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Vets in the rain

I am at the San Francisco VA hospital for my second semester rotation of nursing school. A side effect of this has been to put vets, especially homeless vets, high on my radar. Today a gentleman was panhandling outside of the grocery store and his sign said he was a Vietnam vet, so I gave him five dollars. Now you might think, considering my homeless sympathies, that I give all panhandlers money, but considering the town I live in, and the areas I hang out in, I’d be giving out a lot more than I could afford. Lately however, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to turn down vets.

As you may imagine I’m really not the biggest supporter of war, and I’m also a huge fan of cutting military spending. However, the one area of spending I would never vote to cut is funding related to veteran services or enlisted people’s benefits. I generally see the military as a necessary evil; evil in that, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” as eloquently described by Dwight D. Eisenhower. In other words it’s money that is used to protect society, not to build it up. I agree with this except in that it has become (or always has been) a way for citizens with limited opportunities to make a decent life for themselves and their families, and I think this is awesome. Not only is it an occupation that most people find brave and noble, but it also provides an industry that, in theory anyway, should take care of its members throughout their lifespan. I know that we are not on the path to deconstructing the military industrial complex in my lifetime, so if it can also function as a safety net for a proportion of our society I feel that it will function as more than just a necessary evil.

That makes me feel pretty good. Until of course, I go to the grocery store to buy gluten free bagels (WHICH THEY WERE OUT OF), and there is an ex serviceman standing outside in the rain with a sign telling me how he fought for my country and now can’t afford to feed himself. This makes me really, really angry.

Almost every politician, no matter their political leaning, gives lip service to supporting our troops. With that political atmosphere you’d think that veterans would have a huge safety net within our society, but this statistic from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans suggests that is not the case: 23 percent of the homeless population are veterans; that makes a vet three times more likely to be homeless than a member of the general population. Of these people 76 percent have alcohol, drug or mental health problems, a problem that’s likely to become worse as the vets who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have a higher incidence of traumatic head injuries.

I support my vets, but I wish I could do so as a nurse instead of as a pedestrian.

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My New Colleague

At the Yug Hotel

Last night at outreach I had a wonderful surprise, a new woman joined our team. I met her several months ago as a resident of one of the SROs we go into. She was living there with her husband and two year old daughter. We don’t see a lot of kids in the hotels so we totally swooned and gave her several bag lunches.

Our outreach team is mostly funded by an organization, The Mission SRO Collaborative, whose main focus is on fighting for the rights and safety of people living in SRO hotels. Last year we were at risk for going under due to financial issues and they adopted us because they thought what we were doing was important. In a nutshell, what we do is bring food, hygiene supplies, and safer sex and drug supplies to women living in the SRO hotels in the Mission area. We also have resources such as methadone vouchers, cheaper state ID coupons, and lists of places to get food, needles, rehab, counseling, health care, and domestic abuse resources. We are primarily volunteer driven so the majority of our funding goes to the supplies we bring to the women, and they really appreciate the fact we come into the hotels. They know that once a week someone is gonna come in and check on them, and they have some folks from outside of their scene to turn to for help. We’ve shown up at just the right time in more than one dangerous situation for these women, and they remember that.

The SRO Collaborative adds another dimension to what we do, which is to give the women an extra resource when they are having problems with the hotels themselves. These problems are multifaceted: issues with rent, fees, bedbugs, broken windows, mold- the list doesn’t really end. The people who run these hotels do so as cheaply as possible and try to get as much out of their residents as they can. For most outreach workers and hotel residents this makes the owners the enemy – evil slumlords preying on the poor. I see it as a slightly more complex situation. I’m imagining that running one of these things is actually slightly worse than flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

I was talking with one woman with a list of very valid complaints, but then she went into how these people come into America and just get everything handed to them, and I realized that these immigrant owners are probably dealing with a lot of racist attacks on their validity as business people. The residents use this attack because they don’t have a lot of other power and they know it’s hurtful. Desperate people go for the jugular and are prone to lies and threats. In addition to being treated badly the owners deal with a lot of property destruction, so a reticence to make any improvements can be understood.

This isn’t to say I side with the owners. There are people living in conditions that are bad for their health, and there are rules about when residents can have visitors and they charge fees to let visitors come inside. It’s like a boarding house, and it’s illegal, but no one is willing to call the cops.

From where I’m sitting it’s a tough situation for everyone, and my goal is to keep people as safe and well treated as possible. So now you’re updated, I’ll get back to the beginning.

The other resource our benefactors bring is internships within their organization, and one of the things the interns do is come out with us, and that is how my former client became my colleague. This is exciting because it offers job training and resources that might actually help this woman move into a more comfortable situation in life. It also really helps us because she knows things that we don’t that can aid in supporting our clients. Plus, she can act as an inspiration to other women who want to make a change, but feel it’s impossible. It’s an awesome situation where everyone wins.

House Rules at the Krishna

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It’s no one’s party, let’s all cry

To the Death.

Lately I have felt a vague apprehension regarding the level of political upheaval in the world. I don’t know enough about the issues to have strong opinions, but I’ve been trying to catch up. Highest on my list of priorities has been learning about what the heck is going on in Wisconsin. A friend told me that the governor wanted to take away all public employees’ benefits, and then I heard that he wanted to prohibit collective bargaining. I switched my radio from music to NPR to see if I could find out some more about what was going on and came across a segment which suggested that the GOP wanted to break up unions because they usually backed Democrats. I’ve been hunting around on the internet and have found a secret memo that suggests this is true, but have yet to find the quote, attributed to Karl Rove, that essentially said that it was important to bust the unions in order to undermine the Democrats in elections. If you have links to this please share in the comments, if you have links to suggest otherwise please share that as well.

Now, if this is true, our political situation is quite a bit worse than I had suspected. I know that many will say I am naive to have ever thought differently, but I thought we were at least still pretending that this was about philosophy. An attempt to crush an organization because they are funding the other party says that it doesn’t matter what is best for the people, they just want to win. When I say “they” I mean all of the politicians that are keeping us hostage in this two party warfare, who would rather have their team win than see us succeed; and I know there are plenty on both sides who fall into that category.

This struggle for power means that no matter what one side tries, the other will try to prove they are wrong. We are pulled into this. We want our side to win because we think it will benefit us, but “winning” alone benefits no one. In order for most of us to win we need to see good policies put into place, and we need them to be left alone long enough to have an effect. The pull for power ensures this wont happen because if a policy doesn’t magically fix everything in five minutes we move on to something else (except the drug policy, we doggedly cling to that despite decades of failure).

We are all losing, and we are supporting the people and policies that leave us to struggle. This kinda colored my week and made me feel not so awesome.

For more information about what is going on in Wisconsin click here.

At the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland

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No Place to Sit, Now Live on Twitter!

I’m a regular online media maniac over here. I just started a twitter feed to accompany this blog. It can be found here: NoPlaceToSit.

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My Non-illustrious Debut as a Crackhead

I did crack tonight. Well, I think it was crack, it also could have been meth. I’m really not sure; all I know is that while doing outreach I walked by a gentleman smoking on the stairs and there was a bitter alkaloid burning along with the pot in his joint.

The girls I was working with did not take terribly kindly to this, especially since the gentleman blew a big cloud in one lady’s face as she walked by. I just wandered near an open window to set up shop as my compatriots went up and down the halls announcing our presence.

I found the whole thing more or less hilarious, “Come join Outreach- we wont pay you, but you may get free crack!” We joked about our debut into crack use on the way back to the car, but it reminded me how, of all drugs, I have always found crack to be the funniest.

This probably stems from the fact I was born in the early 80′s and crack, or at least stories about crack, were ubiquitous. Spoofs about crack users could be found on various comedy shows, and the phrase “Crack kills,” had been reappropriated to refer to plumbers. Crack. Even the word itself is funny, it’s short and snappy, and in my day was the most common way to describe someone acting crazy. “What, are you on crack or something?” There was no other drug that made so many appearances in my childhood slang. Even marijuana could hardly hold a candle to crack cocaine’s usefulness in my lexicon.

I was an experimental teen, but I never considered doing crack. Like Whitney Houston, I knew that Crack was Whack, everyone from my generation knew that there were drugs, and then there was crack. Crack was the worst drug you could do, one hit could make you instantly addicted and then you’d be on the street selling yourself for drugs and giving birth to crack babies.

It wasn’t until last year that I dug all my assumptions about crack and crack heads out of my head to dust off and reexamine. It was a good time to do so because I was taking a class about how to better serve crack users through harm reduction. I knew that some of my clients used crack, and had just assumed it was those who looked the most strung out. Over a day’s worth of awesome instruction through The Harm Reduction Coalition via Mark Kinzly, I realized that one of the underlying assumptions in my crack schema was that it was a “ghetto drug”. Let’s go back to Whitney for a second, in her famous interview with Dianne Sawyer she says, “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight. Okay? We don’t do crack. We don’t do that. Crack is whack (12/4/02).” This quote is amazing in how much it says about crack and its association with poverty, ghettos, and the underclass of society. Basically, I was just too white and too middle class to smoke crack. The stigma surrounding crack has been condensed into the term crackhead. This magical term replaced junky as the worst of the worst. I would argue that these terms and the degree of stigma associated with them allow us to disassociate ourselves to the point that we no longer have to have any feelings of empathy towards anyone associated with them. In short, a crackhead is less than human.

The question is why. Why crack? Alcohol still does way more damage to our society. Crack isn’t more addictive than cocaine or heroin. The only reason that I have worse associations with crack cocaine than any other drug is that the media ran with it. There is a truck full of evidence to indicate that crack became as stigmatized as it is because it is considered a black person’s drug. And the hefty sentencing that got crack users the same penalty for one gram of crack cocaine, as cocaine users got for 100 grams of cocaine, was a convenient way to let the more well heeled cocaine users off with a slap on the wrist while locking up the crackheads.

This is a topic with which I am far from done. As time goes on I want to link to more research around this, but for now let me tell you what I realized after I stopped assuming my most strung out clients were the crack users. First, I accepted that crack is a drug like any other, people use it for pleasure, they use it for escape, they use it to kill pain, and they use it to pass the time. I was stoked that a client of mine had stopped using heroin; I’ve known her for years and have always enjoyed chatting with her, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that I found out that she had stopped shooting heroin, but continued to smoke crack. It wasn’t obvious that she was a “crackhead”, but what was obvious was that for her, crack was the lesser evil and she considered getting off heroin a big win, and I support her in that. However, I’m not particularly stoked on the crack use or anything, I mean c’mon, we all know that crack kills.

For a nice look at the exaggeration of the crack baby crisis see this New York Time article.

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The 6th and Market Dilemma

Good Question.

One of many Trees Recently Planted on Natoma

It seems like a million years since I first heard about Mayor Newsom’s plans to revitalize 6th and Market. My knee-jerk reaction was to oppose it; if you revitalize 6th and Market, a well established hangout spot for the “undesirable” members of the population of San Francisco, then where will they go? In the game of gentrification we keep moving low to no income people out of newly desirable areas, thereby pushing them to the edges of the city. When you try to clean your house by shoving everything in the closet it works fine till you decide you want your closet too.

It took so long for anything to happen that I assumed either interest, funding or both had petered out. This year, however, I noticed some changes on Natoma between 6th and 7th. First the street was dug up and pipes were fixed, then came some nice brick work (actually brick facade, but who’s keeping track) in the street, some trees, and a lovely mosaic (faux too, but that’s okay) on the road. All of these were improvements directed to the residents of the area, and are really quite pleasant. I am a whole hearted supporter of decorating the city for the benefit of all.

Men waiting in line for a hot meal along Natoma

My concern, then and now, is that these renovations are being done with the hope of bringing higher rents and higher class tenants. But even more disconcerting is that they are being done with the hope of pushing out the folks who are currently inhabiting the sidewalks. “Blight and crime,” this is the phrase used to describe the current state of this area. My research into this situation consisted largely of reading all the articles I could find online, and not a single one seemed to consider that the folks on the street actually EXIST. As in, they are not just a BLIGHT on the sidewalk to annoy the more productive members of society. They are people with communities working to survive, and whatever we do to 6th and Market will have the greatest effect on them.

My attention was brought back to the 6th and Market revitalization plan by an article about the possibility of the Burning Man offices moving into the area. It describes the exciting idea of the area being transformed into a “civics-oriented arts district,” but still fails to mention what will be done with the folks who are already there. I am not suggesting that we should just leave the area alone, well I might suggest that, but I know it’s not going to happen, so I’ve come up with a better plan. Let’s not shove the “blight” who are already inhabiting the area in the closet. Instead let’s make several blocks of awesome. What isn’t discussed much is that there is already a collection of civics minded folks working in this area. There is the San Francisco AIDS Foundation who run a lot of the needle exchange in San Francisco, various UCSF research studies going on in offices who depend on IV Drug Users in the area to gather important data, CityTeam Ministries, and Hospitality House. In addition to offering support to merchants and artists, we should encourage social justice providers to expand their work in the area. There is currently a recreation center, but expanding the hours could offer more time in a dedicated safe space.

Hospitality House is an established organization that seeks to empower those down on their luck.

Unfortunately, from what I can find, the only project that is truly marked for go ahead is a giant mall located between 5th and 6th street on the South side of Market. They are hoping to cater to “affordable, value-based retail tenants.” Of course I immediately think of Target and Ross. I’m not specifically against another mall on Market, but I am worried that with retail as the only major interest in the area, the focus on civics and arts will melt away. A major positive aspect of this project is that they say they are dedicated to hiring local people, and with projected needs of a 700+ workforce (not including the construction jobs before it is finished), that could really put a dent in the employment needs of the area.

There is no panhandling lobby, but people who are deemed a blight still need protection and consideration. This helps the entire community, because shuffling people from one area to another is not a viable solution.

SOMA Recreation Center

Lovely Street Mural Between Natoma and Minna

CityTeam Ministries provides a men's shelter

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