It is impossible to read about the childhood and early adulthood of these homeless people and not have a change in appreciation for young people in downtown PDX living on the margin. This book refuses the option of demeaning the homeless. It humanizes those without a place on this earth, people of whatever age, and counters the cheap prejudice inherent in privilege that wants to think some people don't deserve a place of their own.
The recent regulation of the poor, the so-called sidewalk obstruction ordinance, which attempts to purge poor people from the downtown business area is clearly aimed at homeless youth.
Young people banding together; isolated, demonized, alienated, trying to survive and imagine a future. This is it! This book, its voices, is a call to action. A shout out to refuse the dismissal and criminalization of the homeless by the business community focused on profits, not the human heart and government leaders trying to balance conflicting interests, which only means ignoring the reality of the homeless fighting to hold onto a little dignity and hope.
Since homeless folk have little or no money, and therefore lack access to the corridors of power, it is necessary to use our numbers.
This book is, simply put, a grassroots treasure. From the first page: “I never thought I'd be homeless.” Amen to that! Who among us is born with such an expectation?
The focus on childhood, specific in one chapter, implicit in the rest, shows how children on the streets do not have to be stuck for life. The book provides a powerful, unignorable current. Homelessness can, in fact, be seen as arrested development. How terrible when a person is consigned to such dismal prospects when young. When the sense of abandonment and closed doors is imprinted so intensely and irrevocably. Just left to kill time.
These voices are of children regardless of age. There is a childishness that takes over, when all possibilities of growth into a better or changing world is gone. We retreat to a sort of thumb-sucking dementia, an oblivion encouraged by booze or dope, an incubus we live inside regardless of the geography. But of course inside this incubus we do age. Ten years in one.
When Frantz Fanon gave us “The Wretched of the Earth,” he gave us a description of psychological colonization. Colonization wasn't just about diamonds and oil but about possession of people's inner psychic resources. The wretched of the earth were robbed of serenity, hope, and self-determination. They were and are today in Portland dispossessed of a future and self-worth, their spirits captive and manipulated. The wretched take the colonizer, the oppressor, into themselves. They oppress themselves and deny themselves life. We don't trust a life. They wander streets and sleep in doorways. The oppressor is always there with them, a homunculus.
Dreams are torn down into delusional nightmares and dangerous ambitions unattached to any reality that isn't long past, dead and gone. To accept that horror and dig out of it takes the help of strangers. Whom to trust? Is this stranger the one who'll set me free? Is this interviewer a possible friend, a supporter, or just a slumming marauder, psychically parasitizing my agony?
The voices in this book and the voices responding to them are part of a symbiosis far too rare in this country today. I remember Bush's famous remark to Jim Wallis of Sojourner, a wonderful publication, that he needed help: "I simply don't know any poor people, Jim." Thank God, these interviewers ain't him, Jim!
The first truth here recorded is that no one expects to wind up homeless. It could never happen to me, is the pitiful insistence. But things do happen, in unlikely combinations, and there you are. The last place you ever had reason to expect you'd be.
Life happens, like landslides.
Another truth is that, fortunately, there are places like Sisters Of The Road that'll lend a hand. Places you hear about from the grapevine, passed hand to hand on the street. Hospitality. No Bible-thumping bunk for a meal. Non-violent. If you got no money, you can barter for a meal. Dignity.
As the sign in the cafe says: "There are no strangers here, only friends we haven't met yet." Amen to that. Thanks for the reminder of what it is to be human.
