Thanksgiving thoughts

On Americas homelessness and loneliness

Ernesto and Destiny were chillin in an El Paso park, watching the I-10 traffic zoom by below.

My picture of them is out of focus, a result of too much going on, not with Ernesto. He had his shit together. At least for this moment, happy to be sipping from his big gulp liquor special. It was still early.

Destiny however was a mess, flipping between a fading post meth high and a quickly approaching pre meth low. She demanded I take a picture of her, jumping up on a narrow concrete ledge and stripping off her clothes. When I turned away, told her to stop, she hopped down and punched lightly at my back, saying she was sorry, she understood I must be a man of the Lord, because why else would I be there and not want to see her titties or sell her drugs, and that she was also given to the Lord, deep down, and insisted she would behave. She handed me her necklace, a faux gold cross, as proof, then worrying I might be a cop, snatched it back. She didn’t want me to get her prints, run them through a database, and throw her back in lock up. They’ve done that before. Pretended they were trying to help, only to screw her over.

She might have been twenty one at best. A rough twenty one, with her otherwise smooth skin dotted with scabs from nervous picking and her lips a patchwork of blisters and lipstick.

There’s nothing special or unique about Ernesto and Destiny. There are versions of them everywhere in US. People living on the fringes, out in the open.

Walking through America means seeing and dealing with hundreds of them per day. Riding public transit, or Greyhounds, means sharing a small space with them.

People drifting along, usually numbed with legal and illegal drugs, surviving off a quilt of friends, shelters, non-profits, jails, and rehabs.

While other countries have addiction, homelessness, mental illness, no place has it as bad as the United States does. Certainly not as out in the open. Certainly not if you adjust for our immense national wealth.

Spend time overseas, a few months in Vietnam, or a few weeks in Istanbul, and it’s shocking to land in JFK, ride the subway to Port Authority, and be surrounded by so much human suffering. See so many people, often a seat away, being tortured by their thoughts, loneliness, and addictions.¹

People everyone tries stay away from and not look at.

It’s our national shame. That the country that everyone wants to move to — the country of Hollywood, Times Square, Cartoon Network, self made billionaires, dryers that work, ACs set to 67, and grocery stores with three hundred types of cereal — is also the country where the mentally ill wander the streets and people live under bridges.

That the country that proclaims itself the land of the free is also the country of public bathrooms locked because of ODs and police carrying Colt M4 carbines, wary of someones last tiny bit of sanity completely snapping.

The usual line when addressing the mentally ill, the homeless, and the addicted, is to say, they’ve fallen through the cracks. But that suggests we have a structure that can be patched up.

That the solution is only a few policy choices away. A little housing here. A few outreach programs there. All good.

But it’s much bigger than that. The broken in our country are not simply the result of policy flaws, but are an active by-product of our system. We are a country determined to churn out the mentally ill and lonely.

The US has a brutal culture of individual material success. Of emphasizing you being you, and in the process, getting as much as you can, as quickly as you can. Of finding and being the true you, of winning at all costs, despite the harm to family, faith, community, friends, and whatever other silly obligations might hold you down.

A loose confederation of millions of untethered individuals running around trying to be their own person, while also getting as much as they can.

Of viewing anyone who doesn’t, or can’t, play this game as a loser. A person who deserves little because they don’t understand themselves enough, or do want it enough.

US culture is a fast moving escalator up, with little time or patience for anyone who gets in the way. You have to keep moving up, plowing over anyone who holds you back.

The broken are the people who’ve fallen, or been pushed, off the escalator, unable to keep up, because they are mentally slow, physically unfit, or tortured with inner demons.

Or people who have jumped off because they don’t want to be on the escalator in the first place. Unable to get with, or understand, our obsession with constantly rising higher, constantly getting more and more, constantly redefining yourself.

While I do love Thanksgiving, it feels more and more like an anachronism. A brief pause in our escalators ever quickening churn higher. An old holiday we wheel out to say, look, we really are still all about community, family, and togetherness. Really about the transcendent.

But we aren’t. It’s the next three weeks, Christmas season, that is the true American holiday. Not the one that comes with meditations on togetherness and ends with midnight mass, but the one that comes with essays about self realization and ends with piles of stuff. The one that comes with ad after ad saying the true you and true happiness only comes by buying whatever they are selling.

That’s America. A place where you can get whatever you want, be whoever you want to be, as long as you do the necessary work.

And if you don’t. Well. We aren’t entirely heartless. We do have plenty of soup kitchens available.

PS: Happy Thanksgiving. Really! I’m leaving for Bishkek and Almaty in a few days, and the upcoming essays I promise will not be so grim.

1. When I was in Grad school in Baltimore in the late 80s I used to help the new Grad students arriving from Eastern Europe. The iron curtain had just fallen and they had been raised on a steady diet of anti western propaganda. They had figured out most of what they’d been told was lies, so when they first saw the poverty in Baltimore, first walked along the length of Broadway, they where shocked. As one guy told me, ‘I thought the idea the US forced the poor and blacks to live in separate neighborhoods, reservations, was another Soviet lie, but it sure seems to be true.”