The Homeless Encampment

The following post was a response to an email strand regarding a recently cleared homeless encampment in the neighborhood.  The prior message made reference to the Vietnam era vets and others who found re-entry from war impossible.  I had acquired another perspective from my own research.

Thoughtful commentary.  I remember those days as well. 

However, many other homeless individuals are addicts who have given up or chosen not to sober up.  I have had first hand experience of this with someone whom I once loved dearly.  He told me many, many stories of why most of the people he knew remained, by choice, on the streets.  I interviewed a few others for material for a book.  The stories were mostly the same.

The subculture fluctuated between incredibly peaceful and terribly harrowing.  Individuals would occasionally go to a charity-sponsored rehab, what's referred to as a "spin dry," then go back out to the street.  Many of them suffered from mental illness, particularly schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder.  Meth and alcohol were the drugs of choice as they were easily available, inexpensive, and alleviated the symptoms and/or eased the pain.  Monthly "crazy money" and social security checks were sometimes shared among specific small groups, but usually the recipient had been robbed or swindled out of those funds by the third day of the payday bender.  That left them eating donated food, what they could find in the garbage, or could could be swiped from a convenience store.  There were no big crimes committed, primarily because none of them could develop and implement a plan.  Instead there was lifting of unattended objects, pilfering of an unlocked car, grabbing clean clothes from the temporarily unwatched dryer at the laundromat.  There was always money, somehow, for a bottle of cheap vodka for a nightcap and the requisite "forty" for breakfast, even if the bottles had to be shared.

Panhandling was left to the experts.  I was told that there would be one or two, usually men, who would ask for "change for breakfast" or "a couple bucks for gas" with success.  So when the "crazy money" or other government support was gone, it was the panhandlers' turn to provide until the next check arrived.  Of the group of 15 or so that I observed, only two were Vietnam vets.  The rest were a wide range of ages with a wide variety of diagnoses, but one thing in common:  an inability and often unwillingness to live within the agreements that the rest of us call "society."  It is not easy to live the "American Dream," especially now.  Just ask the kids currently under 25; I feel we will see more and not fewer such encampments unless some changes are made to our schools, our social services, and our health care.

Maybe I ought to get to writing that book...