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Homeless Bloggers: What's It's Like.
At Blogger Buzz I came across a posting that linked to this article at Wired News--"Laptops Give Hope to the Homeless"---explaining how homeless people can use blogging to re-connect with the world. There's also an excellent article at Salon.com about homeless blogger Kevin Barbieux.
Homelessness is a subject that causes me extreme anxiety if I stop to think about it. One of my dear friends is intensively involved in working with the homeless. Joe is a person of extraordinary grace, and also tact, who has no trouble looking another human being in the eye, without regard to the person's status. I am certain that he would address a homeless person, an A-list celebrity, the President, the prime minister of England, the Nobel prize laureate, and God with exactly the same equanimity. He is one of those people who can look suffering and humiliation in the eye, which is something that I have decided I must teach myself to do.
But the notion of a person living on the streets causes me intense anxiety. I worry a lot about my old age and whether I will survive it (hee). I am basically a contented person and I try very hard to like what I've got without coveting what I don't, but it's hard not to covet financial security. I do wonder what would happen to me if---God forbid; being widowed once ought to be sufficient---I outlive Nick and become ill or disabled.
The hardest part of looking directly with the homeless is realizing that they could be me. Some are just like me.
I think most of us are in denial about the people who have no place to go. We need to believe that there is something different about them; that for some reason they have chosen this life (or it has chosen them) because of some fatal flaw. But I have a fatal flaw: I find it difficult to help accept from anyone else. I do not like to be beholden. I'd rather live on the streets.
But what would that be like?
Postings at Blogger Buzz connected me to two blogs by two people, an English woman and an American man, who have gone through the failure-wringer----as in all the way through. They are very different people; but if you are willing to endure the pain, both can tell you if you're brave enough to listen exactly what it's like to stand in their shoes.
First, there is Wandering Scribe. No longer homeless, she got access to the net through libraries and such facilities. The theme of her life while homeless was shame; a constant contrivance not to be noticed by those who still had connections. She used blogging (when she can get to a computer) as a means of staying connected to the world.
[quote from Wandering Scribe's blog begins]
February 2006. For the past five months I have been living alone in a car at the edge of the woods — jobless and homeless and totally unable to find a way out of it. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't scream loudly enough, alI I can do is write. So here I am laying down tracks...hopefully the start of an online paper trail out of here.
[quote from Wandering Scribe's blog ends]
"Wandering Scribe," her blog of survival at the fringe, is here. It's written with British reserve and occasional wry humor; the tone when she speaks of her rootless life is dry and detached, untinged by self-pity though her shame leaks through. She can write.
She has now found a place to live. But she hasn't forgotten what it was like to be on the streets or what it is like now for other people.
[quote from Wandering Scribe's blog begins]
There were boiling hot days like these when I first slept out in the car.....[S]ometimes, when it had been there collecting heat all day, the car's metal could burn bare skin and the interior was full of exhausting, nauseating, oven-hot heat, unbearable, the kind you have to physically force yourself to get in to: my hair would frizz, my body stick to the seats, grimy sweat from walking about all day would slide in greasy streams and collect in hot pools underneath me, and the inside of my head throbbed with constant headaches from breathing the hot, dry air full of car fumes. ....I gulped down bottles and bottles of the tap water I kept under the seat, always more than luke-warm by then, and with nowhere to shower and nowhere to cool off, dreaded another day of it, and another night of willing myself, exhausted, to sleep across the heated car seats after it. Hot days as extreme as the cold ones, and in ways just as bad. ....
In this sizzling heat, there are plenty of people out there sleeping in their cars, people trying to make themselves invisible, finding a way to get through. But even I, sleeping out there in August and the beginnings of that false promise of an Indian summer we had last year, before the cold came, and more recently during those first shockingly hot days of May, don't know how they do it on a day like today.
[quote from Wandering Scribe's blog ends]
BBC Online has published two articles about her: the original article that made her a celebrity of sorts and a follow-up. She's been interviewed by the New York Times; you can hear the interview at her site. She has a book deal and her site has been nominated for a major award.
It's the sort of story that is all too likely to make Americans like me sigh with relief---see, we don't have to do anything about her! And the Lord does help those who help themselves! And anyway, she's English!
Of course it IS a relief; it's a relief to know that the intelligent and articulate who lose the path can make their way back again via a paper trail. The thing is: what about all those others she mentions? The ones who would strike as deranged, unwashed, thoroughly unattractive, the dregs of humanity? Who are uneducated and smell bad; or who are illiterate?
Well, never mind, they're English too. Not our problem!
But what about our own?
For your consideration: an American story, less lonely and hopeless and heart-wrenching than Wandering Scribe's, but in its way just as grindingly painful. Michael Brown of Greensboro, North Carolina, near where I used to live, started a blog called View from the Sidewalk. Unlike Wandering Scribe, he didn't start it until after he had started to find the way back. But he's still not out of the woods---I imagine that for a person who has once been homeless, there is a sense in which one is NEVER ought of the woods---and like Wandering Scribe, he can really tell the story, give you the real raw taste of his shame and anger. His writing is less polished; and it is anything but detached. He testifies.
He and his family were evicted; and though they didn't have to sleep out on the street, they had to do what I would like even less: accept help from relatives and friends. I can totally imagine being in his place if I lost my job.
This article at News-Record.com sums up his story in pertinent part:
[quote from Greensboro paper begins]
Brown, who works part time at a Kohl's store, said he has been looking for other work. He was a graphic designer for 13 years until he was fired from a job in 2003 -- for what reason, Brown said, he doesn't know. He hasn't been able to find another job in the field and has worked various jobs or freelanced since.
The bills began to mount, and eviction came Feb. 9 for the family, which includes Brown's wife, 17-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. A 20-year-old son is already on his own.
The family packed as much as they could into a 16-foot truck, and the contents of their home are now in a 10-by-20-foot storage space....
The Browns and their 17-year-old son stayed in hotels and with family in Durham. Their daughter also stayed for a week with a friend's grandmother. Brown said his family never spent a night on the street.
Still, the family struggled to find help. On his blog, Brown details going through a confusing maze of government agencies and groups that he said were not much help.
"We tried to plan, but it's hard when you have no experience doing it," he said.
Finally, a counselor at his daughter's elementary school recommended the Guilford Interfaith Hospitality Network, which coordinates churches to feed and house homeless families. The Browns and their two youngest children are now receiving help from the group.
[quote from Greensboro paper ends]
He hasn't been as unfortunate as Wandering Scribe or as (ultimately) fortunate. He's still struggling with both his circumstances and his emotions.
Michael Brown is a reflective man who thinks hard about the meaning of what's happening to him and who can speak firsthand about the sour aftertaste of failure, but who also brings that American belief in the power of a determined man to create change for himself:
[quote from Michael Brown's blog begins]
Speaking of guys in Jags, I did some thinking this morning while cleaning the kitchen* and my mind wasn't otherwise occupied. I recalled feeling a wave of resentment when I saw the guy in the Jag the other day. I asked myself why. Why did I feel resentment at the Jag driver? Had he harmed me or my family personally? No. Was I jealous? No. Was he a lawyer, and therefore worthy of my scorn**? Insufficient data. He could've just as easily been a doctor, an accountant or a university official. Was he driving recklessly, or otherwise endangering society? No.
Then why the heck was I so resentful?.... After pondering it a bit, I realized that the reason I was so resentful was that this guy represented all the possibilities I had either missed, squandered or overlooked. He had what he wanted. I didn't. Not sufficient reason to resent someone I didn't even know, sure. But enough to make me think through the reason I resented him.
As a result, I realized I didn;t really resent the Jag guy at all; I resented myself for not being him, and resented myself for having a hardscrabble life. The first I can't do anything about, but the second? Well, there's still time (even though I'll be 44 in less than two weeks). I can still go to training, or luck into a job comperable to the one I had at Trone. Hell, who knows? I might even hit the Powerball.
[quote from Michael Brown's blog ends]
He fends off self-pity and struggles with the same tendency to inertia all of us feel when we struggle and nothing seems to be about to come of it. He is wearily cognizant of American attitudes toward the poor and acknowledges that he himself feels impatient with some of them.
[quote from Michael Brown's blog begins]
[T]here are too many of us poor who think that it's cool to simply lay back and let the rest of society take care of them. All they do is give the rest of the poor a bad image by (what?) perpetuating a stereotype. There are many poor who struggle every day with jobs, health and child care, yet the image many in society see is the lazy, shiftless person who could work, but won't, and who uses the welfare system as a first course of action, not a last resort safety net. Sadly, I've run into too many of these people myself. But I take comfort in the fact that they're more rare than many political pundits would have you believe.
I try not to be lazy, but I have my days... Still, even though I take some welfare myself (food stamps and Medicaid, primarily for the kids) I'd rather pay my own way, so that I won't have to keep proving I'm poor to various and sundry social workers. On that note, some developments are occurring that I don't want to say too much about for fear of jinxing things. Stay tuned.
[quote from Michael Brown's blog ends]
He also says:
[quote from Michael Brown's blog begins]
Yes, I realize I could be worse off than I am; no, I'm not owed a damn thing; yes, I think that more people of means could be helping those of lesser means more; and no, I'm not going to shut up about the poor and homeless. Jesus said we will always have the poor with us; nowhere in the Bible does He say not to help them.
[quote from Michael Brown's blog ends]
Brown's View from the Sidewalk has a strong, gritty, masculine, down-to-earth North Carolina quality that naturally appeals to this ex-Carolinian. It's a strong contrast to the restrained stiff-upper-lip quintessentially English quiet desperation exemplified by Wandering Scribe. ["Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way..."]
While doing volunteer work in my own community, the one thing I learned is that people don't know what to do when they lose everything. When desperate people called me, I spent a lot of my time just finding out what resources were available to them and giving them phone numbers of people I hoped could help them. Interfaith Hospitality Network, the organization that helped the Browns, is a wonderful, wonderful resource that helped a number of people.
But there isn't as much as I expect many people, including most middle-class people I've spoken to, seem to believe. And to get through the process of getting help, you have to jump through many, many hoops, and you have to be able to get to places such as the Social Security Office or the Salvation Army.
When people called from smaller outlying counties with fewer resources, I often came up empty when I went to look for help in our data banks. And over the years, some of the resources that used to exist have disappeared.
A large number of average people ought to be terrified by the experience of Brown and by the growing problem of homelessness, but it's hard to think about it because it's too terrifying. It's hard to help the homeless for the same reason. What if you give away too much and end up homeless yourself?
Now I am way better off than most people who haven't accumulated much money. Though I have a disability, it doesn't prevent me from doing the sort of work I do. Medication controls the more debilitating side effects. I have family who love me and who---though they live far away---would help me if I needed it and if I asked.
But having had at a certain point in my life to accept help, I would be reluctant to do so ever again. Honestly, I would rather disappear, rather live on the streets.
The poor we shall always have with us---because the poor ARE us. So this statement by Michael Brown really resonated for me:
[quote from Michael Brown's blog begins]
I've only once actually glimpsed someone sleeping under a bridge. I wasn't homeless yet myself at the time, so of course, the only thing that ran through my mind is "there but for the grace of God go I."
Little did I know...
[quote from Michael Brown's blog ends]
For an update to this posting, see this note in "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes."
Drawn by Mr. Tenniel; painted by Damozel!
11:07:28 AM 
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