Path to Enlightenment
Last week I attended my first meeting with the Homeless Outreach Team. The building sits on the corner of Mission and 15th at Walden House. I used to live a block from there and never knew what this place was except that people took a lot of smoke breaks out on the sidewalk. The meeting blew my mind for a various reasons. One being that I was allowed in. I suspected theses selfless folks would smell my rotting apathy from miles away and dead bolt the door. Sitting in the meeting listening to the discussions I learned two things very quickly. Our city, despite my prior assumptions that we were giving out gold bars to lure homeless from around the country, has put these people near the bottom of their priorities list (top of the list: free WiFi!!). The offices are furnished with hand-me-downs, and part of the job description seems to be to fight on a daily basis for basic supplies. If was easy to forget that this is a government funded group—that they are city employees—part of the Mayor’s ambitious and well publicized “Plan to End Homelessness.” The second thing I learned was how acutely mental illness contributes to homelessness. I supposedly already knew this. Everyone “knows” this, right? Regan—or was it Nixon? —shuttering all the mental institutions and forcing all the patients out onto the streets in the 70s. Yet the details of the cases that were discussed in the meeting shocked me. Not because I couldn’t believe that so many people could be so sick, but that I had stopped wanting to believe it when trying to rationalize the drugged out, fucked up, pimped out people that I saw outside my front door on a daily basis. But when the proof is on paper that a 23-year-old transvestite meth addict entered the system at age 6 when he was the victim of sexual abuse, it makes simple distain harder to come by.
