I've noticed a problem in social services.
Anyone who receives need-based financial support has had the resources to seek it, resources which had in the first place eliminated those persons' need to seek financial support.
Similarly, anyone who requires need-based financial support won't get it, because the lack of resources that leads to that need also prevents the possibility of seeking help.
It's an alarming catch-22, almost completely true-to-form of joseph heller's literary model:
If someone requests a certification of 'crazy' to get out of active military duty, then they're obviously not crazy -- a sane person would obviously not want to fight in war. So, that person is necessarily not granted the certification, because they're not crazy.
If someone wants to apply for some sort of need-based government support (such as SSDI -- Social Security Disability Income), they need to wade through a beaurocratic maze of forms, 'red tape', and mailings (which require an address). The ability to do this requires individual resources or support network resources, the likes of which those truly in need necessarily don't have.
'The system', as it's set up, ensures that the only people who get need-based financial assistance don't need it, while those who need it aren't able to get it.
Biff: I'd like to apply for SSDI.
Spliff: very well, fill out this paperwork.
Biff: here you go -- here is all of the paperwork, filled out correctly.
Spliff: the ability to fill out your paperwork disqualifies you from receiving SSDI. Sorry! Next in line...
Of course, this isn't official policy, and a great many of those who apply get benefits. But this is the point -- those who apply for them don't really need them, whereas those who really need them can't apply for them.
The homeless are in dire need of help, and are unable to get this help for the very reasons their need is so dire.
Are there some people who choose homelessness over the burdens of a civilized life? Undoubtedly. These people don't need or want help, and are likely to take advantage of any help intended to propel them into society in some productive way. These are the bums -- able to work, but unwilling to work. But, these cases are easy to recognize, especially with some diagnostic expertise. Those in need are the homeless (especially urban homeless) who have a condition that places them in their situation.
One of the best ways to provide help for the homeless is to keep the bums away, a point that sounds ironic but actually is not.
Is laziness such a condition? Not really, because the lazy are forced into a choice: abject poverty and homelessness, or some minimal work-effort. My focus is on those who are forced into homelessness, and who do not have that choice because of an inability to put in that minimal work-effort. Or, they may be so far gone, mentally, that they suffer silently in their fantasy worlds without awareness of their options. Someone like this probably isn't able to work, anyhow.
There are a few people in need who have NO potential solution -- there's just no way they're going to be able to get help, even through the cleverest navigation of obstacles. These are those with no personal resources, and no support network. They have no one to help them fill out the forms.
It's doubtful that even the most die-hard conservative would deny that there are people in need of help who cannot help themselves. very, very few will admit to subscribing to a vicious social darwinism, espousing that although these people exist, they should NOT be helped. Beginning to exist beyond statistical noise are conservatives who believe that those unable to help themselves should be helped, but don't care to think about how; not even self-proclaimed liberals like to pay taxes. This is partly because taxes will just go to build nuclear bombs, and partly because today's liberals are fashionably lefty, insufferable hypocrites. Of course only the stupid and uncultured are conservative; hoarding your money in the face of plenitude is perfectly ok.
As I implied, I'm concerned not so much with the homeless per se as with those suffering from debilitating mental illness, a condition that, along with the absence of an active support-network, often leads to living in the streets. This is why one sees so few homeless young people, or even homeless, crazy young people -- their parents are likely still alive. This, of course, does not include those idiot youngsters who opt for homelessness as some kind of 'life adventure', there being nothing else to quell their postmodern angst, and who return home when they start to get cold.
I'm a fascist socialist, and if appointed to power I would, based on my ideals of 'to each according to his need, from each according to his ability', seize the resources of the rich and redistribute them in an ongoing process carefully undertaken until everyone has the same. then, people will start to think my regime is going to rip what i earn away from me, and it will care for my basic necessities regardless. So, I'm not going to work too hard'. Then, there will be drastically fewer resources in the whole system, both to trade with and to distribute internally, so me-land becomes desperately poor, and people die. Fascist socialism doesn't really work, as we sort of recently discovered, I think around the time I was in junior high school.
We need mostly free capitalism to keep things moving along, but we need to recognize, and make active, vigilant, continuous efforts to recognize those who are UNABLE to function in this society (but would like to), and help them. I suppose this is what we do anyway, sort of, but I think we as a society need to be more proactive about it, and not assume, in our beaurocratic dream-world, that crazy joe homeless is going to fill out SSDI form 8478 in triplicate.
Here is my solution:
An organization that has drivers in big vans comb the city and pick up homeless people, possibly luring them into the vans with $5-bills or cases of beer. Then, the vans take them to a facility where they are carefully evaluated by a resident internist for physical illness, and by a resident psychiatrist for mental illness. If they are determined to suffer from either or both, then a resident lawyer and team of various administrative staff aggressively files for disability insurance benefits on the indigent person's behalf, based on their diagnosed condition. Or, as would would be the case in many situations, a client would be admitted to a state psychiatric hospital where they'd at least get food and shelter, if not viable treatment. I've noticed that a great many homeless, many of whom ride the BART all day, are more or less totally delusional.
While benefits are pending for those who would benefit from them, shelter, food and medical treatment (including psychiatric medication) are provided in an enormous warehouse-like building. Career-counseling and job skill-training are provided, even to the mentally healthy homeless, either on-site or in conjunction with a funded college program. The mentally healthy homeless also benefit from an address, clothing, cab fare, and job listings. When benefits are received or sufficient training is deemed to have taken place, residents are required (if health deems possible) to find a job and housing, in the meantime using the association and its mailroom as an address. If the homeless person in question is there for job skills, a shower, mailbox and clothing, then he or she will be allowed continued residence until hi or she accumulates enough money for a move-in fee or security deposit.
If it's not possibly for the resident to accomplish this due to mental or physical illness, then the association will find permanent, funded care and housing for the resident, such as in a state psychiatric hospital. Long-term or permanent association residence is to be avoided at all costs. There's no time limit set on residency, but cases will be evaluated in terms of continuous progress and goal-achievement.
The problem of the psychiatric hospital and the totally indigent deserves a bit of further discussion. When I was working at 'taylor manor' private psychiatric hospital, there was in effect a 'no dumping' policy. In fact, I think it may have been the law. 'dumping' is the practice of driving to a facility, leaving a potential resident on the doorstep, and then driving away.
Since a hospital can't eject these persons into the street if they're deemed healthy, the hospital might end up being, in effect, a homeless shelter. The 'no dumping' policy make sense, but unfortunately it prevents a mentally ill homeless person without a support network from effectively helping his or herself in that way (getting someone to drop them off there). Taylor manor was set far off into the woods -- it's doubtful that a crazy person would walk to the shelter, so to speak.
I presented my depiction of the imaginary association as I did to exaggerate a problem: an association like this would unload an enormous tax burden, or require massive corporate funding. Since totalitarian socialism and flat wealth-redistribution doesn't work, what people are willing to give has to be considered.
Some homeless, mentally ill or not, are likely to avoid training and going out on their own after receiving benefits, and will prefer to stick around being fed while sleeping in class, not because they're bums but because it's what they're used to, and what they've learned to do. However, a few will do it because they are bums; hopefully, most bums will have been weeded out with early diagnosis and assessment, except the very clever ones. Mwaha. Also, I'm sure the relapse rate would be high -- we'd see a lot of former residents coming back. This further illustrates that many (most?) who don't help themselves do not because they cannot, as opposed to will not. Fine line, of course.
Disability benefits coming to residents might help with the costs, since those payments can be legally applied to any residency. But I'm not sure it'd be enough to keep the program going -- it might have to be a BIG, resource-intensive program to work on any scale, at least initially. After a while, maybe the association could get by less staff, space, food, etc.
A solution might be to scale back the idea quite a bit, and do something viable with grant and taxpayer support, without causing riots in the streets. For instance, one or two used vans and a shelter with food, use of nearby PO boxes and one or two nonprofit-loving, inexpensive, hippy 20-somethings, practically working for free as a pair of admins. There's no shortage of these types in san francisco, at least -- here there aren't enough nonprofits to go around. Help-recipients would be sent to the local YMCA to get cleaned up.
One or two doctors might provide a few hours a week pro bono, as might one or two lawyers in case the two-person administrative staff encountered a few problem-cases. If payments were to arrive for a particular client, the staff would locate an apartment or mental health facility somewhere and send the client on his or her way. Maybe some money could be contributed to a security deposit or move-in fee, if necessary.
This is about as small as I can get things -- probably doable. There would even be advantages to such a small system; primarily and ironically, elimination of the red-tape and beaurocracy that would slow things down. Of course, the presence of mostly hippy youngsters working at the monolithic, corporation-style association might keep it on the move. Contrast this to parasitic civil servants working for the government in search of easy pay.
Any rate, anything would be better than the current system, which pretty much does nothing proactive to help. there are facilities in san francisco that give out 200 paperwork-free dollars or so a month to walk-in individuals according to some standard of appraised need, but this is not enough. At the very, very least, the homeless should be 'dumped' at psychiatric hospitals across the nation; an epidemic of dumping.
Regardless of the details, a necessary solution to the problem of assuming the value of and helping people who cannot help themselves requires proactivity. We can't sit around and refusing to see them, helping only those few who seek help, by which they indicate that they don't really need help. We need to thrust help upon those who need it.
But aren't business free to hire whom they please? Maybe not -- perhaps tougher non-discrimination laws should be put into effect to protect those without proper attire, proper hygiene, proper speech, or proper haircuts.
That's somewhat facetious. Problems are to be solved as they come up. Of course, some employers are more lenient than others (mcdonalds). But these jobs don't allow for the urban homeless to find residence in their city; perhaps the homeless could be relocated to a little country, cheap-rent town with a few mcdonalds restaurants.
Or, drivers in big vans can comb the city and pick off homeless people with a scoped .45 rifle. It really depends on which is more economically viable.
That's totally facetious, but it does illustrate that no solution is perfect, and that all one can reasonably hope for is a partial solution. It's up to the competence of altruists to ensure that this partiality is kept to a minimum.
I spend a disturbingly large percentage of my waking hours on the BART, the bay area subway. BART stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit. I am beginning to hate it utterly.
This doesn't contribute to my hatred of it, but I'll mention it nonetheless, because it was so striking to me. The BART is a phenomenally, disturbingly similar doppleganger of the DC metro. It looks the same -- the seats, seat covers, poles, doors, floor, lights, emergency operator contact boxes, and EVERYTHING precisely match their DC counterparts. It sounds the same when it starts up, slows down, and drives along, except that it's a lot louder; more on that later. It smells the same. I'm 99% sure that if I were to google around a bit I'd find that the same italian company that made the DC metro also made the BART.
Here is why I hate the BART: it comes infrequently and not on time. it goes almost nowhere interesting in san francisco; it shoots into the business district in a little single-branch spout, and then ploughs southwest a little ways before stopping. Compare this to the DC metro, which spiders all over the city, and has vastly superior suburban commuter service. The BART goes out, I think, on three lines. it doesn't serve south bay at all. So, huge sections of the bay area, and huge sections of san francisco, are totally neglected.
But the worst thing, the thing that pisses me off the most, is the unforgivably terrible station signage. The signs in every station that tell one where one is are spaced maybe 50 feet apart, hang from the station ceiling, aren't lit, and are faded off-white-on-brown.
When one is a standing BART passenger (which frequently happens, due to the 5 million bay area residents BARTing about), the signs are totally invisible, outside of the window-frame; one has to crouch when the train enters a station, hope that the crouch coincides with the BART passing one of the signs, and then hope that the sign is visible in the dark, murky underground station through the glass in one's BART-car, which is serving more as a mirror than a window due to the florescent inside-lights.
On top of this, 90% of BART operators squawk/grunt barely audible, totally incomprehensible station arrival announcements. So, the upshot is that the only way one is going to know where the hell one is on the accursed BART is if one has an intuitive sense of how long it takes to get from start to destination. Most bay area residents have mastered this delicate art, but it's very difficult for a newcomer to grasp.
BART is incredibly expensive. I spend about $200 a month on BART tickets -- it costs me $6.20 to get to and from work on a given day, which is about a work-hour's worth of pay, and three hours of my life. if I were to do this until I die, riding on the BART would consumed four and a half years of my life.
Finally, BART is unbearably loud. When passing through a tunnel, not only is it impossible to hear anything else, but it's really, genuinely LOUD. It's loud to the point where if it were much louder, it would damage a rider's eardrums.
Apparently, the BART won some sort of award, voted in by the Northern California Committee of Self-Worship. A lot of that goes on here -- north californians in general, especially bay area residents, and even more especially berkeley-ians and san franciscans, KNOW that their locale is culturally, economically, practically and aesthetically superior to the rest of the country.
If northern californians had their way, they'd break off from the rest of poor, drooling, idiot america and take off in a great landship piloted by the lemurians (google them), which are a race of aliens who live under mount shasta in the foothills of the cascade mountains , and who capture the imaginations and conspiracy theorizing of many northern californians. Apparently.
I think the bay area is pretty much full of shit, and the only thing that makes it nicer and more interesting than the rest of the country is its weather, and possibly its produce, which are related.
Back to BART-bashing. There are three posters that are visible on the walls of BART cars: safety posters, and advertisements of two types. The first type features a grinning human. I'm sure you've seen these -- there is some text, like 'get a monthly cell phone plan you can afford', and a huge photo of some grinning idiot, often a Person of Color.
This is one of the new paradigms in advertising: mention the product or service in text, and then superimpose that text over a close-up of some smiling fool in business attire. The point, of course, is that the ad-viewer is supposed to identify with the grinning idiot -- to see his or herself as a happy, successful business-person. Well, not quite. Her or she will become a happy, successful business-person as soon as he or she buys the product featured in the superimposed text. then he or she will become the grinning idiot!
The other type of BART advertisement is one whose primary feature is really short phrases, with every word capitalized and in block-letters, ending in a big, block-period. Sometimes, the ad-men are so desperate to include their block-periods that they screw up the grammar. Here's an example:
I see this friggin ad just about every time I ride the friggin BART. Of course, it should read:
...but the boners at 'Slimebag Advertising Inc' were so desperate to use periods that they just couldn't resist putting one in, ignoring the desperate pleas of their editors.
'But it doesn't make sense! It makes us sound illiterate!'
'Silence, peon. Studies have shown that ads consisting of short phrases with every word capitalized and ending with a period have a greater impact on the consumer, since they imply finality and authority. We're keeping the period'.
(weep weep weep weep)
I would have expected a bit more from apple inc, which seems to be a moderately intelligently-run company with a few standards, but I guess not. Who knows about bose -- it's an indian company.
Sometimes, the grinning idiot is combined with the big block- period; these ads sell the most widgets.
Anyway, the third poster I see every single day on the BART, gazing at it as the train roars through a tunnel at 150 decibels, is a BART safety poster. Three phrases from the poster stick in my head: 1) high voltage electric paddle-device, 2) rescue train, and 3) transbay tunnel. I think these are sort of interesting, somewhat poetic concepts, which would be a lot more interesting if I didn't SEE THEM EVERY SINGLE DAY.
I should really bring a book on the BART. BART. BART. Ipod. Meet BART. Ride the Bart. (picture of a grinning african-american woman) BART. Meet Bart. Grinning Idiot, Meet Transbay Tunnel.
There is still more evidence of my imminent nervous breakdown. sometimes, when I'm at work in 'my' art supply store, I must stock paints. Artist's paints, as you might know if you've ever bought them, have the most ridiculous, pretentious, nonsensical color-names ever contrived.
A painter only needs four huge tubes of paint: primary red, primary yellow, primary blue, black and white. From this, everything is mixable, including 'medium alizarin rose (light hue)'. For this one, mix red and white.
Even though they're available, these primary colors aren't labeled as such. Primary blue is 'ultramarine', primary red is something like 'alizarin crimson', and primary yellow might be 'cadmium yellow'.
Why? Why?!? Why?!? Is there some reason there can't be oil paints called RED, BLUE, BLACK and WHITE? We can't even have black and white; these are 'zinc white', 'titanium white', etc, and black is 'mars black', 'some other black I can't remember', etc.
Instead, we have hundreds of tiny little tubes, costing about $10 a-piece, with idiotic names. Some of these names that have taken a particularly powerful hold on my subconscious mind.
Whenever I see 'quinacridone' anything (red or green, I think), I pronounce this word with really exaggerated italian inflection and accent: 'keen-AK-rrri-DOUGH-nay'.
Whenever I see 'naples yellow', I call it 'nipples yellow' (hawhaw).
Whenever I see 'phthalo' anything (just green and blue, possibly), i say 'phthalo! PHTHALO!!' to myself in a violent little whisper, just because 'phthalo' is such a bizarre word, and it's fun to get the 'ph' and 'th' into one sound.
Whenever I see anything 'hue', especially 'blue hue', I do something strange to the 'oo' sound -- something like a french 'u', which is a sound that can be made by pronouncing an english 'ee' sound with an 'oo'-shaped mouth. This is particularly fun with 'bleu hyeu'.
This next one is definitely the most bizarre. When I see 'yellow ochre', I call it 'ogre jelly'. Before you call the concord state mental hospital, let me explain.
I had a friend, back when I was in 5th grade or so, with whom I used to play dungeons and dragons. This is a role-playing game, if you aren't a big dork and don't know, in which there are lots of fantastical monsters that attack you (the player character).
One of them is called an 'ochre jelly', and is just that: a blob of jelly that is ochre. The blob attacks by glopping on top of your character and dissolving it, or something. I don't know -- it's been a long time since I've played. Anyway, this friend of mine made up a new monster (which is perfectly kosher, in 'dungeons and dragons'). He called it an 'ogre jelly', and I think it was a blob that transformed into an ogre when it wanted to.
I'm reminded of this, and I mutter 'ogre jelly' to myself whenever i see a tube of yellow ochre, which is sort of a brownish-yellow (mix yellow, a bit of black, a bit of red, and a smidgen of blue).
When I see 'permanent' anything (this can apply to any color), I pronounce it 'permanement', just like daffy duck in the old warner brothers cartoons.
In general, I make a point of silently pronouncing to myself the bizarre names of each color. I'm reasonably certain that I'm the only associate in the store who can do this, or even thinks about the jumbles of letters as potentially spoken words. I think my pronunciations are close to 100% accurate, too.
Oil paints sometimes don't have 'oil paint' written on them (in fact, most art supplies don't tell you, on their packaging, what they actually are or do), but instead 'coleur d'huile'. So, I mutter this to myself in french with my lovely parisian accent.
When I concentrate, it's parisian. When I let myself go and start speaking fast, it becomes a synthesis of bumfuck southern french and quebecois. I talked with some french teacher/paint-buyer the other day, even though both of us (of course) could speak english. We were basically showing off for the rest of the staff and customers.
I think there are more examples of paint-speak, but that's all I can think of. I'd add more in future blogs, but that would be dumb.