The rich and the homeless on Thanksgiving

This is the land of beautiful people, perfect weather, and stunning coastlines, but in the fringe areas along the back, the rarely traveled dirt roads to the impressive dunes of Ocean Beach are the people without home: skinny, dirty, and screaming loudly at the rising sun, the boy was on drugs or psychotic, or both. And I quickened my pace, not quite sure what the guy was capable of in the cool dawn of this Thanksgiving morning; silently, I urged the dog to move faster.

On the corners of gleaming grocery stores, offering everything from kale smoothies to premium grass-fed beef, sit men and women holding signs like “Please help” or “Anything will help.” , God bless you”. waiting for us to roll down the window and give them something, anything.

Last Veterans Day, I heard a newscaster talk about John Kerry’s speech and the promise he made on behalf of the Obama administration to ‘eliminate homelessness among veterans’ and ensure every veteran has a roof over his head. on his head with a lot of food.

To say the least, it’s disconcerting to see these men and women on street corners, sometimes with dogs holding up their various signs; At best, our thoughts merge with Secretary of State John Kerry’s statement, and we feel pity, guilt, even anger at this seemingly simple problem: Our response, like Kerry’s, is to give money, thinking we’re helping, providing them with a meal.

Through the years of working with different shelters, I have learned, speaking with some of the homeless men and women we encounter in the various programs we have become familiar with, that ‘homeless’ is understood as a variety of men and women ranging from having suffered a run of bad luck among addicts and the mentally ill.

Men and women who have a run of bad luck somehow seem to bounce back and get back to work. But addicts and the mentally ill confuse this terrible problem in ways that couldn’t be more complex.

The homeless problem was exacerbated by Jack Kennedy’s decision to insinuate the federal government into institutionalized populations of the mentally ill. Many thousands of chronically mentally ill patients were discharged from the institutions they had been serving as guardians, most with nowhere to go; Almost overnight, the cities of this country were faced with a labyrinthine problem. With the best of intentions, the federal decision that ‘freeing’ these people was more humane than locking them up, thousands, perhaps millions of thousands, took to the streets of the city and stayed there.

Are they better off sleeping on patches of sand here along these coastal paths, much better no doubt than the concrete of a city street or ‘safe’ and chemically anesthetized in institutions?

Kerry said many of the homeless veterans had such severe post-traumatic stress disorder along with other psychological problems that drugs and alcohol are their treatment of choice. Homeless centers cannot reasonably house people who are unable to maintain sobriety.

Give more money to fix this? I wish the solutions were that simple.

We keep driving past the signs, ‘Work for food,’ ‘Help please,’ held up by these people, wondering if the five dollars we give them is for food or medicine, wondering what their story is; wondering how they will spend Thanksgiving. And sometimes I roll down the window and give him the money.