Broken

What if the solution to Skid Row is Skid Row?

I’ve been watching Peter Santenello for a little bit. The latest one is about Skid Row in Los Angeles. I know a few things about Skid Row. I used to work not far from there and ate lunch many times right on the border. Also, one of my favorite joints is right in a spot called Skid Rokio. It’s called the Escondite. Thinking about it makes me hungry. My brother used to work the Skid Row beat for the LAPD and I’ve heard all kinds of stories, some unbelievable, most just sad.

Blight
One of the things I know is that where there is a political will, the streets will be swept. But I also know that Skid Row is more than just where homeless bums, drug dealers, addicts, ex-cons, hookers, pimps, thugs and whackjobs live and practice their respective habits. Skid Row is an institution. It has been here at least 50 years. There are charities and shelters and police and public facilities that are funded and maintained. It is that place, and everyone in California knows it. There’s room for many a-more. That’s why such people come to LA from colder political and meterological climes.

When the 1984 Olympics came to Los Angeles, and USC had a couple million fewer bricks in their walls, the mayor and police department made it a priority to clean up all of the derelicts and winos from our lovely boulevards laced with colorful banners and flags. The whole thing went without a hitch. It was so wonderful that the Oakland Raiders decided to make LA their new home.

Gradually, however Skid Row reverted and then mutated and got larger. Just before COVID, we had a cholera outbreak. Before that we had a TB scare. Oh yeah and a particular political party had the denizens lend their names and signatures to thousands of voter registrations and several voter initiatives. I heard that one guy got a year for it.

My solution to all of this has been to reinstate mental asylums in the state of California and place them away from downtown out in the boonies. But all that would cost billions our leaders would rather spend on themselves, high speed rail, their cronies and other fantastic pipe dreams. No hope invested. People who care more about party politics should expend more intellectual effort on such matters than this Stoic ever will.

Favela
What I now think is that these humans are going to live and breathe just like any other humans in similar situations. Their tent cities are going to gradually get more and more sturdy and permanent. What is now canvas will soon become corrugated steel. There will be PVC pipe and maybe even some Tesla batteries providing electricity. The government funded housing is going to become what they used to be, tenements.

But the rest will be a straight up favela. The gutters already have the human poop right alongside the cat piss and dog dookie. That aligns with the current trajectory of the half-assery that we call politics these days.

One of the fantasies that I keep in mind is how the middle class pretends that they can make the poor into the middle class. It’s simple to say “Just get a job”. Not so simple to get people to undo their trauma, un-craze their minds, re-boot their self-esteem and get a haircut. People who cannot care for themselves in our society will not be responsible for taking care of some boss’s expectations. It’s not gonna happen. Some people are just broken. And where do broken people go? They find their way to Skid Row because Skid Row is the answer. It is the Other checkbox at the bottom of the page of life hacks.

Indigence
As a Peasant and washed up Genius I find myself somewhat outside of the middle class in my attitude towards indigence. I just know that I can’t bring myself to give a great deal of lip service to that kind of liberal highmindedness that persists in the face of official indifference and incompetence. Nor can I exactly pretend that I don’t care at all so la-dee-dah. I feel a bit weird saying it in the context of not wanting to go to either watch the Barbie movie or the Sound of Freedom movie about human trafficking. I just know people know about their agendas and we in the masses are supposedly informed about them through such pop culture messaging.

I’m not stupid enough to believe that powerful people are stupid. The evidence is plain that they’re not about to fix anything. I’m not numb to it, but I’m not making myself sick over it either. This essay is not propaganda, it’s something of a prediction. There are plenty of places around the world that should remind us of how humans subsist where there are no umbrellas and safety nets.

Maybe no safety nets but we have paint buckets. The indigents squat into paint buckets when they find it a bit too humiliating to go at the curb. I’m two degrees of separation from those people. I have never purchased a paint bucket, but I have purchased the services of people who paint. Indirectly. My insurance paid for it.

COVID
In the early days of COVID, before any of our officials came up with ways to communicate what they thought we ought to do, I was wearing cloth masks underneath a balaclava when I went out of doors. During of those days of the 10pm curfew I got the urge to see how the authorities have cleaned up Skid Row. So I drove up to Central & 5th where I used to eat fried fish and made the deadly left turn beyond. Nothing had changed. They were all out there. Unmasked. Unshod. Unbathed. Unbelievable. So I wept.

I can recall the podcast with Nicholas Cristakis, who is my age, in which he calmly explained his estimation of 600,000 excess deaths in the US from COVID. He was pretty much on target with that, as well as with how our personal reactions to it would be different from something more frightening and ugly, like Ebola. As rational as I wanted to be, in the end I had to accept the odds against me and my family. I employed what I thought was a good barbell strategy. Take every precaution. Prepare to die.

The bottom line was that I was quick to accept that the system of delivery from this plague was broken. I think the metaphor put forth by Michael Osterholm in his book Deadliest Enemy, was that when you are in a shooting war, it’s much too late start building aircraft carriers.

Broken
What stands out in the 21 minute video is the simple acknowledgment that Skid Row is full of broken people. It’s something you have to admit if you want to see the situation for what it is. They understand that the problems are multi-layered and the expression is multidimensional. There are no quick fixes, there are only those circumstances that arise in which the peril and destruction becomes obvious. We have a lot to learn from the acknowledgement of what and whom is broken.

And finally, while most Americans can be pushed around a great deal, there comes a time when they will be pushed no more. They had not been told why they were in Korea or why they must fight and die, but in many men a certain pride took hold. The “gooks” had pushed them around long enough. Undisciplined, untrained, unhating, they had come to battle. They had been clobbered, as American citizen-soldiers had usually been clobbered in their first battles, from Bull Run to Kasserine. Only gradually did men understand the nature of the job they had to do. Once they did, they would begin to do it.

Fehrenbach, T. R.. This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War (p. 180). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Once again I am going outside of the contemporary interwebz to the honesty and candor of great books to inform myself. This is T. R. Fehrenbach, one of my new favorite writers, who goes deep into detail. Nobody ever in life told me to study the Korean War. Did anyone ever make that suggestion to you?

Only gradually did men understand the nature of the job they had to do.

The Poor Are Always With Us
If so many Americans weren’t so hungry as to eat the marketing of Mattel and call it culture, we might honestly study the Humanities and remember writers like, oh I don’t know, Eugene O’Neill? Maybe I can do a better job of pointing to such masters and their masterworks. It’s not all about passing the news quiz of All Things Considered. We could then, a greater fraction of us, recognize dimensions of character not based on the amount of money in one’s pocket and one’s spending proclivities. You realize there’s an algorithm called LTV that discriminates among all e-commerce participants on the interwebz. That’s the information about ‘you’ getting sold behind your backs. You realize that a greater than ever fraction of ‘human communication’ is mediated by such transactions and customer service is outsourced to even more hungry materialists than us.

Our rulers do a poor job, despite that fact that Mike Rowe and Peter Santenello do a good job, of finding reasons to take the working poor seriously, not as a threat to our Barbie ways of life, but as integral to the spirit of America. The poor peasants are not the broken. The indigents and predators of LA’s Skid Row and of Philadelphia’s Kensington are the broken. So are the systems that accommodate them and institutionalize the filthy streets where they dwell.

The Kensington Dilemma

Once again I find myself stressing the difference between just knowing stuff and understanding. Only gradually…