The Mind of James Donahue

Heads In The Sand














Home | Political Art | Genesis Revised | About James Donahue | Many Things | Shoes | Ships | Sealing Wax | Cabbages | Kings | Sea Is Boiling | Pigs With Wings | Lucifer | Goetia Spirits | Hot Links | Main Page




















The State Of The Homeless In America
 
 
My recent story about the "dog woman" has led me down the dark trail of how we are dealing with the homeless in America. And the picture I am getting is ugly.
 
If you recall, the woman I refer to is a 73-year-old who had her dogs destroyed and her home taken away from her. This happened because she could not afford to fix her broken water and sewer lines, pay the cost of having her garbage removed, or pay to license her animals. Instead of helping her, the police and civil authorities in Michigan made this elderly woman homeless and destitute.
 
I fear this is not an isolated case.
 
Bad enough that so many people lack the means to seek proper dental and medical care that failing health and missing or blackened teeth are commonplace among people on American streets. Tragic is the fact that these same people are now going homeless . . . and I think it may be by the thousands.
 
The complacency by the general public, government leaders, police and even our churches to this national disaster is alarming. Even though I, as a working newsman, am seeing first hand the growing desperation, there is a tendency by those who still have jobs, who still can manage their house and utility payments, to look the other way. They want to say the problem does not exist.
 
This is not a new phenomenon. I remember walking the streets of San Francisco at least 30 years ago and seeing homeless people sleeping under cardboard boxes in parks, abandoned cars and under bridges. I remember how some southern cities like San Francisco, where the homeless were gathering to escape the harsh cold winters, tried to make laws banning homelessness. The police were actually trying to drive them away rather than offer help.
 
I remember one winter in the late 1980s, when I used to drive into downtown Detroit on Saturdays to research the library microfilm files for historical news stories for a book I was writing. To assure a place at one of the readers I would arrive just before the library opened its doors for the day. Most of the people waiting at the door with me were homeless. Wrapped in heavy winter garb, they had been walking the streets all night waiting for a warm place. Once the library was open, they planted themselves in chairs and tables throughout the building to sleep.
 
My wife and I became accidentally and temporarily homeless a few years ago after we sold our house, paid off all of our bills and moved to Arizona. Doris, a licensed hospital medical technologist, had supposedly landed a job in a government hospital on the Hopi Reservation. The facility promised us a house to live in and good wages. Our plan was to live among the Hopi, learn the culture, and I was going to do some writing.
 
Somewhere between the time we left Michigan and arrived in Arizona a few days later, our legislators in Washington became engaged in a fight over the next year's budget. President Bill Clinton put a freeze on all spending, including new job hires. When we arrived at the reservation, the job Doris was promised no longer existed. Even though she was badly needed, the laboratory director was forbidden to hire her. We moved to nearby Holbrook, Arizona, and quickly spent our cash reserves on motels and restaurant food while we waited for a job that never happened.
 
It took us about a year before we both landed jobs and started crawling out of that mess. During that time, we discovered resourcefulness. We found an abandoned motel along the old Route 66, that the new I-40 passed by, where the owner let us stay for something like $12 a night. We were not as bad off as the new homeless. The employment picture in America was still healthy in those days; just not in Arizona. But we were determined to try to make it in that beautiful place and stayed on.
 
I remember the desperate feeling of not having a home. In that period I think Doris and I would have given anything for a place of our own. We remember driving down some of those lonely desert roads and looking at abandoned buildings, thinking how tragic it was that someone let them go to ruin.
 
I think we were allowed to live in that homeless state for a few months so we would have some kind of an understanding of just what it feels like to be really homeless. Now as jobs continue to dry up and people are running out of unemployment benefits, the homeless are showing up everywhere.
 
Even people working at jobs paying only minimum wage are starting to lose their homes. They just don't make enough money to cover the cost of living.
 
I was recently in court to hear criminal matters for my newspaper. I was shocked when one defendant pleaded with the judge to put him in jail. He said he was homeless and didn't have any place to go if he was released on probation.
 
I am working on another story where a rural Michigan farm family is struggling to keep their home and the mortgage holder is using every legal means possible to take it away. That family is in desperate straits. He is driving truck to supplement the meager income from the farm. The family got behind in the mortgage payments and the bank started foreclosure before these people had the presence of mind to go into bankruptcy court. The local sheriff held a bankruptcy sale after the bankruptcy judge ordered a freeze on the property. My news story about this mess stopped that bank from illegally seizing the property and putting this family on the street. But the drama continues even as I write these words.
 
This is a large family. These people have eight children. When I visited the home recently I counted 11 children. I learned that they were allowing a second, already homeless family to stay with them in an old mobile home parked in the yard. Thus if the bank wins this battle, and I have every reason to believe it will, two more families in the county where I live will be made homeless.
 
I have examined the government agencies in place to supposedly help the homeless. There is a county group of noble business people, county officials and bureaucrats that meet monthly to discuss the problem. Yet talking to any of them gave me no answers. They believe homelessness exists, but don't know how to find these families. They refer me to a lady in the mental health agency who is supposed to be dealing with the homeless.
 
This lady was very friendly over the telephone. She agreed to send me a "packet" of information and statistics about the state of homelessness in our area. The packet never arrived. When I called back she said a study was being done in a three-county area by the Regional Human Development Commission and that I would be getting a report in a few days.
 
The report arrived last week; two months after I asked for the information.  It said a questionnaire sent to police, pastors, and all government agencies revealed the existence of only six homeless people in my county. It said four more adults were in "danger" of becoming homeless. If this is true, then I think I have personally met all of them.
 
I wonder how much the taxpayers paid these idiots to do this ridiculous study. The money might have been better spent helping a few of these desperate people find shelter.
















All written material on this site is copyright protected. Reproduction on other sites is permitted if proper credit is given and the material is not sold or used for financial gain. Reproduction for print media is prohibited unless there is expressed permission from the author, James L. Donahue, and/or Psiomni Ltd.