Seeing scary people?

Seeing “Scary” People this Halloween?

(After bicycling past the tent and tarp encampments of people without homes in Minneapolis and Saint
Paul.)

You may have seen him. His eyes are smallish in his face, not likely to look into your own. Shaven, but
not clean-shaven. Shirt might have been only half-tucked in. You may have heard him. Mutterings, not
understood, but you might sense the passion, no, better said: the deep, deep anxiety.

He’d been told to leave his brother’s house, my house, after, among other things, leaving the tea kettle
on the burning stove and walking away from the house. He walked and walked, looking for work and
stayed at a cheap motel.

He might have ended in a tent under the sumac near the Mississippi, or, had he gone the way of many,
to the band of “dual diagnosis” (mental health and substance abuse) folks at the “encampments" in
Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Troubled, but not so troubled that he did not know it; he was assessed at the U of MN. He let me read
his paperwork. Symptoms fell into the cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis buckets. He’d had speech,
coordination and learning problems all his life, but with special education help, lots of it, he’d graduated
from high school. And worked a job coach-supported kitchen job at a local college, eventually buying
and driving a VW over the hills to work and back every day. But work became harder and harder for
him and he feared he’d be fired; he thought some of his kitchen co-workers were doing drugs. He
became intensely fearful of one he ID’d as a dealer.

So, we agreed that he should come to stay with us to escape this threat and where entry-level jobs
seemed abundant. But he never got a job, he bungled this and he burned that. The dealer was no
longer a threat, but the helicopter ambulances headed to ERs set him off.

The assessment added: smack my forehead with the palm of my hand again today; “probable
schizophrenia.” He suffered so much while waiting for a correct diagnosis and suffered so much living
with this chronic debilitating illness.

When you grow up with your brother who is different, you can see wild things as just an extension of a
lifetime of challenges. You can rationalize that his suspicions just stretched the bounds of reality. After
all, 20-something guys on a college campus might be using drugs and might threaten a co-worker who
is agitated and won’t shut up about the pot smoke. But, yes, schizophrenia.

He returned to our parents’ home. He got help. He had a supervised-living apartment. He was in adult
foster care. He worked in supervised settings. He spent time locked in one of the few rooms left in the
state hospital. He walked around the streets of the small towns where he lived. He moved to assisted
living. He was damned by this disease but lucky to be offered or more truthfully, to be compelled to try
such options. Our parents joined the then-new National Alliance on Mental Illness, organized meetings
and took phone calls from distressed families around the U.S. They volunteered at and lead the local
mental health program.

He got really, really psychotic.

Drugs prescribed him dampened some symptoms but added their own overlay of horrors. The newest
kind of antipsychotics gave him one lucid day twenty years ago but the pills would have killed him in
another week.

We could have tried to keep him in our home. Or my parents in theirs for a longer time. But keeping
someone with these severe problems safe and on a path towards possible recovery is hard, hard work,
it is expensive and it is exhausting for all. Our’s is a privileged, middle class connected white family
who can get the most out of what the system offered.  So, my folks and eventually a local brother and
his family, have shared the work of caretaking with publicly-paid services and the work of protection
and advocacy with the courts and Legal Aid. Thank you, Betty, Jim, Jon, Deb and all the others. Thank
you taxpayers, government and welfare.

Bare Potatoes, Family Care and Welfare in the U.S.

Yes, thank you “welfare” for the help given our family, my brother. Welfare - a word probably derived
from the Old English phrase wel faran (“to fare well, get along successfully, prosper”) - now the
publicly-funded provision of care, housing, food and supervision. It is part of the fundamental fabric of
the U.S.A..

My brother’s short career in meat-cutting was a hope smashed by brain dysfunction but it did qualify
him for medicare and a tiny check from the social security disability system. Otherwise, the expense of
drugs, hospitals, counselors, minders, supervisors, housing and, and, and…comes from money from
you and me and other state and federal taxpayers.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of America.

Fundamental. Of course, those Constitution writers could not have imagined what it might take to
promote the general welfare (or establish justice, tranquility, or to defend and secure liberty) in the 21st
Century. They probably looked to banishment, corporal punishment and town-based legally-enforced
charity of neighbors to address the welfare of the needy and (dis) possessed. And the needy and
possessed probably did not live long lives. Later the U.S. adopted “poor farms” and particularly in
southern and western states, new forms of slavery for the indigent and homeless “vagrants.” We’ve
made mistakes in the past and make some today.

And families, mainly women, did what they could, as caregivers for the lame and helpers for the poor.
(Though a great-grandfather was known to nurse the sick and injured around the village.)My mom said
that her mother, on the farm, at the top of a hill, far off the main roads, on the edge of Vermont’s
Northeast Kingdom, kept notes throughout the Depression on all the extra meals she fed to job
seekers, college students, wanderers, shirttail relatives and hobos who came knocking on the door.
How many was it? I think one year there were four hundred extra people fed, same as the family,
meals that featured potatoes at every sitting.

Americans have known for a long time that one job is usually not enough to support a family. We don’t
have no longer have so much unpaid labor of homemaker women to take on the burden of someone’s
“welfare”, even if our family has space and spare “potatoes” for a thousand extra meals a year.

But it does happen, of course.

The families of the people at the homeless encampments or in the scattered tent sites are likely very
poor themselves. They probably work and if getting any benefits, are compelled by law to seek work
(likely far away, on off-shifts, always in low-wage and often dangerous jobs.) They’ve surely served far
more meals to the needy than I ever will spoon up from my table. Their families have been pushed to
the edge of homelessness, loss of stability and safety in their own lives for taking in troubled relatives
and neighbors. If they took someone in, thy'd dace a threat of eviction themselves.

Minnesota has one of the strongest voluntary social service sectors in the nation, but we are barely
marshalling a response the concentrated, and therefore visible, crisis of the encampments. There is no
private safety net strong enough to again and again catch my brother and all the others like him. We
need to support and pay for a net of public and private resources that can do what an individual and a
family cannot.

Tax cuts have swollen the accounts of the fortunate few. Congress is buying F35 war planes at $100
million each - buying more planes than even the Pentagon wants and more than we can pay
maintenance costs on. It’s not a lack of money.

People in the U.S. will spend a billion dollars on fireworks and $9-10 billion on Halloween this year and

many will begrudge a little spending to help the poor. That should be scary to us all.

A Response to Panhandling.

I think my brother never panhandled. If he had, I solemnly wish that you did not give him money.

My parents worked hard to move my brother past the disabilities and give him freedom and
responsibility. His own home, work, possessions, his choices. He could not manage this as the mental
illness grew more and more severe. If he’d been given the “choice” of holding off the imposition of care
insisted on by family and the state, say by subsisting on handouts, I wonder if he would be alive today.
He’d have lost or wasted 50 cents of every dollar given him, and he had no alcohol or other drug
dependencies.

If you want to help people in such desperate straits, I encourage you to give. To organizations that
house, feed, heal and advocate for homeless people. Once you have done that, find more to help
organizations that are working towards solutions for the long term. Invite someone on the corner with
a cardboard sign out for a meal. Then roll up your sleeves and volunteer. If you have done a good job
of that, you might make a handout and consider that you’ve done some real good.