Huzzah!  Take THAT L.A.!  Take THAT, San Antonio!

BUT, most of the guys, out here, view masculinity in rather terrible, old-fashioned — and, yeah, prison-based — ways: You gotta get your respect; if you get dissed, respond with your fists!

And, indeed, there are fights that happen, and, much more often, fights that almost happen. So, "friendship" sounds all weak-kneed and girlie! And so it does to me, also, (thought absolutely nobody fears my fists, nor should they).

But I do think that the social interplay that there is is saving for us all, in whatever way each of us tease and listen and communicate with others "out here."

But you cannot help noticing that many guys get ostracized because their behavior is unusual.  In this way, the homeless community is like a junior-high school.

Some guys are outliers.  Because of mental illness.  Because they are very evidently gay.  Because they respond in odd ways, when they are addressed.  Because their emotions are inappropriate.  Often you don't know what it is; some guys just can't seem to fit in.  And others, very normal-seeming fellows, just seem to have chosen to always be by themselves.

It should concern us — what happens to these outliers: What their experience of the homeless life is and what affect that has.  We should all broaden our scope of compassion, being friendly to everyone for the benefit of THEM and US.

Housing Support for Veterans

[This is important relayed information, received today. Homeless Veterans should certainly look into benefiting from a housing-support program the government provides. While the 'early' dates on the schedule, below, have past, there is still time for veterans to get to an application-preparation meeting.]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs Supported Housing (HUD-VASH) Program, through a cooperative partnership, provides long-term case management, supportive services and permanent housing support. VASH recipients receive a permanent rental subsidy through “Housing Choice” section 8 vouchers in conjunction with long term supportive services to foster stability and recovery from physical and mental health issues, substance use, and functional concerns contributing to or resulting from homelessness. To be eligible for this program, Veterans must be VA Health Care eligible, homeless and income-eligible. Requires participation in long-term case management services.

HUD-VASH Sacramento
Applications are being accepted at the locations and dates listed below:

• Mon. Dec 6th, 8:30am - 2:30pm Loaves and Fishes/Friendship Park
  1321 North C Street, Sacramento
• Tues. Dec 7th, 8:30am - 2:30pm Loaves and Fishes/Friendship Park
• Wed. Dec 8th, 9:30am – 3:00pm County Veteran Service Office
  2007 19th Street, Sacramento
• Fri. Dec 10th 9:00 am - 11:00am VA-Mather Directors Conference Room
  10535 Hospital Way, Mather
• Mon. Dec 13th, 8:30am-2:30pm Loaves and Fishes/Friendship Park
• Tues. Dec 14th, 8:30am-2:30pm Loaves and Fishes/Friendship Park
  1321 North C Street, Sacramento
• Wed. Dec 15th, 9:00am - 4:00pm Sac Veteran Resource Center
  7270 E. Southgate Dr., Sacramento
• Thurs. Dec 16th, 9:00am—12:00noon Citrus Heights Vet Center [5650 Sunrise Blvd., Suite 150; Citrus Heights, CA 95610; Phone: 916-535-0420; Fax: 919-535-0419 ]
• Fri. Dec 17th, 10:00am—12:00noon Mather Auditorium

Homeless World Sacramento needs The Wolf

This is a reprint of a post from a year and a half ago, with some minor changes. The issue of aggressive efforts to fix stalled lives has been coming up a lot lately, in the haunts I frequent, in HWS.

Yep. We people stuck in the Big Muddy Muddy of Homeless World Sacramento need the Wolf. That is, we need someone like Pulp Fiction's Winston Wolfe who is a Fixer of any – and I do mean any – problem.

You might recall the character The Wolf in Pulp Fiction, played by Harvey Keitel, who was called in to fix the fix that Jules and Vincent found themselves in. Seems the movie's principle characters had a bloody corpse in the backseat of their Dodge.

The Wolf had been called to the scene by Marsellus Wallace, boss of our sociopathic protagonist heros, to clean up the incriminating mess, which he did lickitysplit – and in impressive fashion, otherwise.

We need someone like The Wolf in Homeless World Sac. Not to clean up incriminating messes, but to straighten up to make fly right fallen lives.

Damn it, the most frustrating thing about the world I'm in has to do with all the impressive men who have so much to offer the world and no means out of their mudhole to offer it.

What's rather weird – and unknown to the world outside the world of the outside – is that homelessness is a wonderful training exercise in humility (though many would attest it hasn't taken with me). And since so many people in Housed World Sacramento are such vainglorious pistols, a bit of humble splendor would be exactly the right pat of butter for their bread.

Whether you live hidden away out in back of the outback, or trundle you body back and forth between Sanctuary* and Loaves**, there's no egress from Miseryville. Now, that's not to say there's ABSOLUTELY NO egress from Miseryville, but effectively that's the case for beat-up folks who don't know their virtues and are unaware of their shadow aspects.

Shadow aspects? Yep. "Everyone carries a shadow," Carl Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

Quoting wikidpedia,

According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to project: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object – if it has one – or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power." These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world. Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness – or perhaps because of this – the shadow is the seat of creativity."

So, am I envisioning a psychologist for this Fixer position? Hmm, well, maybe. But it needs to be an all-purpose fixer who knows a great deal and has terrific instincts. Someone who can quickly get people jobs and housing and get their lives unstalled.

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* Sanctuary: This winter's Overflow, Winter Sanctuary.  It's the best of what the county is doing to try to meet the over-abundance of need in the way of shelter for homeless folk this cold season.  It provides a floor at an area church for just 100 homeless people to sleep on in their own blankets/sleeping bags, or ones WS provides.  Our county's supervisors meet first the needs of the best connected, rather than the more-dire needs of the poorest of the poor.  That is damnable at a time when the economy is collapsed.

**Loaves: the daytime facility known formally as Loaves ampersand Fishes, or totally informally as Libby's Playground.

Playing with logos, as SacHo is set to gain readers

This blog may be on the road to a jump up in readers, which would be nice.

In an effort to accomplish this I have painstakingly, and untalentedly, created a logo and a mini-icon which may be useful.

This is not much of a post.  Things'll be back to "situation normal" - to the extent that the homeless situation can be "normal" - tomorrow.

The fall into the unreality of selfishness and pride

In Thomas Merton's 1961 book The New Man, the Trappist monk delves into the reasons and meaning of Adam’s fall from grace. For Merton, Adam’s (and Eve’s) fall is, in the final analysis, his allowing “unreality” to become a part of his worldview. Adam, you see, wanted to know “evil” or “bad.” He wanted to experience what wasn’t: A lie.

Merton tells us,

Even the natural and healthy self-love by which Adam’s nature rejoiced in its own full realization could gain nothing by adding unreality to the real. On the contrary, he could only become less himself by being other than what he already was.

All this can be summed up in the one word: pride. For pride is a stubborn insistence on being what we are not and never were intended to be. Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality, an exorbitant demand that others believe the lie we have made ourselves believe about ourselves. It infects at once man’s person and the whole society he lives in. It has infected all men in the original pride of Adam. It has, as a secondary effect, what theologians call concupiscence: the convergence of all passion and all sense upon the self. Pride and selfishness then react upon one another in a vicious circle, each one greatly enlarging the other’s capacity to destroy our life. In a sense, pride is simply a form of supreme and absolute subjectivity. It sees all things from the viewpoint of a limited, individual self that is constituted as the center of the universe. Now everybody knows that, subjectively, we see and feel as if we were at the center of things, since that is the way we are made. Pride elevates this subjective feeling into metaphysical absolute. The self must be treated as if, not merely in feeling but in actual fact, the whole universe revolved around it. Concupiscence is then enlisted in the service of pride, to prove this one obsessive metaphysical truth. If I am the centre of the universe, then everything belongs to me. I can claim, as my due, all the good things of the earth. I can rob and cheat and bully other people. I can help myself to anything I like, and no one can resist me. Yet at the same time all must respect and love me as a benefactor, a sage, a leader, a king. They must let me bully them and take away all they have and on top of it all they must bow down, kiss my feet and treat me as god.

Humility, therefore, is absolutely necessary if man is to avoid acting like a baby all his life. To grow up means, in fact, to become humble, to throw away the illusion that I am the center of everything and that other people only exist to provide me with comfort and pleasure. Unfortunately, pride is so deeply embedded in human society that instead of educating one another for humility and maturity, we bring each other up in selfishness and pride. The attitudes that ought to make us “mature” too often only give us a kind of poise, a kind of veneer, that make our pride all the more suave and effective. For social life, in the end, is too often simply a convenient compromise by which your pride and mine are able to get along together without too much friction.

That is why it is a dangerous illusion to trust in society to make us “balanced,” “realistic” and “humble.” Very often the humility demanded of us by our society is simply an acquiescence in the pride of the collectivity and of those in power. Worse still, while we learn to be humble and virtuous as individuals, we allow ourselves to commit the worst crimes in the name of “society.” We are gentle in our private life in order to be murderers as a collective group. For murder, committed by an individual is a great crime. But when it becomes war or revolution, it is represented as the summit of heroism and virtue.

Spate of deaths in Homeless World Sacramento has people shaken

Last night at Union Gospel Mission, home­less people assemb­ling for the night’s sermon were met by police officers and detectives distributing fliers, titled “SPD Crime Alert,” relating to the homicide of Lloyd Hancock, a mission regular, also known as “Redhead Steve.”

The flier informed us that Hancock was kill­ed "during the morning hours" of Sunday, Dec 5. His body was found "under the 160 bridge near North­gate Blvd." [Blue marker in map.] At the SPD website, a "news release" informs us that Hancock’s body was found inside his sleeping bag, and had sustained trauma to the head.

The Sacramento Police Department Homicide Division seeks any information that might be helpful to its investigation.

Probably fully unrelated, but also deceased, is a man, possibly named Ray Murdoch, who died of a heroin overdose at the Safe Ground campsite in recent days. His body was found inside a tent that had needles all about. It is believed that others using the opiate may have scattered once it became apparent that Murdoch was having a bad experience.

Chatter at the mission was that use of drugs at the Safe Ground campsite has been considerable in recent weeks. Update: I find no verification of this death online or at the 9-1-1 blog. Since I think the nature of the death would result in police interest, I now believe the activity and death described here to be unlikely to have happened and am striking it. Apolgies. I will make further inquiries and possibly need to do some eating of crow.

A third man is believed to have died from exposure to the cold of last week. He died in a remote area where he is believed to have been sleeping alone. His body was found, bundled in his sleeping bag, days after his death. [Update: The Sac Bee's 9-1-1 blog verifies this death. Per information that I didn't give, this third man's body was found in the vicinity of Hancock's. Police do not believe Hancock's and this man's death to be related.] [Further Update:  Per a source, ultimately leading back to Elizabeth Fernandez, this man -- whose name I still do not know -- is said to have died of an overdose.  Whether cold weather was an additional factor in the man's death, I now do not know.]

Railyard development will bring vibrant Sacramento communities close to the Mission



  The Railyards development will connect three streets to N. B Street, west of 7th St. [see top of map]. The streets that will connect to No. B St. are, in order, from left to right: 5th, Judah, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th Sts. [Note that 11th St.is misidentified on the map as 16th St.]

Those of us who stay at the Union Gospel Mission can just look out from the grass in front of the mission to see “encroaching development” moving in to the seemingly-rural setting where the mission is.

A road — an extention of Sequoia Pacific Blvd. — leading north to Richards Boulevard from where the mission is is in final stages of construction. And along that short road the new modular Greyhound Bus station for the metropolis of Sacramento is about to begin to be put up.

Meantime, the Railyard development will bring encroaching urbanity in from the south.

It opens several questions, beginning with the broad interrogate What's to become of the mission?

If it stays at its current location [the red-A marker in the map, at right] mightn't it lose its focus of aiding the homeless and bringing them The Word?  The mission is soon to be just a hundred steps away from the new Greyhound station, such that many lower-middle-class men may endeavor to use the mission as a highly-convenient free-and-basic hotel, with a complimentary evening meal.  When they do that, they displace legitimately homeless men, in desperate need of services.

There is already a troubling situation in Homeless World Sacramento where many men are faux-homeless to 'enable' their substance addictions, their drinking or gambling.  They get disability checks, or retirement checks they use for fun while getting shelter and food from homeless-services charities.

At least in the case of the real and faux homeless of the current time that use the mission's services, souls are readily available for the mission to save.  Any influx of hotel-substituting homeless, coming in from Greyhound, will stay at the mission wholly because they're cheapskates.  [Homeless addicts are 'cheapskates,' too, in the sense that they are unwilling to spend their scratch for anything other that what's fun for them, but they, at least, come to the mission with a huge problem — their addiction! — that makes them readily availed to the Christian message of salvation, and prime candidates for the mission's Rehab Program.]

The encroaching Railyard development, with its traffic and upscale development, and that which will be forthcoming in the River District, more generally, will make the Union Gospel Mission 'out of place,' just as it was in 19801965* when it moved to where it is from Old Sac, which was then being developed as* at the beginning of its transformation into a tourist attraction.

It raises the further question If the mission were to move, where might it go?

--
* [update on 12/11/10, The mission moved in 1965, not 1980 as I wrote, incorrectly, when this was first posted.] [source the "History of Union Gospel Mission" page at the UGM website.]

The daunting downward spiral of unemployment

The set of graphs, above, are startling.  Being unemployed is daunting and damning, and is ever more-so disheartening the longer you are daunted and damned!

The spiraling downward road to homelessness grows wider and slippier, and homelessness, itself, more achingly difficult to escape.

[Graphic of graphs was kiped from yesterday's New York Times article "Unemployed, and Likely to Stay That Way."]

Homeless advice in recent "Ask Joey" columns

The first thing I read in the Sacramento News & Review each week is Ask Joey, a relationships and commonsense column, written by Joey Garcia.

Joey is about seven levels of maturity and brilliance and compassion above those relationship newspaper columnists I grew up reading: the twins, Ann Landers and Abby of "Dear Abby." Often, I am blown away by Joey’s insight into the human psyche.

Last Week, Joey responded to a parenting question that dovetailed, sorta, to an issue I have with a great many poor mothers I see on the street. This week, she responded to a situation regarding a homeless person shoplifting.

Joey Garcia

I had complained about parenting skills in Homeless World, writing in the post "A long line and loot," on Nov. 20, "It was sad to see some of the woman with children that I saw this morning and see most days. Many of those kids are brutalized; they need more-loving mothers and the attention of their fathers."

This quote by Joey Garcia, from her 11/25/10 column of "Ask Joey" in the Sacramento News & Review snags the pith of how parents should be.  Listen up, you homeless parents:

Good parenting always places the best interest of the child above a parent’s own perceived needs and desires. Parenting is an opportunity for adults to learn how to be selfless, a key skill of maturity.

In THIS week's issue [for 12/2/10], Joey responds to this concern from a reader:

What do you do when you see a homeless person stealing? I was in a Grocery Outlet store, and this woman came in who, obviously from her smell and appearance, lived on the streets. She shoplifted a few items righ in front of me, and I was so startled I didn't say anything. She left immediately and, as I was thinking about it, I started justifying her action because of the crazy social-service system we have. What do you think?

Joey's response:

If it happens again, it's unlikely that you will be as surprised.  So try this: Admit to the person, if it feels safe to do so, that you observed the act of stealing.   Offer to buy the item as a gift if she (or he) puts it back on the shelf.  Then after the person exits, alert the store manager.  After all, if you owned or managed the store, wouldn't you want to know?

Funny thing that is not at all funny is that I have myself recently been flustered by being told by a homeless person of his theft.

A homeless guy, whom I'll call Charlie, who was "the life of the party" at the mission when I knew him about a year ago, recently returned. Apparently, for his interests, Sacramento and the mission have changed for the worse. As compared to a year ago, he is prevented from doing the things he likes to and in engaging in his slightly-illegal business — so he's leaving in a matter of days for Colorado.

Yesterday, he told me, with some giggling pride, that he stole some person's backpack at the train station and now has a cellphone.

I wish I had at least loudly voiced disapproval, but I've gotten acclimated to the wanton ways of homelessness, including my own wry acceptance of rascality by grown men.

Someone with us asked what else was in the backpack and Charlie said, in an offhanded way, but with a smile, "Just some college papers and clothes."

There's not an inkling of thought about the person who owned the stolen backpack, and how losing one's stuff is painful and disruptive.

I think that Joey's response to the woman who witnessed a homeless person shoplifting was perfect: Compassionate, yet intolerant of theft.

Tonight at the mission I'm going to let Charlie know I think it was wrong for him to have taken the backpack. Concerns for my own well-being in the homeless realm prevent me from doing more.  I'll just slink off to the corner and lick wounds that I don't have.