homelessness

Some thoughts on comfort and ease.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

So, I’ve been reading a lot lately and Carolyn has just been through an emergency appendectomy. Not that the two things are related. I don’t think my reading has brought on Carolyn’s appendix woes, but her woes are real and are making her very uncomfortable and in disEASE.  I often read in bed. I’ll go to bed around 9 in the evening or so and read for a couple of hours, if my brain will let me. I sometimes wake up with my head in my book, drooling. It’s 2 in the morning and my reading light is still on. At that point I make the sensible decision to shut the light, put my book away and snuggle into my blankets with the hope of a good sleep. It doesn’t always end up that way, but sometimes it does.

I like my bed. It’s comfortable. It never disappoints me. It’s a steady friend unless the surgery I had 50 years ago on my lower back decides it’s time to mess with me and I toss and turn just hoping to find a position that will allow me to drift off to sleep. Well, if my back co-operates my wrecked rotator cuffs sometimes take up the challenge of keeping me awake. They’re often quite successful. In fact they’re always successful. My arms and hands go numb, tingle and hurt like hell. Damn. That’s when I give up and take a T3 (that’s Tylenol with codeine). Now, I know that’s a narcotic, but, damn it, at least after I take it I get some sleep. Problem is when I wake up in the morning I have the equivalent of a hangover and it takes a while for my arms to respond reasonably to a little movement without making me nauseous. It’s distinctly unpleasant but a T3 eases my pain, dammit!  I find it hard to admit that a narcotic can give me comfort, but there you have it. It just does. I have a bigger, tougher, narcotic, hydromorphone that I can always use when I get into dire pain straights. That hasn’t happened in a long time and that’s a good thing because I don’t want to feel stoned all the time. I can’t get anything done when I’m ripped and I thrive on getting things done. Still, I know that if I need them, I have the little white pills. It’s a comfort to know that they will be there to ease my pain if I need them. They never fail me.

So, I think that comfort and ease for me reside in the familiar, the predictable, the physically pleasant sensation of benign homeostasis. I like that. Business has long realized that people seem to seek comfort and ease so we are constantly bombarded with ads trying to sell us products that are designed to make us more comfortable or to make life easier for us. The big luxury car with all the automatic gadgets you can conceive of at our fingertips makes life easier, doesn’t it? The automatic dishwasher, the coffee maker, the vacuum cleaner, the tons of shop tools I have, they’re all designed to make life easier for me and thus bring me more comfort.

We love comfort and ease when we travel too. Some people pay a lot of extra money to fly first class. Well, there are the prestige and showoffy aspects to that, but comfort and ease are a huge draw too. Ah, room to stretch out, lots of leg room, complimentary drinks. Sometimes our travel destination is a tropical island. We long to lay on the beach in comfort baking our bodies to a darker shade of white (depending where you are on the spectrum to start with). We love luxury hotels too because they’re so comfortable and people do everything for us.

So, I hope I’ve sort of established that we love comfort and ease in our lives. The problem is, that comfort and ease are certainly not the only goals to which we aspire. In fact, discomfort and pain can just as easily attract us. We are such fickle beings. Take golf for example. I don’t play the game because I don’t want to endanger people’s lives in the vicinity of the golf course. If I hit a ball, I have no idea where it’s going to go. But why bother in the first place? I would play golf if I were allowed to carry the ball around and drop it into the holes as I walk the course. Perfect score every time! Doesn’t that make much more sense? It would be a lot easier. Well, of course, it doesn’t make more sense. No challenge in that! No chance of experiencing the pain of defeat! But no chance either of being a sub-par hero. So, no, we don’t always seek comfort and ease. If we did, we would never climb mountains nor would we compete in any sport or game. As a species we seem to need a good measure of both comfort and discomfort, ease and unease. Marketing firms are masters at finding under what circumstances we seek comfort or discomfort. Sometimes both values are pitched in a single ad.

Now, my point. It seems like a truism to suggest that homeless people are also drug addicts and lazy slugs. I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but just by simple observation it strikes me that most people feel that the poor, but especially the homeless, are hopeless addicts and moral degenerates. I just want to suggest to you that if I were homeless, I would try to find some way to find a reasonable balance between comfort and discomfort, ease and unease. That’s just what we all seem to want. However, because my options as a homeless person would be so limited, the only way I could experience even a few moments of comfort and ease is by getting as stoned as I could. Passing out would be a blessing.

If I were homeless, I’d be wrecked as often and as completely as I could be. Good thing I’m retired with a decent pension. This way I can stay reasonably clear headed although I won’t turn down a good single malt scotch if it’s offered to me. If nothing else it helps with the pain!

Homelessness has deep roots in economic, social and psychological dimensions. However, if we are to do anything about homelessness as some of us are keen to, we have to set up our world to provide people a reasonable shot at achieving a balance between comfort and discomfort without them resorting to consuming excessive amounts of alcohol or drugs to get there. For a homeless person, it’s reasonable and rational to get as drunk or as stoned as possible. It always amazes me that no where near the number of homeless people resort to booze and drugs as some people think. Part of the reason, methinks, is because people create community on the street. There is comfort in community. Community is an antidote to drug and alcohol abuse for the homeless and a piece of the road to balance between comfort and discomfort for the rest of us.

An early 20th Century sociologist made the same argument as I have in this post only using different analogies and a different focus. I’ll write about his work soon in another post.

 

St. John’s Homeless-Serving System Coordination Framework | The Homeless Hub

~ Roger JG Albert

I think all communities can learn something from this framework. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel although we do have to deal with local conditions. Those local conditions include a lack of coordination of services, extensive privatization of services with a landscape of fragmented resources. We can do better.

Source: St. John’s Homeless-Serving System Coordination Framework | The Homeless Hub

Mental Illness, Homelessness, Drug Addiction: Do These Sound Like Crimes? | BillMoyers.com

~ Roger JG Albert

Mental Illness, Homelessness, Drug Addiction: Do These Sound Like Crimes? | BillMoyers.com.

Bill Moyers gets it right.  We call it ‘mental’ illness when people display erratic, unusual or abnormal behaviour but most of us don’t believe it’s ‘really’ an illness and our governments act accordingly.  No.  Most of us believe, in our heart of hearts, that mental illness is really a moral failing and if people just got their shit together they would be fine.  Would we tell that to a cancer patient?  Well, yes we would, and we do.  (If you hadn’t smoked, you wouldn’t have lung cancer, so there!) What’s really sick here?  I think our social values are, that’s what.

 

Healthy Living Experts Forum – The House of Now

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Healthy Living Experts Forum – The House of Now.

For those of you in the Comox Valley area who are not averse to getting up on a Sunday morning, I’ll be speaking at this forum this Sunday.  The details are on the website.  I’ll be talking about morality and poverty among other things.  I have 20 minutes like the other presenters…but for those of you who know me, I could go on for hours!  Should be an informative morning…which you could then follow up with lunch somewhere like the Atlas Cafe or the Wandering Moose in Cumberland!

Escape 21: Scapegoating 101: “Hell is other people.”

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

Escape 21: Scapegoating 101: “Hell is other people.”

This is going to be a shorter post than the last few…which have been way too long.  I fear I’m getting pedantic in my old age.  Say it ain’t so.  I’ll carry on now, pedantry or not.  One positive thing I’m getting out of this is that my typing skills are improving, if nothing else.

So, in the last post we looked at Becker’s use of the term ‘sacrifice’.  This post is about a related term, scapegoating.  Scapegoating is a form of sacrifice…in the early days using a real goat.  Now we do it with people, mostly people we blame, realistically or not, for all of our troubles.  Becker opens this part of Chapter 8 with a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist, who said “Hell is other people.”  I need to put that on a T-shirt, damn it!

From the beginning, men have served the appetites of one another in the most varying ways, but these were always reducible to a single theme: the need for fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity.  Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death…In one of the most logical formulas on the human condition Rank observed: ‘The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.  No wonder men are addicted to war…war is a ritual for the emergence of heroes.

What about heroes? This is where Becker introduces the concept of heroism as a major element in his whole thought.  Heroes are not like the rest of us.  Most of us would be willing to sacrifice just about anyone who stands in our way, friend or foe, because inevitably people offend us.  A wife or husband ‘cheats’, another driver cuts us off in traffic then gives us the finger.  As Becker notes, this is the price of our natural narcissism.  We would like to kill people, or at least maim them, almost every day, but our fear of death prevents us.  Heroes are different.  They take the bullet, they take on the bad guys, they put themselves in harms way instead of throwing others in the way.  So “war IS a ritual for the emergence of heroes.”

The logic of scapegoating, then, is based on animal narcissism and hidden fear. If luck, as Aristotle said, is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path – with special alacrity if he is a stranger to you. 

Freud was right; in the narcissism of earthly bodies, where each is imprisoned fatally in his own finite integument, everyone is alien to oneself and subject to the status of scapegoating for one’s own life.

 We kill others, literally or socially, in order to affirm our own life. Then killing others in mass rituals like war is spectacularly affirming.  To bring it closer to home and in a bit of a less dramatic fashion, consider the way we treat the homeless and the poor and how desperately they try to hide their condition.  We kill them socially; it’s almost better than killing them physically because we prolong their suffering and see their distress and immobility as it slowly unfolds before our very eyes.  That affirms our life.

As we watch the Sochi Olympic Games, the victory celebration is a way of

…experiencing the power of our lives and the visible decrease of the enemy: it is a sort of staging of the whole meaning of a war, the demonstration of the essence of it – which is why the public display, humiliation, and execution of prisoners is so important. ‘They are weak and die: we are strong and live.’

We are disgusted by what is happening in North Korea but we turn a blind eye to the humiliation and degradation prisoners experience in our own prisons every day.

The U.S. is always keen to keep the torches lit and the electric chair warmed up.  Guantanamo Bay is a celebration of American power.

 It is obvious that man kills to cleanse the earth of tainted ones, and that is what victory means and how it commemorates life and power: man is bloodthirsty to ward off the flow of his own blood.

Other things that we have found hard to understand have been hatreds and feuds between tribes and families, and continual butchery practiced for what seemed petty, prideful motives of personal honor and revenge. 

Nothing has changed much.  We all think that we are the chosen people and if we don’t try literally to exterminate those who don’t agree with us or who aren’t like us therefore we can’t possibly ‘like’, we ostracize them, marginalize them, ignore them.

Here I would quote a passage that Becker uses from Alan Harrington, but it’s too long and I’m too tired.  Suffice it to say, that that guy over there with the funny beard and strange looking clothes and hat, what if that guy is right in his beliefs.  Can he be my equal?  “All I know is if he’s right I’m wrong.” (p. 113)

In times of peace, without an external enemy, the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society, in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide.

 Enough for today, don’t you think?  Is anybody really reading this stuff anyway?

The Tyee – Meet some of Surrey’s formerly homeless

~ Roger JG Albert

The Tyee – Meet some of Surrey’s formerly homeless.

Interesting approach to dealing with homelessness in Surrey, British Columbia. To have a look, click on the link above to The Tyee, one of my favourite sources for news.

This approach seems to be working, at least for some people.  I’d like to see a proper evaluation of it, but then I’d like to see a proper evaluation of all programs organizations advance in the cause of ending homelessness.  Evaluation is the key to determining whether a program is successful or not.  Of course, once a program, any program, gets off the ground and survives its first 2 or 3 years of operation it gets a life of its own and that’s hard to give up, even in the light of ‘thin’ success on the ground.  But programs can change rather than die and become more relevant and successful with a new approach to evaluation called developmental evaluation that includes the evaluator in a dialogue with the program to get its practice in line with its goals and objectives.

 

Substance Use: Pathways to homelessness? Or a way of adapting to street life? | Here to Help, A BC Information Resource for Individuals and Families Managing Mental Health or Substance Use Problems

~ Roger JG Albert

Click on the link below for an interesting follow-up to my last blog.

Substance Use: Pathways to homelessness? Or a way of adapting to street life? | Here to Help, A BC Information Resource for Individuals and Families Managing Mental Health or Substance Use Problems.

Homeless People, Mental Illness and Brain Injuries

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I’m not a front line worker when it comes to homelessness.  I have spoken with many homeless people, heard their stories and, yes, given them money, often in the face of disapproving glances from passersby, as if it were any of their business.  Homeless people are often thought of as threatening, loud, dirty, uneducated, lazy and drunk or drugged out.  There is some truth to these thoughts.  However, homeless people don’t have a monopoly on them.  

Homelessness forces people into the street where their every gesture, their actions, their conversations and their very beings are constantly visible.  If they are street bound, that is, if they have no temporary accommodations, no shelters to sleep in or no tent in the bushes, they are visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Being observed all the time, without privacy has to be very emotionally taxing, to say the least.  If the homeless person has mental health issues, a brain injury or an addiction (most of them) , the vulnerability of constant exposure must be enormously distressing, compounding any problems they might already have ‘behaving’ themselves and relating to other people.  Constant surveillance by the police and other agencies cannot but add to the stress of living homeless.  

Most of us, if we have too many drinks, get a little raucous, loud, or a little unruly, can catch a cab home and crawl into bed, secure in our isolation and out of the public eye.  Our homes are our refuge, a place where we can do things we wouldn’t dream of doing on the street or anywhere in public. In fact, if you can afford to rent or own a home, many behaviours and activities not for public consumption become viable.  Drinking to excess, getting stoned, walking around nude, all these things are possible if you live in a home.  Those are the things that make it so liberating when we move out of our parental homes into our own pads.  Privacy is precious and it’s obvious that the more wealth we have the more privacy we can buy.  

Privacy is not something homeless people can afford.  The public life that homeless people lead makes them incredibly vulnerable to being targeted, scapegoated and unfairly characterized as morally unacceptable and less than worthy in the eyes of many.  Mental issues, brain injuries, addictions and other problems are spread throughout the population, but the wealthy can buy themselves into expensive treatment programs and privacy.  Street people don’t have the same advantage.  Our attention is drawn to the homeless because of their visibility.  If we were subject to the same surveillance intensity they are we may not be so quick to judge and reject.