A funny moment at the soup kitchen last night. Lydia was serving for the first time, a Lily Pulitzer clad soccer mom who anxiously fills all conversational hiatuses with nervous chatter. And she was all nerves as they came down the chow line.
"Y'all hungry tonight?" She kept asking.
Most of the men and women coming through the line for their trays responded with a simple 'yes mam, thank you', but finally a seasoned bum (seemingly fortified with malted courage) put the chatterbox in her place.
"Lady, I'm homeless. Of course I'm fucking hungry!"
Hilarious.
"You hungry tonight?"
"Oh, funny you should ask mam, because as it turns out, yes, the reason I lined up outside this afternoon with the rest of the derelicts and waited an hour for a tray of beenie-weenies and an overly-sugared lemonade is that, as it turns out, I could use a nibble. Those sea scallops I had for lunch just weren't filling. You must be the goddam Madame Cleo of the Junior League."
It's no coincidence that only a dreadlocked and drunk hobo felt safe enough put Lydia in her place. After the shock wore out and the startle drained from her cheeks, Lydia smiled, fanned her face, and pinched her cute little nose to indicate that he'd been a particularly drunk and smelly one.
This is how we like our bums too, cartoonishly intoxicated and clearly to blame for their own misfortune. These folks can have all the beenie-weenies they want, as long as they wash it down with a glass of shame served up by an ignorant bitch patting herself on the back for doing God's work.
Because there are two types of people in that food line. The cartoon hobo, yes, but also the caring father in line with his two kids. And lately, I'm guessing there are increasingly more of the latter, able bodied and minded individuals trying hard but still not making it. These folks frighten those of us who've got it made. They assault our sense of order and entitlement, force us closer to the humbling realization there but for the grace of God go I.
Examining the fortuitous circumstances that separate the haves and have nots is a scary endeavor. Why do we have the jobs and cars and apartments? Are we smarter? Maybe more educated, but not smarter. Harder working? Not a chance. Do we possess some specialized skill absent among the droves of desperate job seekers? Probably nothing that couldn't be learned within a couple weeks.
These are painful facts. They make us feel vulnerable and guilty. They compel us to rexamine. To change something about how our society is organized.
So we ignore them. We set up welfare queens and drunk bums as the straw men to justify our reluctant conservatism. Can we give day care or cash entitlements to poor single mothers? Hell no, they'll just sit around and get rich and lazy populating the world with a new generation of dumb dark-skinned losers on the dole. Universal healthcare? I'm not paying for that drunk's liver transplant.
Oh, if you're hungry enough we'll feed you a bit. But you won't forget for a minute that you should be ashamed of having less than us. Or that we think of you as a child, pathetically incapable of providing for yourself.
Y'all hungry tonight?
We'll make sure that if you have an ounce of self-respect left you'll do everything in your power, from pushing drugs to payday loans, to keep yourself out of that food line.
We call it social darwinism. Survival of the fittest humans. This idea that helping is a well-intentioned fallacy that will create a dependent underclass, but competition for scarce resources will create new generations of super capable people, worthy of their successes.
Some theory. It was responsible for Lydia, a woman so dumb she wondered aloud if homeless people in line for food at a soup kitchen were hungry.
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This should be prominently displayed over the entrance to every soup kitchen in America.
And, while we're on the subject, let's require a sign over the sink in the bathroom that's exclusively for the "workers" in soup kitchens saying: "God loves you best."
An excellent post, Mr Mendoza!
it's not necessary to rub people's noses in their need. and there's no reason to tolerate that.
rated
But seriously, people on both sides of the chow line must be made to believe that anyone can be a success through hard work, and that failures deserve the gutter. If the charitable and the objects of that charity ever woke up to how things really work in our "free enterprise" economy, the American people might riot. Or even worse yet, vote conservatives and pseudo-liberals out of office.
You described it perfectly in saying "But you won't forget for a minute that you should be ashamed of having less than us." Too often people in this society make it apparent that you're only fully human if you have the same material goods as the rest of the jones's.
But I am much closer to the soup kitchen than I am to Lydia's station. Things were iffy for us before the crash, and last summer they got a lot worse, and things haven't come close to stabilizing yet. For instance my husband is now on total work stoppage due to "funding cuts." This past month due to one thing after another, I had to haul my family down to the JFCS to beg for some rental assistance. The social worker treated us to a lecture about how our 3-year-old cell phones with minimal plans (which have been our only phone line for years, while both of us were shuttling between jobs, college classes, and taking care of the kids) were a "luxury." Right, being able to call about job leads, coordinate child care schedules, stay in contact with references is "unsustainable." Tell you what, $50 per month for a phone plan didn't put is in this situation, but maybe the fact that people who have advanced training and degrees who want to work full time cannot even get a 15 hour per week minimum wage job is a bigger contributor.
And then she told my toddler, oh, you're pretty, you guys should put her to work as a model! My little girl cried after we left, afraid she was going to be sent away or something. "I can stay wif you mommy? Don't have to go on bus go work?"
I can ignore the Lydias of the world, but when the "helping professionals" are this dumb, I give up.
You have your facts a little, okay a lot, wrong.
Most of the homeless are mentally ill. It was the liberals of the 60's who forced the hospitals to discharge them if they were not dangerous.
So if you are not dangerous and mentally ill what do you do? You can't hold a job, pay bills or much of anything else except survive.
Umm, what? No, I have the facts exactly right. Clue in- My father worked in SF in the 50s and 60s, often taking me with him. Downtown there were NO mentally ill homeless people. Skid Row, sure, where drunks slept it off in cheap hotels. Then came Reagan and Voila. These are facts, I was there. Reagan's long bout of mental illness was Karma.
I would like to suggest, however, that the "cartoonishly intoxicated" and "smelly bum" is as deserving of respect as the newly homeless father of two. I am not so put off by Lydia's well-meaning gaff, as I am by her pinching her nose in front of a man whom she is, presumably, there to serve.
Keeping oneself clean on the streets, especially over a long period of time, is a task of Herculean proportions, and which of us wouldn't attempt self medication after having been homeless for a long time, whether we were on the streets due to mental illness or misfortune complicated by a lack of family ties. For that act of extreme unkindness, Lydia should be deeply ashamed.
Providing care for those suffering from serious mental illness had been a legitimate function of state government since 1766 when the first psychiatric hospital opened in Virginia. This practice remained in effect and virtually unchanged for approximately 200 years.
But in 1955, major changes in mental-health treatment were on the horizon. The introduction of new medications like Haldol, Prolixin and Navane to treat the serious and difficult symptoms of schizophrenia and the drug Lithium to treat manic-depressive patients brought hope to the field of psychiatry. There was now new potential for those reduced to a lifetime of institutionalization. That potential meant deinstitutionalizing many patients.
Deinstitutionalization is a long-term trend wherein fewer people reside as patients in mental hospitals and fewer mental health treatments are delivered in public hospitals. This trend is due directly to the process of closing public hospitals and the ensuing transfers of patients to community-based mental health services. It moves patients to more health care settings in a larger geographic area.
Deinstitutionalization also illustrates evolution in the structure, practice, experiences and purposes of mental health care in the United States. The ideology goes that it is inhumane to keep people confined to a hospital or institutional setting when the advent of new medications would allow them to live within mainstream society. The result was a decrease in the average of occupied state hospital beds from 339 to 29 per 100,000 persons.
In 1963, two significant laws were passed that accelerated the concept of deinstitutionalization. The first was the Aid to the Disabled Act that made the mentally ill eligible for federal financial support in the community setting. The second was the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act. It was amended in 1965 to provide grants for the initial costs of staffing the newly constructed centers. These funding sources coupled with new medications, new alternative methods of dispensing those medications and better access to outpatient counseling gave rebirth to deinstitutionalization.
So if you want to blame someone for the mentally ill homeless on the streets today, you have to look at President Johnson and his Great Society. This started long before Reagan took office.
Very good post!
Are you in GA? I may need the name of your soup kitchen.
Whose better'n who? No one really. It's not that one person is necessarily more skilled, educated or knowledgeable than the other. It breaks down to 3 rotten human nature things. 1. How well you bullshit in the interview 2. What you look like/how you dress and 3. Who you know.
Yours Truly,
Previous Web Master for Pope John Paul II and Creative Web Director of a start up dot com (Victim of dot com bubble bursting - unemployed for so long I started my own business which has done great for 5 years, until the economy tanked in November 08).
This cuts to the core, and anyone who's ever been there and reads this knows it's true.