The Business and Art of Survival
by Stuart Marks

We eat outdoors with flies for all seasons, and manage our campsites in areas fools would fear to tread. Given the options of drainage pipes, river nests, or under bridges and overpasses, we would prefer a more Arcadian location than the overgrown paths we follow, for our life path is completely involved in the business and art of survival. We are subject to losing what few possessions we’ve managed to accumulate. If not the local police serving and protecting then it’s Cal-Trans that will arbitrarily and capriciously toss away our tarps, blankets, clothes, shoes, sleeping bags, pots and pans, bicycles any and everything they find. Most of it is our survival gear. Homelessness isn’t a state of mind; it’s about location, location, location. What is troubling and compounding is there seems little concern for a.m. homelessness. Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, p.m. homelessness is a citable offense today. It’s not illegal to be homeless, it’s just illegal to be homeless and sleep. Having experienced the vigor and abuse with which some police pursuit this victimless crime it will not be long before we have a fatality to address in our county.

Now vehicular homelessness is yet another category for consideration. In spite of the hundreds of empty parking lots, and thousands of empty parking spaces at night, none are available to sleep in for an evening. A similar situation arose in Amsterdam, and the Dutch showed remarkable compassion in their decision to allow all that needed a place to sleep to go to one centrally-located park and set up their tent or park their vehicle. There was no further need to harass or arrest anyone after this proclamation in the city of Amsterdam.

Unfortunately, I understand that surfi ng the waves of change is diffi cult enough for the individual, but for a society, especially this community, it is an insuperable task. The county is thoroughly bent on law and order, and such thinking will almost always be well-served by chance. Considering the homeless problem for the 8:00 am briefi ng in the cop-shop, and to the county fathers, this is but a penumbra of intangible truth. Faced with torrents of papers that daily pass across their desks, this momentary glimpse will only provide an unheralded ripple in their daily rush for staff meetings, and their public life of heightened eventfulness. Meanwhile, our hope is neither secured nor their spirit ignited by anything short of the cheers in the crowd. The sad part is any sophomore knows that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it and the accommodations asked for and required here are far better served by the social and medical communities than by the criminal justice system. May I remind all of us that the Chinese symbol for problem and opportunity is the same.