Rising Waters

I attended a secret meeting on homelessness last Friday. Many members of the inner cabal were in attendance. I didn't even have to crash the thing. The press was not invited, as there were delicate matters under discussion. How screwed are homeless people? Who is screwing them? And so forth.

Therefore, I can only discuss this meeting by cloaking the proceedings in extreme allegory. I have chosen the river babies trope, which has the metaphorical happiness of being infinitely extendable. The following events may or may not have occurred.

It was noon, and the Kingdom smelled of portabello paninis. The Juridical Commission on Criblessness was in Seattle to review the local plight of the Riverbabies. Gathered with the Commission were many of the leading advocates and caretakers for the Riverbabies. Or of the Riverbabies, as was now the preferred term.

Riverbabynessness — from the early days, when just a few people were pulling babies out of the stream, all the way through to the large well-lit open rooms, which played Brahms while babies laid teeny toe to adorable head throughout the vast facility — had continued to grow. There still wasn't enough room. The babies were coming faster than anyone knew how to handle. Families First, once the goal for all babies, was now the fate of maybe one in ten. Many of these were speaking in complete sentences before finally joining a family. Most people simply didn't have the additional means to help, and those who did mostly didn't like babies.

The Kingdom was overextended and badly managed. The Skypeople, about 1% of the realm, reveled in vast piles of gold while the Invisibles, the bottom 15% or so, lived in conditions of utter misery. For most of the kingdom, life was filled with worry and risk.

The Riverbabies were now overflowing the banks and getting lodged out in the weeds. These were called the Outliers. There was the incident where a gang of youths used one as a soccer ball. A brief public outcry occurred, and then everyone stopped caring again. Most people had become very accustomed to the Riverbabies, to the point of hardly noticing them. The Outliers and the Riverbabies were outwardly indistinguishable. It was their surroundings that made the difference. An indoor Riverbaby was legal. An outdoor Riverbaby was not.

The King's Riverbaby sweeps had been in the press a lot lately, and the King himself was increasingly forced to defend his policies. It didn't help that he had grown more swollen with each passing day of regal tenancy. His neck poured up over his collar in angry waves of exfoliated pink flesh, rising into a doughy ball of obscenely pouty lips, flapping jowls, and bulbous nose. The King's tiny flat gray eyes swam in small seas of bright pink nestled against the fleshy shores of his brow. They alternated between frightened and bored as they darted about, often finally fixing in a defiant glare that still seemed somehow dead. The expensive haircut strangely accentuated the oddness of the King's bullet-shaped head, which resembled a slug fired into a block of wood and retrieved as evidence.

A recent Riverbaby Uprising had drawn much attention to the King's edict, and people were once again beginning to notice the Problem, as it was commonly called. After all, the waters were continually rising. Some would walk to the banks nearly everyday, commenting nervously to one another on how the depths had just claimed some new point of interest. A fence post. A field. A parked car. An unlucky cow.

Various squires of the King, both loyal and disloyal, were there before the Commission, as were the key shysters and proles, and, of course, the star baby tenders, allies, and agitators. Discussion was mostly polite. They nibbled on inexpensively catered sandwiches and drank urns of coffee with their brownie triangles. A few of the villagers didn't seem to know why they were there. Some of the more loquacious tenders prattled on about the details of tendenceship, oblivious to the waters that would soon swamp their feeble efforts.

The core facts regarding the Riverbaby sweeps were read. Upbeat assurances of progress on the Problem were offered by the Top Tender. Many tenders still adhered to a Riverbaby creed based upon a belief in the Number Ten. The Top Tender was the chief local exponent of this belief system which had swept the Kingdom hence and hither.

One of the agitators asked the Top Tender why the Outliers were of such little regard to Ten Worshippers. The Top Tender replied that while individual Ten Worshippers might have their own opinions, his belief system had no democratic process that allowed for resolution of differences or airing of controversy. This may anger some of the Ten Worshippers, he wordlessly implied, and gravely fracture the Tendence Coalition, which, sadly, was failing miserably in its meticulously meretricious yet metrically misleading goals. Eventually, the Top Tender remembered that the Tendence Coalition had set a standard for the King based on the King's standard, and boldly announced his bright thought, assured that those assembled would thricely applaud and dance a jig. None did.

A Juridical Commissioner noted — once many of the inner cabal scurried to other appointments and the others had resorted to chatting semi-furtively among themselves — that this was the way of the Ten Worshippers in most Kingdoms. The Outliers make the SkyPeople uncomfortable, and are thereby the enemy of the King, for the King is of the Skypeople and not of the rest of us. Ten Worshippers are often loath to offend the King. For the King is mighty, and holds their fate within his pudgy yet powerful hands.

The Street Years: Part Three

The Davis Square Street Magazine house was a second story apartment in a house where the landlord, Larry, lived downstairs with his wife. She was nice enough, but Larry was a boozer. He soon decided, given the traffic through our apartment, that we must be dealing drugs. It was a tense relationship.

Every few months or so we'd get an issue together. Between Jon's manic-depression and perfectionism, our poverty, and my own chronic distraction, it's a wonder we published at all. Every once in a while though, a truck would come, and we'd get ink all over our fingers as we carried the precious bundles upstairs.

The times of no money continued. I remember standing near a Burger King in the Northeastern University student union. A volunteer was driving me around to drop papers at the distribution points. I was starving. Literally. I smelled the greasy food and longed for a dollar to buy french fries. I read Knut Hamsun's Hunger that year, and knew just how he must have felt.

I would later come to think of this as my boiled potatoes and shoplifted cheese period. Jon was the thief. I'd lost my nerve for that sort of thing by thirteen. He specialized in string cheese and cigarettes, reserving most of his actual money for 12-packs of Rolling Rock. At least we kept the rent paid.

I lived upstairs in a roughly finished attic room across the stairwell from our photographer David, who converted a closet into a darkroom. Jon was downstairs with two of my friends that I knew from college. Doug and Claudia were Central America activists and ran a teeny non-profit called the Student Central America Network. I was hired to run their phone bank.

This was, without question, the most pathetic fund raising operation in the history of half-assed non-profits. We'd cold call from the phonebook, and anyone unfortunate enough to pick up would be treated to an "update." This would begin with the latest atrocity of that blood-soaked time and end with an earnest plea to support student organizing to change U.S. foreign policy.

It's amazing that anyone ever gave us anything. A strong night would bring in around $100. Doug weaved and dodged every time I asked to get paid. The three of us would sometimes visit Al Sais, a friend of Doug's in Cambridge, who would cook a nice dinner and get us high. By this point, eating a real meal was a rare treat.

During one especially desperate week, where I had no money even for bus tokens, Al wrote each of us a check for $100. Mine bounced.

Al Sais would later be fired from his long time job as book keeper for the Central America Solidarity Association in Cambridge. It turned out that at least some of the much discussed string of "FBI break ins" that plagued Old Cambridge Baptist Church during the sanctuary movement were really just Al covering his tracks.

Doug eventually skipped out on his rent and we confiscated his guitar and amp in retaliation. Jon got good at surfer licks, and could slay me every time with his cover of Sargent Barry Sadler's Ballad of the Green Berets. The irony thing was very in.

By then, my focus was turning more and more toward homelessness. It was 1988, and Bennett and Harrison's The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America offered a framework for understanding the incredible growth in visible poverty that occurred over that decade. Homelessness in American cities had tripled or quadrupled, and a politicized grassroots movement had arisen along with a still nascent sheltering industry.

Boston's Kip Tiernan was running around quoting Walter Bruggeman, talking liberation theology, and asking qui bono? "Situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency," she would say. A bag lady doll went on the market and Kip went ballistic. I found this irresistible.

A few years before, a chapter of the Union of the Homeless was founded in Boston. While there were a few radicals running around acting like this was a real organization, it was clear that there wasn't much there. The happening place was First Church Cambridge, where Jim Stewart and Stuart Guernsey were leading the direct action revolution.

Jim was a cynical divinity school grad who dressed in black, wore James Joyce glasses, and read Adorno and Horkheimer. He was a CD junkie, and ran a small shelter in the church basement. Guernsey was a soft-spoken southern minister who'd somehow come north to run another small shelter in Dorchester. They acted as Northeast lieutenants for Mitch Snyder, and would regularly go on some sort of extreme fast in solidarity with their hero.

Around them were a mixture of politicized homeless people, church folk, and shelter line staff who were down for the revolution. I found myself in the First Church function room more and more often, drawn in by the drama and the people. At the conclusion of every meeting, Guernsey would offer a little benediction. After awhile, Jim took pity and gave me a job doing overnights.

The summer of 1988 brought the CCNV's "Take off the Boards" demonstrations. Mitch Snyder had a genius for mobilizing coordinated direct-action events that kept homelessness in the papers and turned up the heat for action. Take off the Boards was a week of housing takeovers in cities throughout the east coast. There was a boarded up house in Boston's South End that Jim and Stuart chose as a target. A group of around 60 met up at Boston's City Hall for a brief rally, and marched toward our destination.

"What do we want?"
"Housing"
"When do we want it!"
"NOW!!"

This chant would be good for at least another 20 years. My favorite variation would come at the 1989 Housing Now! march more than a year later. My Boston affinity group came up with "Hey you's guys! How's about a house!"

Much better.

Only a few leaders actually knew where the house was. We came to a stop at a boarded-up Victorian, and a half dozen guys raced up the steps with crowbars to pry at the plywood. An advance contingent was to have taken care of this. They were there and inside, but hadn't managed to loosen the nails.

Within a minute there were about ten cop cars on the street and a couple of horses. These were Boston cops. They don't fuck around.

The plywood came off just as the police swarmed the house. The crowd lost it as cops started throwing bodies down the stairs. No one was prepared for a police riot, and things escalated within seconds to full-on pandemonium, which only made the police more aggressive. They pushed us back to the street, and then to the sidewalk on the other side.

I was stalking back and forth on the street and sidewalk, alternately screaming chants and yelling at cops. I saw one near by catch another's eye, point to me, and say, "him." They closed in.

For me, nothing brings on hyper-focus and a sense of calm like the prospect of getting my ass kicked. I locked eyes with the lead cop, raised my hands loosely over my shoulders, and slowly backed away.

Suddenly, they turned and ran. My scrawny hippy ass was saved by dumb luck and distraction.

The media had arrived, and several cameras were trained on a police horse as it trotted straight down a crowded sidewalk to bowl over a septuagenarian former nun. The cops seemed to know this was the end. The de-escalation was immediate. An ambulance arrived, and she was taken away for treatment of minor injuries. A few arrests were made, but most of us just huddled for awhile in small groups and walked away.

The story played the same way in nearly all of the media. Peaceful protest turns violent. The violence was blamed on the cops, and the TV stations found their footage of the horse running over the old lady irresistible.

This, I decided, was the revolution I was looking for. I'd found my people.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two
The Street Years: Part Three

Urban Meditation Excerpt Two, with Dad Story.

Today I was able to spend another hour or so with Urban Meditations while the girls entertained themselves at a playground above Puget Sound. I looked up from my book just in time to see Kay drop her pants. She had left something there which had apparently grown uncomfortable. As I took her inside to change, a gang of fourteen year-olds lounged around out front being as hip as is possible in a place as uncool as the Shoreline public library. Twin A, who is a serious contender for the cutest little girl in Seattle, chose this moment to reach into her pants and hand me the most enormous piece of shit you can imagine. "Daddy, I got it out," she said. "I don't need to change anymore." It sat heavily in my hand, like a miniature billiard ball. "Eeewwwww!," said the cool teenagers. This was too groty for words. Before I tossed it into a nearby trash can, I held the thing out like a handful of Fritos. "Want some," I smiled. Before anyone could react, the poop went in the garbage and we disappeared inside. When we came out five minutes later, the kids were gone. I think I scared them.

But, back to Urban Meditations. I've posted about Kip Tiernan before. When I was in Boston, she and her partner Fran were spiritually engaged activist-intellectuals who's sense of outrage regarding homelessness never seemed to dim. I admired them a great deal, and am grateful for this recent work that puts their forty-odd years of poor people's activism in some sort of perspective.

Things are worse than ever, and she struggles with the meaning of this. That alone, to me, is very helpful, as so few people seem to struggle with the meaning of anything these days. If nothing else, there's validation in being so at odds with reality in such good company.

I've reproduced below another excerpt from the book to go with yesterday's poem. The following is from an address delivered at the Harvard Divinity School in 1999, where Tiernan describes how years of conservative ideology have eroded the idea of human needs amounting to any sort of recognized right to survival, and the moral consequences for us all.

Why Hasn't Anything Changed?

You must ask yourself, qui bono? — Who benefits? And who sets the terms of the debate in which these things are discussed? The rich do. People are being paid by the rich constituencies so that things don't change.

We live in a society of cultural apartheid, two separate worlds of rich and poor, and the distance between the two is becoming greater, because we are not demanding that things change, that priorities be reorganized, to provide justice for all, not just the few that take it and then demand more.

The holocaust essayist George Steiner tells us that tragedy becomes possible when cultures become less rational in behavior and belief. This is America today.

In these times I tend to favor the Old Testament prophets like Amos, "I hate, I despise your sacrifice and burnt offerings" (Amos 5:21). Our shelters and soup kitchens have become for us 20th century "burnt offerings," things we offer God from the midst of the injustices of our time, all so we and everything else won't have to change. I like Jeremiah too. He lived as we do in a time of turmoil, a time of dying. Jeremiah saw coming the death of a society, a culture, a tradition. He watched his world dying and Jeremiah felt its pain. And what pained him more was that his contemporaries failed to notice or care. They could not or would not acknowledge or admit it. Jeremiah could not determine whether they were too stupid to understand, or whether they were so dishonest that they actually understood but were complicit in an enormous cover-up.

We too are in a time of transition, our world also is dying. What we used to call democracy is dying. Our grief is poignant because we are all too busy, too sure, too invested, too committed ideologically to the political forms and economic models of the past which are increasingly ineffective.

The value systems, the shapes of knowledge through which we have controlled life, our own destiny, are all in great jeopardy. The haves against the have-nots is not just a Boston phenomenon, it is world-wide.

The threat is so massive, so comprehensive, and so acute in personal hurt that the result is frenzied activity. We shriek for a death penalty, we pass brutal legislation, we make sure more people are starving and homeless and without any resources. We blame victims and we look for vulnerable scapegoats and they are everywhere. As government's role recedes, Lester Thurow points out, capitalism and democracy clash. Democracy, he points out, is radical equality. Capitalism is radical inequality.

We must look at — and own — the intractable pain induced by a government that no longer cares and is careless, a government endorsed by an arrogant and unfeeling gang of political thugs, and simply endured by a growing number of American citizens.

Urban Meditation

Today I've been reading Kip Tiernan and Fran Froelich's Urban Meditations, a collection of testimonials and other writing by Kip and those who have given inspiration during her more than forty years as a Boston urban minister. I was happily surprised to find this 1998 poem by Norma Laurenzi, a woman I knew in the late-80s and early-90s as a core activist in our Homes Not Bombs homeless direct-action organizing group. Norma was a front-line staff at Pine Street Inn, and was one of those extraordinary people whose passion for the poor derives from equal parts love and anger.

Easter, 1998

In Search of God,
No, no, not high above the alter,
but way below in the subway.
Not in the church
But behind it,
Bent over the heating grate.
No, not Sunday mass
But the mass that rises
In cement fields
With dirty dawn:
Climbing out of dumpsters.
Peeling from the pavement
Worming out of
Torched car windows.

I saw him.
His legs are lost in Korean landmines
And Boston snow banks.
His fingers ground
In factory machinery
Or green and thrown out
In hospital trash.
His lungs are eaten
Away with T.B., holes the size
Of nickels and dimes.
His jaw is sunken —
The teeth dropped out —
He sucks stone crusts till soft
Enough to swallow.

Go ahead,
Keep climbing mountains,
Examining sunsets,
Waiting for wind
To whisper answers.
I tell you he's here where:
One wooden foot keeps stepping
In front of the other, where
Fingerless palms
Balance cups in food lines,
Where tattered veils of lungs
Inhale and exhale,
And tongues keep finding
Nourishment in garbage.
He's most beautiful here
In this shrunken, aching mass of stumps
That keeps rising, rising, rising
Every dirty-rose dawn
To start all over again.

— Norma Laurenzi

Kip Tiernan's River Babies

One of the very first people I ever heard challenge homeless advocates to go beyond services to structural solutions was Kip Tiernan, a Boston activist out of the Catholic Worker mold. Kip is still around and at 77 continues to direct Boston's Poor People's United Fund with her longtime associate Fran Froelich.

She and Fran have recently published Urban Meditations, a work they describe as "outcast political theology" that is a reflection on forty years of urban ministry. I've been thinking of her lately because voices such as hers are so rare yet so badly needed. I first became acquainted with Kip's work in the late-80s, when she was a fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, and was working out a structural analysis of homelessness.

Kip was the first person I ever heard ask the question "Qui Bono," or who benefits? Having seen Good Will Hunting, I can't hear this phrase anymore without thinking of Matt Damon's retort, "Qui gives a shit?" In a time when more people seem to care about the next American Idol than the problem of increasing inequality, that's not a bad question to pose either.

I'll always be grateful to Kip for starting me down this path and for turning me on to radical theologian Walter Bruggeman, who in The Prophetic Imagination said "Situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency." There's a lot in there to unpack.

Today someone asked me what I thought about Project Homeless Connect in San Fransisco. Apparently the US Interagency Council on Homelessness has adopted this program as one of their best practice models, which means that it is likely to spread. In fact, their website says it has already been duplicated in 106 cities.

On the surface, it looks like a good thing. Huge amounts of corporate support are linked up with government and non-profit resources to offer volunteer driven assistance fairs that link homeless people up with services. Longtime San Fransisco homeless activist Paul Boden says that while the both the volunteers and the homeless people who line up the night before care about the problem and want to see solutions, it's a bit of a media show that creates the mistaken impression that if only homeless people would just ask, they'd get the help they need. They ARE asking, says Paul, every day. And typically, the help isn't really there.

The question reminded me of Kip's signature story, which I've embellished and taken to telling as well.

Imagine a village where life is good. People have what they need and more. In some cases, much more. This village, where life is good, is filled with good people.

One day, someone notices a basket floating down river. There is a wailing sound. A girl wades out and finds a baby that needs to be rescued. A temporary home is quickly found and arrangements for care are made.

The next day, several more baskets arrive, and the day after that, the flow increases even more. After a few weeks of this, a crisis is declared. Meetings are held, resources are appropriated, and the Coalition for the Survival of Basket Babies is formed.

Over time, the trickle of baskets floating down river turns into a deluge. The village gets really, really good at dealing with the problem. There are rescue teams that can pull baskets out of the river in any weather and hardly ever miss one. This matters, since further down river there is a huge waterfall. There are teams of volunteers who spend all day mashing bananas and apples for the babies to eat. A dairy farm is dedicated to the purpose of providing milk. Churches erect baby dormitories where volunteers tend to their needs and seek to place them with loving families. A basket recycling center is created to mitigate the environmental impact. The pulp is mixed with cotton fiber to create cloth for diapers.

This is adopted as a best practice in hundreds of other villages that are experiencing similar problems.

About ten perent of the village resources are now dedicated to mitigating the baby crisis. People feel really good about it and are imbued with a strong sense of purpose. But despite the enormous infrastructure that now exists, and despite the great skill, caring, and generosity that has gone into its creation, the babies are still coming down river in great numbers. And oddly, no one ever goes up river to see if the flow can be stopped at its source.

When someone finally does, no one listens to what she says. The up river solution might mean that some of the people who have way more than they need might have to do with less. This is a controversial idea, and the villagers don't want to make the wealthy town fathers angry. They're the biggest financial supporters of the rescue operation.