Homelessness from San Diego CityBEAT

December 20, 2006

Fighting poverty during the holidays and all year long
I walked two blocks from my house to the Rite Aid in Hillcrest last Saturday night in what passes for a driving rain in Southern California. I only braved the elements because I had run through the stack of paper towels torn into quarters sitting on my toilet tank and, rain or no rain, a man’s pooper deserves Charmin once in awhile. En route I passed two homeless people huddled and sleeping under two nearly adjacent overhangs that afforded little protection from the wet and cold but at least kept them fairly well hidden from view. One of them was an old woman. The other was an old man missing a leg.

I will not propose a thesis in macroeconomics or urban planning in a mere thousand-word editorial comment. Neither will I espouse any particular ideology in this brief treatment of homelessness. What I will say is this: old men, women and amputees sleeping in the rain on Sixth Avenue amid ostentatious affluence are manifest evidence of something in our society gone horribly awry.

I can hear you groaning. “Why must you snooty, liberal columnists always trot out the homeless during the holidays?” I’ll tell you why: It’s the only time that most of you are the least bit likely to care. And for the record, I refuse to refer to a diverse population of men, women and children as “the homeless,” as if they were some homogenous mass whose circumstance defined their essence. Nobody refers to my neighbors and me as “the homed.”

I look forward to your letters, which will likely be of three types:

1. People are homeless because they’re mentally ill.
No, they’re not.

2. People are homeless because they’re substance abusers.
No, they’re not.

3. People are homeless because they choose to be.
Get fucked.

Friends, gather ’round. Tony’s got something to share. People are homeless because they’re poor. That’s it. Period. Homeless people are young and old, sick and well, red, yellow, black, white and brown, male, female and in between. Poverty is the only characteristic universally shared by all homeless Americans. Quote me on that.

Now, those of you who’ve been to law school or studied logic will object that there are causes and then there are causes. About homelessness, you will say that poverty might be the proximate cause but the cause in fact is substance abuse (or mental illness, or whatever) inasmuch as substance abuse, etc., is the cause of poverty. I wonder about that. There are more substances abused at Gaslamp clubs every night than are abused by every homeless person in the county put together. And while substance abuse sometimes leads to homelessness, it just as often leads to Betty Ford. Where a substance abuser ends up is a matter of the quality of his or her insurance coverage and the strength and integrity of his or her support system. The same is true of mental illness, age, infirmity and any other issue to which one might point and say, “Aha—that person is homeless because….” I’ll say it again: Homeless people are homeless because they’re poor.

But that, of course, is what was so troubling to me as I dodged the downpour in my quest for quilted tissue. As D’Arcy Thompson wrote in 1917: Everything is what it is because it got that way. How, then, do the poor get to be poor? What is it about the least among us that makes them the least? More relevantly, what are we to do differently to quit letting the poor get that way in the first place? What sort of systemic change would make it so that I could run to the store for something soft with which to daub my dumper without passing the byproducts of a society that indulges the amassing of indefensible wealth while tolerating, if not denying, the persistent existence of such crushing poverty?

I haven’t worked out the answers to those questions yet, not in much detail anyway, but I will offer one general observation. This country is ready for a war on poverty. What we need is a full frontal assault against the forces and institutions from which the downward spiral of intergenerational poverty stems. We must seek victory on the battlefield of opportunity and we must engage any enemy that shows himself, even if that enemy is us.

This country has never really sustained anything like a war on poverty, not anything that carries the moral force of war, nothing that conveys the seriousness of the term, maybe because those who declare wars haven’t seen poverty as a threat to all of us. Lyndon Johnson declared such a war in 1964, but that war petered out as we pressed ahead with a war deemed more winnable—the one in Vietnam. We have fought wars against aggression, against ethnic cleansing, against imperialism and totalitarianism, against drugs and now against terror. But we have never felt the need to combat the causes and consequences of poverty through the waging of full-scale war. Even during the Great Depression, what could arguably be construed as attacks on poverty were really minor skirmishes against joblessness. Fighting today’s poverty will require more than that. Sending men off to build bridges and dams might be a part of the war, but it won’t be the major part.

The major part will involve admitting that we, as a nation, have squandered more than 60 years of unprecedented sustained prosperity and 20 years of utter global hegemony and that we have become a people noted chiefly for our complacency. To win the second war against poverty we will have to ask hard questions and we must be prepared to make sacrifices. We must accept that poverty is as much our problem as it is the problem of the poor, we must be willing to join the fight not only during the holidays but all year long and we must learn, finally, as we should have known all along, that the worth of our contribution will not be measured by how much we give. It will be measured by how much we keep for ourselves.