SN&R publishes remarkable first-person story of life in Homeless World Sacramento

Buckner as pictured online at SN&R's webspace.

There is an amazing first-person essay in this week’s Sac’to News & Review that ‘hits on’ central crimes of Loaves & Fishes and its disgraceful leader. The crimes are those of “Warehousing the Rabble” and “Collective Punishment.” The essay, titled “Sacramento's coldest season” [online; in hardcopy it's titled, simply, "the coldest season"], by Christopher Lee Buckner, relates suffering he endured at Loaves & Fishes and at Sac Steps Forward’s Winter Sanctuary during this winter when he was homeless. Happily for Christopher, he is now back in an apartment and back in college – otherwise, for the outrage of saying something negative about the horrors of the Libby Fernandez administration at Loaves, he would be subject to denial of survival services. Some Overlords in Homeless World don’t tolerate essential American freedoms.

For the record, I have never met the writer, and I don’t know that he has ever heard of me. It doesn’t take social networking for knowledge to spread that Loaves & Fishes is a bumbling nightmare that undermines the efforts of homeless people to aright their lives. Homeless people, individually in large number, experience the dunderheadedness of how many so-called homeless services operate, and then the homeless people suffer the deprevations visited upon them by the massive waves of ineptitude.

Writes Buckner early on in his essay,

I spent the winter of 2010[-2011] at Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park, as one of the many misfortunate outcasts forced to call the streets my home due to unforeseen circumstances. I became a stranger in a strange land, forced to live among the forgotten and forsaken through one of the coldest and wettest seasons of my life. The park was meant to be a safe place that offered protection away from the elements. Truthfully, it was a cage, meant to keep those that no one wanted to see away from the civilized world.

Yep. “Warehousing the Rabble,” it’s called. It's a polity, first identified by John Irvin in the 1980s, of massively wasting homeless people's time to keep us out of public view and out of trouble. Enlightened societies/metropolises have moved away from this extra-legal and backward policy, but Sacramento at Loaf & Fish is 'Warehousing the Rabble' Central.

I'm told by my pals "out here" that they recognize the events Buckner writes about in his essay and that they occurred on New Year's Day, 2011.

Two paragraphs later, Buckner writes,

The closing of the park was not a rare occurrence. While the rules were clearly posted and many individuals did respect them, there were always those that felt the rules that governed the rest of us did not apply to them. As a result, the whole had to suffer because of the individuals’ mistakes.

This is the new Welcoming Center / Admin offices / Warehouse that Loaves & Fishes built during the past 12 months or so, in lieu of doing anything to shelter the homeless during the particularly cold and wet winter of 2010-2011. The cost was btw $1.5 and $2 million, dependent on whom you ask. This is L&F's way of giving homeless people the finger.

And, this, this is “Collective Punishment.” Here is the blogpost “Loaves and Fishes’ program of ‘Collective Punishment’” I wrote in July, 2010, that, with this blogpost, resulted in me being 86ed for life from Loaves & Fishes Mall of Services. Sister Libby, like a Middle East dictator, can’t tolerate anyone criticizing her outrageous behavior. In addition, she doesn’t want donors and potential donors to know how money gets wasted by her and her crew.

As I said, Buckner is also critical of Winter Sanctuary, which sheltered homeless people on the floor at various churches in our metropolis. For the benefit of sleep, homeless people have had to spend sixteen or seventeen hours per day getting a legal, sheltered place to sleep. This is outrageous. It devours a person’s day and can make the escape from homelessness impossible.

Hooray, you, Christopher Lee Buckner! Thanks for letting the public in on what is really going on in Homeless World Sacramento with your revealing essay. [And thanks, too, to SN&R for putting the truth out there! Please, please keep it up SN&R!] 90+% else of what gets published re homelessness in Sacramento is purely homeless charities’ press releases. It is wonderful to get the fresh air of what is true and real in your essay, Christopher. [And, I must unabashedly add, from this online publication, Sacramento Homeless blog].

Readers, please read the whole of Buckner's essay!  Splendid information, splendidly written.  The truth of things, the unblinkered truth:  "Sacramento's coldest season."