Boats Against the Current
After writing weekly columns about homelessness for two-and-a-half years, I’m ready to put what I’ve learned into book form. It will be my 30th book and maybe my last, although (as chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes states) “of making many books there is no end.” But since I have written a lot, I’ll paraphrase the opening of the Declaration of Independence: “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires” that I declare the reason for writing a book on homelessness when a bunch already exist.
Some of those books are by reporters who have lived with homeless people. Others are by opinion writers who have sat in their offices and proposed policies. The “unique selling proposition” of my book is that I meld personal experience with policy analysis and add new perspectives at both ends. In short, this book is about (1) people who populate homeless shelters, (2) the construction of thoughtful programs, (3) the institutions we need to reduce the number of people sleeping on the streets, and (4) what we learn from history.
I have some personal history here. In the 1970s, I learned a little about homelessness by sleeping on the floor of a San Francisco shelter amid wall-to-wall bodies. In the 1990s, I learned more by posing as a homeless man in Washington, D.C., and visiting shelters in New York, Chicago, and Texas. In the 2020s, I’ve lived in shelters in Missouri, California, and Colorado. What I’ve seen repeatedly is that some of the experts in the U.S. Capitol are not as wise as observers from a century ago whose insights are buried in the stacks of the Library of Congress a block away.
The prime goal of relief, our poverty-fighting predecessors argued, was not material distribution but “affiliation . . . the reabsorption in ordinary industrial and social life of those who for some reason have snapped the threads that bound them to the other members of the community.” In practice, whenever homeless individuals looked for material assistance, charity workers sought information about relatives, neighbors, or former coworkers or co-worshippers.
A century later, I’ve sought that as well, and in the process seen why typical media coverage of homelessness — parachute into a shelter and stick a microphone in someone’s face — is so inadequate. The typical interview is the equivalent of pouring a cup of hot coffee and expecting a person to chug it down. In my experience, interviewees take sips. Sometimes in four days, deeper answers emerge — but not in four minutes.
The acronym, SIPS, which stands for “short-term, institutional, parental, and subterranean,” describes how the people I interview typically divulge their past. They offer complaints: a boss was bad, a cop was corrupt, a lover was unlovely, or rents are too damn high. They recount how failing institutions didn’t help floundering people: poor schools, an ineffective war on drugs, a lack of good mental health programs, and so forth.
Those short-term first day or institutional second day accounts often make sense, but a question lingers: Why do others who suffer similarly avoid homelessness? That’s why I ask about childhood trauma. Some people on the first day say mom and dad were great, but on the third day they’ll tell me about physical and verbal abuse, sexual abuse by a single mom’s boyfriend, and so forth. Some stories would figuratively curl your hair, and others literally: thermal burns from electric curling irons.
The long-lasting impact of childhood trauma reminds me of a book published exactly a century ago, The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald penned one of literature’s great last lines: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Individuals replay the behavior they learned from parents, who often learned it from grandparents.
Avoiding homelessness sometimes means rowing hard against a strong current, but some do. What is clear is how alone many among the homeless are. The plight of many goes beyond having no relatives or friends who will take them in. Many don’t trust anyone. Many have no purpose in living except survival from day to day. Many have no belief in God, or they may say a sadistic god targets them. Whether they have their own cubicle or sleep in a room with a hundred others, many are alone.