One thing I'll never get over is how much street folk desperately need to be seen as human. Today a recently beaten fellow asked me for a coffee, but what happened next was the heartbreaker. As I was making eye contact, his eyes welled up & he apologized. For what? He said for burdening me, because it was his fault he'd been beaten, because he'd said bad words. Just meeting him human to human was enough to spark his shame. He limped off then like so many: in need of therapy that will never come.
Over 600 unhoused live in Asheville. You cannot avoid their heartbreaking plight. Smarter people than I don’t have a solution. Housing is just one component.
One of my neighbors told me he was institutionalized when Reagan dumped the mentally ill on the streets. He has no memory from the 10 yrs in was drugged into compliance living off/on the street.
There is a chair in hell with Reagan’s name on it. He killed the middle class and replaced it with the homeless.
Oh Lindsay, what a gut punch. I often think about how much the carceral system and streetlife just wipes whole years off the human record. I'm so thankful to hear that your neighbour had a turn in fortune - but the number of people in need of systemic uplift just keeps growing, doesn't it?
And so many of us are *teetering*, which keeps the class war strong; so long as we think that folks worse off are threatening the thread we're holding on to, we'll never bring about better change.