Street Spirit December 2005

The Personal Cost of San Diego's War on the Poor

by Rocky Neptun

As Father Richard Rohr is fond of saying, we must find those broken spots in our lives, our greatest fears, and overcome them as individuals if we are to heal and be whole. Likewise, as a community, we must find the compassion and courage to "just say no" to the madness of materialism, the madness of increasing our collection of material junk, designer lives and artificial prestige. This lifestyle benefits a very few, while enslaving the rest of us in long hours at boring work and suppressing our creative natures of play, travel and new experiences.

But most importantly, for this writer, who lived on New York City streets as a homeless teenager, we must understand the holistic nature of human existence. If some in our community are cold and hungry tonight, there is a part of our humanity that freezes or dies each night, until we are but emotionless bio-machines, disconnected from the organic wholeness of symbiotic humanness; facing a meaningless life and an equally pointless, terrifying death.

Like most discarded people, the homeless are kind of tough when it comes to the big stuff, like arrests or being beaten. It is the small cuts, one by one, day by day, that inch one ever closer to the edge. Every officer's harassment, every passerby's cruel stare, every hateful word spoken by those who live in terror of their own fall, slices away at the core - dehumanizing, animalizing, creating a human shell of what was once a human being.

We, likewise, in the circular nature of all life, both as individuals and as a society, lacerate our basic human integrity - our love force and liberating compassion - when we allow the persecution and abuse of people because they are poor. To criminalize their condition, to hunt them down and beat them down, retards our evolution toward inner peace and goodness. Our egos, based on money and prestige, no doubt, will become our cruel, ugly millstones into eternity.

The dirt and grime of the streets can be washed off in a hot shower, but the filth of indifference to human suffering clings like molten tar. The opposite of love is not hate; it is the inability to love.

Without compassion, and the love that nurtures it, we are but another insect crawling its way through the mud, pretending that life is a great big game of chance, with no real purpose, so that our social theory can justify our self-indulgence, indifference and hoarding. We risk becoming spiritual cripples, our humanity a stunted concept.

If we allow the City Council to continue its war on the homeless, our membership in a free, loving community will be based on a lie. Our social capital, the cultural brick and mortar that binds us, built upon generations of caring neighbors and compassionate citizens, is in danger of being handed over to speculators and developers to persecute human beings in our name.

Ultimately, we must ask ourselves if we can continue to eat good food, enjoy our pleasures and sleep in a warm bed, while our city government hunts down human beings like wild dogs, denies them food or sleep, and arrests them for being poor.

Can we be participants in psychological terrorism which degrades and brutalizes those already living lives of hopelessness and desperation? If we fail to act to prevent their suffering - the pain of personal worthlessness, hunger, sleep deprivation and even death - then what kind of human being are we?

At the November 1st wake, in the shadow of City Hall, several people held lit candles, and passed around a flask of vodka. We remembered our friend Thomas Dwyer, and asked, how many more needless deaths in San Diego?

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