Who Will Save Your Soul

So...I got off the bus a few minutes after midnight last night. I live on the border of Old Town and the Pearl here in Portland, you see a lot of tents on the sidewalks, a lot of people on the cement without tents. Last night there was some guy crashed out a few feet away from the entrance to our building.

Some people would be inclined to get some water, toss it on the guy, and snarl "This isn't a KOA, move on, motherfucker."

Some people would be inclined to go up to their apartment and get a blanket for him.

Both approaches, in my opinion, are wrong.

The second is more humane, but it reinforces a fucked up situation, enables that guy to keep sleeping on the street.

I think about this a lot.

How did this get to be normal? We moan about all the homeless in their tents, wring our hands, vacillate between compassion and anger---

But...how did this get to be normal? What the fuck is wrong with us....as a society?

My upcoming book, The Bad Kids, is about when I was in middle school in the early 1980s. In Petaluma, California it was hard to find homeless people, you had to know where to look. Big cities had more of them, but it was nothing like today---

How did this get to be normal?

I think about this a lot, living in Downtown Portland.

People on both ends of the political spectrum have it wrong, in my opinion.

Right wing people want to deal with the situation aggressively, Left wing people too passively.

Yeah, they sweep the streets of homeless camps, but the camps just move on to another neighborhood.

We need to ask where this all starts, and stop it there.

Well, how did that guy nodded off next to my front door get there? How did he fall through the cracks in such a dramatic fashion?

How did we fail him as a kid, or whenever this downfall started?

That's where we need to start.

The truth is if we can fix this, we're not just saving people like that guy sleeping on the sidewalk, we're saving ourselves...