Harvest of Shame

By the fall of 1984, I'd settled in at UMass-Amherst. Life as a student radical agreed with me. The collectively run house I'd moved into lived on vegetables, tofu, and whole grains, which were purchased at the Belchertown Coop and kept in large jars beneath the kitchen counter. We had a chore wheel and decided things in house meetings. I'd joined the puritanical left. Nobody smoked, drank to excess, or took drugs. Sex was OK, but we didn't much talk about it.

During my first year, I was placed on academic probation after flunking French and balancing my one A in Marxist American History with a few Cs. As someone who had skipped most of high school, I was poorly prepared for college. I didn't really know how to study, and the undiagnosed ADHD didn't help either. I wouldn't figure that one out for another twenty years. As long as my coursework mostly involved reading and writing, I was fine. I decided to major in Social Thought and Political Economy and minor in journalism.

My girlfriend Kathleen had a job as a typesetter, and taught me her trade on some funky little terminal that used cassette tapes for memory. I soon landed a job on a Varityper making posters and brochures for student organizations. This was a computer terminal that saved jobs to big floppy disks and printed text to photographic paper. I'd cut out the lines and columns with a metal ruler and exacto blade and use a waxer, light table, and border tape to make things all nice and balanced.

The Radical Student Union was homebase between classes, and the Student Communications Office, which housed my beloved Varityper, was just downstairs. I was happy. Overwrought, but happy.

The College Republicans had a strong- well-funded chapter and offered a convenient nemesis. The Contra War in Nicaragua was in full swing and there were US-funded horror shows in El Salvador and Guatemala as well. Nuclear proliferation and star wars threatened the planet, and apartheid was just beginning to surface as a campus issue.

The night Ronald Reagan was re-elected, a farmhouse party in Belchertown culminated in a solemn flag burning ceremony as we held hands in a circle and sang We Shall Overcome.

That was just the sort of thing we did back then.

Reaganomics, which was characterized by heightened military spending, tax cuts for the wealthy and the middle-class, and large cuts in government spending, especially that directed toward the poor, was bringing homelessness back on a scale that hadn't been seen since prior to World War II.

The call went out from Mitch Snyder's Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) that protesters were needed in Washington, DC for their month long Harvest of Shame action. We rented a van on the RSU's dime and drove the 400 miles to get ourselves good and arrested. Our English anarchist friend Fiona taught us a song from her homeland that we sang every chance we got:

Trash trash, trash all the nation
We are the anarchist generation,
We're gonna find a new direction
We're gonna have an insurrection.

BOLTCUTTERS! Devolution,
We're gonna have a, revolution
Something, something something,
Something something, something
TRASH TRASH!!

As our group of baby radicals broke into song at the slightest excuse, the older and clearly exhausted activists from DC would look at us in wonder, and then be happy that we were leaving after the weekend.

When we arrived, Mitch Snyder was in the 43rd or 44th day of a fast that had come to the point of being seriously life-threatening. At issue was $5 million dollars that the CCNV wanted from DC to renovate their famous shelter for 800. This was where we came for our CD training and orientation. This was my first real brush with homeless activism. Hundreds of people had arrived for the climactic end to the month of action and around 80 of us would be arrested in front of the Capitol the next day.

The CD itself was one of those highly choreographed things that involve groups of people going limp and being flexi-cuffed and carted — with various degrees of delicacy — off to jail. Our group went to DC Central Cell Block. Most of the arrestees posted $80 in bail and were free. We, on the other hand, were prepared to gum up the system with our bodies.

The system pretty much took it in stride. We were placed two to a cell in four by eight rooms that had steel plates suspended from the walls as beds and a toilet and small sink. Three times a day they would trundle a laundry cart down the aisle that was filled with paper bags. Each held a baloney, mayonnaise and white bread sandwich and a plain donut. The donuts tasted like baloney. There was also coffee, which was terrible.

Some of us took this as an opportunity to fast. We devised a game that used sandwiches in baggies as a sort of a hockey puck. The goal was to get it through the feeding slot of the opposite cell. Opponents were allowed to block the hole with their hands, but not from the inside. Periodically we'd fish the sandwiches from the hallway using a belt.

The lights were on constantly. It was a long, three day weekend. We lost sense of time. The highlight for all of us was when Todd, who had all of Alice's Restaurant memorized down to the slightest inflection, performed the whole thing at 3 am. The real prisoners down the hall yelled for him to "shut the fuck up."

Eventually, we were taken to court where a judge dismissed our charges and were reunited with the women radicals who had gone to a different jail. They complained of mushy broccoli and scratchy blankets. We, on the other hand, had done hard time, with nothing but baloney and donuts.

I broke my glasses by rolling over them as they laid on the steel plate of my bed. My cell mate was a gay friend named Matthew. We amused ourselves by telling people my glasses were smashed in an attempted jail rape.

Snyder ended his fast on the 49th day when the District of Columbia capitulated to the CCNV's demands. He had lost fifty-seven pounds. When asked if he was afraid to die, Snyder said, "No. It's painful, but I have a greater fear of allowing people to languish like animals, and sometimes I'm afraid I'm not doing enough."

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

Full Employment My Ass

Last night, pathetically enough, I entertained myself by poking around on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. The national unemployment rate in July was just 4.6%. This is what we call full employment.

During the Reagan administration the definition of unemployed was changed to only reflect those who actually receive unemployment benefits. When the benefits run out, you no longer count. So even Flint, Michigan, a city that has become the poster child for economic desolation, has just 8.6% unemployment. Not bad at all.

If you include, says the BLS, the marginally attached (those who say they want work but aren't looking very hard) and discouraged workers (a subset of the marginally attached who give a job market-related reason for not currently seeking work), then the 4.6% national average rockets right on up to 5.5%

These are numbers that seek to hide the obvious, and for the most part they work as intended. Structural unemployment, which is usually defined as the mismatch between available jobs and skills brought about by shifts in markets and economies, isn't something we talk about much.

If you look at unemployment rankings by city, you'll see that in my hometown of Sioux Falls, SD, just 2.3% are looking for work. Sioux Falls is a low-wage town in a right-to-work state that has so many lousy jobs that people can work two or three of them at a time and still have plenty of work for everyone.

Well, almost everyone. Just 265 miles to the west on the Rosebud Reservation, actual unemployment is estimated at 82%. Over at Pine Ridge, things are even worse. Maybe they should all move to Sioux Falls.

Just kidding. They hate Indians there.

Consider this, from a NYT article on unemployment rates among black men, which says that even when the economy does great, some people still fall behind:

¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

But just because people have been disappeared doesn't mean they totally stop looking for work. This helps to explain why, when it comes to low-wage work, the laws of supply and demand are suspended. No matter how low unemployment rates get, wages on the bottom rarely rise. That's how the system works, and it's working perfectly.

Zero Tolerance for Dehumanization

Today the police brought formal charges against my friends Rainee and Bruce. I can't remember the last time I've felt so angry about anything. The details surrounding their case are so outrageous that it's hard to accept that they are in great danger, but they may well be.

They could go to prison, lose their daughter, and have everything that they've struggled to achieve destroyed. But they probably won't. Their counsel is the lead medical marijuana lawyer in the area, and the media, Real Change included, seems to be taking a keen interest. For now, I'm optimistic.

"How could anybody do that to someone?"

The answer lies in the word "someone." Drug users, like homeless people, are considered subhuman. So we're not dealing with "someone" at all. We're dealing with the dehumanized Other, who does not merit our empathy.

Heather left a comment on last week's Drug Users in Belltown post directing me to an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled Your Brain on Drug Addicts. As it turns out, I'm a subscriber, and the article was in the pile below my coffee table.

Here's what it says. Brain imaging studies confirm what many of us already know. For most people, drug addicts and homeless people do not trigger empathy. They trigger disgust. They don't really even register as people.

With co-author Susan T. Fiske, also of Princeton, Harris chose which out-groups to show on the basis of stereotypes about them and the emotions they evoke. Fiske previously noted that the stereotypes of out-groups vary on two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warm and competent groups like American Olympic athletes inspire pride. Warm groups that are deemed unable to act on their warmth, such as the elderly or disabled, elicit pity. Cold groups that are nevertheless competent, such as the rich, induce envy. And groups that are low on both warmth and incompetence – drug addicts and homeless people – arouse disgust.

Fiske and Harris showed photographs of these four kinds of outgroups to 10 Princeton undergraduates as they lay in an fMRI scanner. To 12 other Princeton undergraduates they presented photographs of inanimate objects that aroused the same emotions as did the out-groups – for example, a sports car to induce envy, or an overflowing toilet to evoke disgust. They found that the pictures of the objects, homeless people, and drug addicts did not excite the mPFC, although they did activate brain regions associated with emotions.

So there it is. Were one actually dealing with another human being, the idea of manipulating an eight-year old who's beloved grandfather had just died to bust a couple who grow prescription medical marijuana for pain control would be unthinkable.

But if you're used to thinking of drug users as disgusting subhuman creatures who must be eliminated, then anything goes.

This is the issue that drew me to homelessness in the first place. Homeless people are widely regarded as subhuman. So are addicts and prisoners. When you have an expendable group of people who arouse disgust, terrible things can happen. The dehumanization of anyone leads to the dehumanization of us all.

Speaking of which ...

This week I fielded two press calls about downtown homelessness. The Downtown Seattle Association, as I said before, is on a new propaganda offensive over panhandling and public toilets. They are trying desperately to whip up some righteous indignation.

Thus far, they're not getting a lot of traction. But you can bet that they're not giving up. As the relationship between city and suburb changes, with cities becoming the new nucleus of upscale density, visible poverty is more unwelcome in urban centers everywhere.

Thus the fixation on "chronic" homelessness, and the companion stick approach, an escalation in the policing of the urban poor.

Being the angry sort of guy that I am these days, I'm finding diplomacy less and less appropriate to the moment. Last winter I had numerous conversations with the DSA's Peg Dreisenger and Anita Woo about the panhandling education campaign they had in the works. They were being reasonable, and so was I. I'm not wild about panhandling either.

They wanted an endorsement, but I wouldn't go that far. If they did their campaign in a way that focused on positive alternatives, as opposed to negative stereotypes, I said, I would not organize against them. They arrived at Have a Heart, Give Smart, and were rewarded with my public neutrality. I liked their brochure.

During our last meeting, Anita Woo, the DSA's communications staffer, told a story about a woman panhandler who was spotted hopping into her SUV to make a quick call on her Blackberry.

I laughed at her.

"You can't tell that story," I said. "It's like Ronald Reagan and his Cadillac driving Black welfare queens. It's apocryphal bullshit." We all laughed nervously.

She went on the radio during the launch of the campaign and told just that story. She punched away at all the buttons that the lit itself avoided. They're making a lot of money off of credulous do-gooders. It's all a big lucrative scam. They're mostly addicts. Etcetera. It's like they couldn't wait to take the fucking gloves off.

That was last January. Since then, they've escalated. Their position now is that, despite their panhandling education campaign, downtown begging is up by thirty-eight percent!

Woo trotted out the Blackberry story to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter just last week. You gotta love a good story.

Here's another one.

The DSA is also opposed to handing out sandwiches on the street. Here's a handy DSA guide to public policy: if it's visible downtown poverty, they want it to go away.

We were talking about downtown feeding, and Peggy Dreisenger, the affable manager of DSA's street program, told me the real reason one doesn't feed the poor.

Chronically homeless people have, through their years of alcohol and drug abuse, undermined the viability of their digestive organs. If one, therefore, feeds one of these wretches a sandwich, their body will reject it. They will throw up in the nearest bush, curbside, or sidewalk, and someone, probably one of her employees, will have to clean it up.

The do-gooders, she said, don't understand this.

I contained my amazement, walked back to Real Change, and told our editor what she had said. He knew. She'd said the same thing to him several weeks prior.

Since then, I've had the opportunity to ask the opinions of various health care professionals, each of whom were appalled at the story.

This story is about one thing. Dehumanization. This isn't something we should tolerate. Politeness, even here in Seattle, has its limits.