The Homeless Walkabout

I love watching the homed and the homeless interact.
They are like people from different countries.
They look the same. They talk the same. But yet there are distinct differences.
Generally, the homeless understand the homed. That’s simply because all these people lived in homes not too long ago.
But most homed people have never been homeless. So they are the ones that are typically caught off guard by some of the behaviors of the homeless.
There are a few unique behaviors some of the homeless exhibit. But the one I want to talk about today is the homeless walkabout.
Simply put: some of these people just disappear.
No one knows where they go. They don’t leave a note. They don’t give you an idea of when they’ll be back. They are just gone.
It’s disorienting for everyone involved. Even other homeless people.
It’s not like all homeless people do this. But it’s enough of a segment of the community that it is clearly a behavior that is a repeated pattern.
It’s very much like the walkabout that happens in the Australian Aboriginal society.
Wikipedia says, “Walkabout has come to be referred to as “temporary mobility” because its original name has been used as a derogatory term in Australian culture, demeaning its spiritual significance”
I think temporary mobility is a better phrase.
The homeless are practically the living incarnation of “temporary mobility.”
They have been spit out by society. And very often they quickly acclimate to the homeless lifestyle. Moving from place to place to place. Being kicked out of some places. Being forced to move out of other places often because the drugs and violence is too much to bear in other places.
They quickly lose their fear of mobility. All of their things fit in a small backpack. They have no ties to anything. No people. No things. Nothing.
And so they become untethered.
That’s a feeling that sticks with you.
This causes constant irritation with non-aboriginal employers in Australia. They don’t understand it, don’t respect it and can’t plan around it.
We have similar difficulties here at Second Chance Village.
All heads of departments like, maintenance, kitchen, lot coordinator are run by villagers. And all people under them are villagers.
One morning on one of the coldest days of the winter one of our elders was nowhere to be seen.
We all suspected he maybe left for a few days. But as I thought more and more about it I started to worry.
I went out to his tent. I called his name a few times. There was no answer. Finally, I had to open his tent to check. I expected the worst.
But he wasn’t there.
I don’t know where he goes. He never tells us when he leaves. And he never talks about it when he comes back. It’s like an entirely different life he has that none of us know anything about.
And that’s the way it is for several people.
Single women. Old men. Couples. People with pets. The only connection between these people is that they are homeless.
This repeatedly confuses, frustrates and sometimes hurts volunteers.
A volunteer will hire one of our people for a long-term job. They will be completely committed to the job for several days. And then they’ll just not show up one day.
The volunteer usually calls me worried and irritated.
This is a trait among homeless people that will always make traditional work very difficult for them. Just as it causes difficulty for the Australian Aborigines.
These are people that likely may never be suitable for a traditional 40 hour job the rest of their lives.
That’s not to say they don’t work hard. The opposite is true. These people will bicycle all over town all night long dumpster diving. For $30 they will detail your car for 8 hours. They will gladly take all your metal garbage and scrap it for cash.
But flipping burgers for 8 hours all day every day is probably not going to fly. You’ll be lucky if they tell you they quit. More likely they’ll stop showing up and never pickup their last check.
Successful people in society like this are called entrepreneurs. I haven’t had a job in 20 years. Not only am I totally unsure anyone would ever even hire me, I’m not sure I could actually survive a “job.”
Washing windows or selling apples on the street corner sounds WAY more enjoyable to me than someone telling me I need to show up every day at 8:15 and I can only wear jeans on “dress down Friday.”
I believe we need to help the homeless learn basic entrepreneurial skills. Like finding a sellable product, marketing it, pricing it and selling it.
You see them doing this everyday. These are our panhandlers. They panhandle because they know that it is a product that converts at a decent conversion rate. It pulls at people’s heart strings. It works ok.
In big cities like New York you’ll see panhandlers add certain skills to their repertoire. They’ll play an instrument. They will do some kind of street performance. This requires an audience that is walking. A driving audience is too difficult to entertain. A compelling sign is about the best you can do in Akron.
I do, however, think they need to test different products. We are moving towards creating our woodworking shop. So, maybe they can create items to sell that people will buy.
We just have to help them succeed with the skills and temperaments that they have. And we, as the housed community, have to help support them and believe in them.
Throwing people away hurts more than just these people. It hurts the fabric of our entire community.
So, if you ever find yourself wondering what happened to the homeless person you were having a perfectly lovely time with yesterday, don’t take it personally. They just needed to go for a walk. They’ll probably be back in a few days like nothing happened.
 

The Invisible People

Rocky, my wife, opened up this morning’s family conversation with: “Whelp. It’s official. Selena Gomez is back with Justin Bieber and her mom is NOT happy.”
Selena is not an uncommon topic in our family because, like my wife, she has Lupus. In fact, Selena’s lupus is so bad that she has had chemo treatments and a kidney transplant… and she’s only 26.
Selena also has depression. If you type in her name into Google this article comes up on the front page:
Selena Gomez Opens Up About Mental Health and Instagram Fatigue – Vogue
In the article she says about her world tour: “Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it.”
There are some studies that are suggesting autoimmune disorders are connected to depression because of inflammation.
Famous, successful people experiencing depression and anxiety is not uncommon at all.
Lady Gaga Opens Up About Her Depression | Teen Vogue
Kurt Cobain and Manic Depression (Bipolar Disorder) | Bipolar Lives:
Kurt was diagnosed at a young age with Attention Deficit Disorder [ADD], then later with bipolar disorder [also known as manic-depression].
There is an almost endless list of examples like this. Successful people experiencing significant mental health issues is a common recurring story.
In our family we often discuss how success is irrelevant to depression and other mental health issues. You live your life and mental health issues lay on top of your life no matter how successful or unsuccessful you are.
For years I’ve been on a steady dose of Citalopram. It’s a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) used to treat depression.
I’m not “celebrity” successful. But I’ve done OK in business. I now get to help the homeless with our day center and tent village. And my family is out of this world. They are SO amazing.
Yet depression and anxiety chase me around too.
I set this stage for you to now imagine this scenario:

  • All of your family is dead or hates you.
  • All your friends have given up on you and don’t answer your calls any more.
  • You’ve spent years in prison.
  • Your father beat you and your mother regularly.
  • You were repeatedly molested as a kid.
  • You started self medicating because $5 of Fentanyl takes away all the pain.
  • Now your opiate tolerance is so high you are spending every penny just to stop the pain from coming back. Being “high” is a long gone dream.
  • Chasing drugs takes all your time.
  • You lost your job months ago.
  • You can’t afford living anywhere.
  • You stay in shelters with people you hate and can’t believe you are now on their level.

If Selena Gomez thinks “Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough,” imagine how homeless people feel.
They are in free fall. Every societal backup plan has failed. The bottom fell out long ago.
I just talked to a person yesterday who, through tears, cried, “How many times can I handle being at the end of my rope?”
These are people who hit “bottom” long ago. Bottom flew past them and now they have no idea where any of this ends.
Mental health issues are at the root of most homeless people I know.
Depression, anxiety and many more mental health conditions are constantly presenting themselves.
Because of the mental health issues along with the homeless issues, seeing some people just totally give up on society is common.
Yet, through all this they are survivors. They are resilient, determined and rarely will you hear them complain about any hardship they experience.
However, as soon as you start talking about mental health support and addiction support they often start to glaze over.
Clawing their way back into society is exhausting. Endless paperwork, hoops and logistical mazes.
The first step is getting 3 forms of identification: birth certificate, state id and social security card. Most people I know start here. They have lost all of these a long time ago.
These are sometimes adopted kids that were born in other states. I just paid $80 to some service to help a person get his out of state birth certificate. It required navigating a series of online forms and ended with paying with a credit card.
I don’t think I know a single homeless person with a credit card, much less $80.
But you need all of these. You can’t get a social security card if you don’t have a picture id. You can’t get a picture id if you don’t have a birth certificate.
And without these you can’t get any services. No food stamps. No Medicaid. No getting on a housing list.
There is a collective “screw it!” among many of these people.
Surviving takes all their time.
Engaging with the maze of society doesn’t feel worth it. Society hasn’t shown to be worth the effort.
And that’s when it begins to happen. These people begin to disappear. You very likely pass by these people every day of your life.
They are in the gas stations. They are walking down the sidewalk. They are in the library.
They try very hard to blend in. If they don’t have severe mental illness that causes them to talk to the voices in their heads, they are very quiet. They don’t look up. They don’t talk in front of strangers. If you go into their camp site they likely will not easily come out of their tents no matter what you offer them.
They move around really early in the morning and late at night.
And so they become invisible to society. And society is cool with that. Society is afraid of these people and embarrassed that we have these people.
It is a convenient symbiotic relationship. We won’t look at you if you don’t look at us. It’s an unspoken agreement.
Occasionally, these people do try to be seen. They try to take a stand to interact with society. They try not to be invisible.
These are the panhandlers.
But they have broken the agreement. They decided to not be invisible.
And many of us are upset by the broken agreement.
They should “get a job!” They probably are actually con artists driving into the city (often in Mercedes) from the suburbs to take all the sweet, easy inner city panhandling cash.
We scorn them because their visibility makes us uncomfortable. We aren’t supposed to have to look at them.
They need to become invisible again so we don’t have to deal with their existence. And in reality, most of these people would rather become invisible too.
They don’t want to beg from you. They don’t want to stand there and take your ignorant, closed minded verbal abuse. But they are fighting to get back in. They are fighting to be back in the mechanism of society through getting money.
Money is the admission pass to society. No money, no society, no community.
Not making money betrays your obligation to society. And so society excommunicates you. Your punishment is to become invisible.

The Torture and Abuse of the Homeless

There is an aspect to working with the homeless that I try not to discuss much.
There is a constant hum of fear and desperation in parts of the homeless population that is perverse, grotesque and endless.
I won’t do these kinds of stories often. I want this to be an arc of hope, salvation and redemption.
But this part of homelessness is something you need to know about.
It is not uncommon for the homeless to come to us having been robbed and/or beaten.
They rarely complain about it. It’s almost like it comes with the territory, in their eyes. They have a certain kind of resignation that something like this happened to them. They typically are smiling and hopeful and usually grateful that it wasn’t worse.
But this is a level of savagery that reaches some of the darkest most evil depths of humanity.
A person that has nothing, causes no trouble and then is stomped repeatedly in the face by a group of people could possibly represent the worst example of human capability.
The person in this picture is named Brian. It’s important that you know that. His name is Brian.

He is one of the countless invisible homeless that has no place in society.
He has found a barn in an area in Akron where he has setup a tent inside. He comes to our facility to get food and supplies. He takes the bus back and forth.
Brian has significant mental health issues. He constantly hears voices and can’t resist talking to them out loud. They are conflicting, evil  voices. The voices in his head talk almost continuously.
In spite of that, he is a kind, sweet man. I’ve never seen him hurt anyone. Even though his voices are scary he is able to control them.
I’m quite sure these voices were talking out loud when he was attacked. We know for certain, because of witnesses, Brian did not provoke this brutal attack. He was attacked without any provocation, other than likely the voices these others might have heard.
We asked if he wanted to press charges. He said no. He just wanted to go back to his tent.
There was talk from his friends of going after these people. They all agreed not to because violent revenge leads nowhere good.
This is a story with no happy ending. There is no uptick, happy arc I can give you here.
This brutal savagery will likely not stop because this isn’t seen as a hate crime. If he had been gay or Muslim and it was clear these people hated him for that this would be front page news.
But the homeless are not a protected class. People in government will still say things like, “Let’s be honest, no one wants to live next to the homeless.”
How we can in good conscience and moral certitude allow the shocking, unbelievable treatment of the poorest and weakest among us to continue is utterly unfathomable to me.
They aren’t allowed to exist anywhere. They can be kicked out of their hovel with a single call from a person who finds homelessness distasteful and having to look at them uncomfortable.
The cruel and unusual punishment of the homeless has no end.
Here are 71 Cities That Have Laws Against Feeding Homeless People
And then there are countless stories like these:
Death of Kelly Thomas – Wikipedia

Kelly Thomas (April 5, 1974 – July 10, 2011) was a homeless man diagnosed with schizophrenia who lived on the streets of Fullerton, California. He was killed by six members of the Fullerton Police Department, on July 5, 2011.

Police searching for teens who allegedly beat a homeless man to death, then ‘ran away laughing’ – The Washington Post
Cop beating homeless woman caught on camera
I’m telling you this story for one reason: The homeless MUST become a protected class. They have no rights whatsoever. They lose their freedom of religion at shelters. They are held to absurd and childish required bedtimes at shelters.
The laws of America make it illegal to be homeless.
Spikes are put on floors to keep homeless out of alcoves.


In Akron, an abandoned building owner put up an iron fence to not allow the homeless to sit under his small, unused awning during the day.
This is hate. Pure and simple.
This is the great American tragedy of our time. We cannot allow this violence and total lack of regard from our government any longer.
The Homeless Charity will be working on legislation to end the blatant disregard and total lack of compassion for the homeless.

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