The War and Homelessness

pstrongDid Recent Terrorist Attacks Affect Dallas’s Homeless community? /strong/p pDIV align="left" TABLE cellpadding="5"TR VALIGN="TOP"TDIMG SRC= "../sites/default/files/arch_img/540/photo_1_supplement.jpg" //td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TD/td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TDTR VALIGN="TOP"TD pby Gordon Hilgers/PNN Texas Correspondent/p pThe evening after organized criminal attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., a homeless acquaintance of mine was seen, at downtown Dallas’s Akard Street light rail station, making a spectacle of himself. Stumbling around, half-crocked, sweating like a soaked sponge, rocking on his scuffed heels and winding in and out of the rush hour train-bound crowd, he was seen shouting, cursing, flailing his arms. Most downtown workers probably never realized in their wildest dreams that my friend is a Vietnambr / veteran/p pThis spectacle, however typical in workaday downtown Dallas, had been framed and reconfigured by a terrorist bombing. On that warm North Texas afternoon, it seemed as if every little thing that happened was somehow related to the shocking TV scenes from the previous day. Many downtown office workers seemed, and probably were, hypervigilant, angry, shocked and afraid. /p pIn light of all the nervous energy in the autumn air, I suppose, you couldn’t have helped but notice the befuddled and often contemptuous expressions on the faces of these businesspeople who had happened to step into this man’s path. Many who had been surprised into a confrontation with this man’s parade of emotion, I gathered, found it hard to decide what to make of his fierce expression. Was he upset over the bombings, like everyone else? Or was he just drunk or crazy? And who on earth was he berating?br / /pPAs the man perpetrated his public display of turmoil as if the world had some sort of obligation to listen to him, most workers disdainfully took the other road altogether and ignored the suffering. He was, after all, behaving outside the pale on a day when most people sorely needed routine and business as usual activities to reassure them. It’s also possible that this upsetting slice of life probably didn’t seem particularly pertinent to their worried concerns. All things considered, it was just another nagging upset from beyond the cloister of the real world; which, after all, still reeled from attack by criminal extremists. Even if his unsettling exhibition had seemed significant to the anxieties that consumed most Americans ;will more terror descend on us? Most of us admit that downtown Dallas white collars have long conditioned themselves to keep the disquiet of strangers out of their worlds. That’s the routine.br / /pPTherefore, it wasn’t too surprising, not to me, that is, that no one paused to ask this man if he was all right, or if they could help. Despite admonitions, by everyone from local TV news anchors to the President of the United States, that Americans pull together and muster the courage to comfort one another during this national tragedy, this man might as well have been completely alone in an abandoned ruin of a once-great city. As this homeless guy disappeared into the train and headed for the highway underpass he calls home for a moment I couldn’t help but wonder if unity and pulling together during this crisis were words and phrases that apply only to the productive, respectable segments of the city. The summary tone of public apathy, in fact, suggested the powerful pull even the slightest evidence of suffering has on Americans. We don’t quite know how to react to it. Homeless people have known this about the real world.br / /pPUs Vietnam veterans feel things in ways regular people don’t; a friend of mine, a former Marine who saw action in some of Vietnam’s fiercest fighting, told me. When you see stuff like the WTC buildings crumbling, it throws you right back to the moments you were traumatized. I’ve been dreaming I was at Mead River for two whole weeks.br / /pPThis friend, who jokingly says he’s lucky not to be homeless right now, exclaimed that he has no earthly idea how tough it must be to be both homeless and a Veteran with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You probably have two traumas to deal with: The war and homelessness. That poor buddy of yours probably felt really vulnerable after the terrorist attack. He probably just started screaming. He’s probably never been able to get past trying to drink away his terror. If that’s how he tried to deal with it 25 years ago, when something like this terrorist attack occurs, he goes right back to what worked. I wonder what he can’t deal with. I wonder what’s so ungodly terrifying to him that it’s presence in his mind has destroyed his ability to cope or strive or even get a little faith in his life. No telling where he was--inside his head. He probably wanted to hide somewhere. Because he’s homeless, he probably he felt he had no place to run.br / /pPBeyond the remembered terror of military duty in Vietnam, nearly all of Dallas’ homeless have also experienced that same sense of vulnerability described by my friend. In fact, we experience that vulnerability on a daily basis. Many of us have been traumatized by our humiliating experiences on the streets of Dallas. Downtown Dallas, of course, is a far cry from the tinderbox of Vietnam’s fabled Mead River Campaign, and there’s no sense in even trying to make a comparison between guerilla war and homelessness in a well-off American city, despite the fact that some actually do try.br / /pPRegardless, we have to look at the facts of life surrounding homelessness that, sadly but truly, tend to mirror the traumatic experiences of those who actually witnessed the criminal attacks in Washington and New York that are documented daily on the evening news, that is, if we want to fully understand how homeless people reacted to a terrorist attack. Many of Dallas’ homeless have seen plenty of trauma: fistfights, stabbings, drug overdoses, muggings and robberies. Some have been assaulted late at night while sleeping in hedges and alleys. Others have gone hungry for days. Still others have suffered mental and emotional relapses on Commerce Street. Most quivered in the cold last Christmas Day.br / /pPWhen a frightening national trauma occurs, one that everyone goes through--many homeless Dallasites, just like my veteran friend, are just plain vulnerable to the strong and often conflicting emotions that open old wounds. Should anyone be surprised by that? Feelings of vulnerability and fears of surprise attack both come with the territory of homelessness. But there is very little in the shape of a support network towards which to turn. Many homeless men women and children, for example, simply have no families left to hug, no shoulders on which to cry. Most of us, however, have learned to survive without what, many of us would agree, seem like indulgences after everything we’ve been through. Living on the streets, you learn to steel yourself to adversity. You get tough. You block out what used to make you afraid. You avoid what puts you in danger. The ultimate effect, according to psychologists interested in the mental and emotional dimensions of the trauma of homelessness, is that you step out.br / /pPMan. I feel like I’m invisible or something one man told IEndless Choices/i. As he sat in the Stewpot, a local soup kitchen which serves as ground zero for the area’s growing homeless population, he laughed. But you could tell he was stymied by the strange sensation of looking at your status as a homeless pariah through the distorted new lens lent to all Americans by 22 suicidal fanatics from the other side of the globe. I mean we’re always invisible when we’re homeless anyway. People don’t even want to know what our lives are like. But this is pretty scary. Who cares if you’re homeless when 6,000 people are dead? People were looking at me like I was one of the terrorists or something. I could’ve smoked a pack of cigarettes the morning of that attack, man, but I didn’t even have any. I’d ask people for a cigarette and they’d look at me as if I was personally responsible for what happened, personally responsible.br / /pPSeveral told me that nobody would care if they were killed in a terrorist attack Nelson said. Her comments were echoed by one homeless man who asked, ‘If some terrorists killed 6,000 homeless people, do you really think it’d make it to the evening news?br / /pPAnd sure, reactions like these are not only startling to those who have never slept on a downtown sidewalk or hid in the bushes when Dallas’ infamous bicycle police came calling, such reactions are shocking.br / /pP”Hey! Look at me!” shouts Vincent, a longtime friend and familiar denizen of Dallas’ streets. ‘Look! Look! I’m a homeless terrorist! I’m a terrorist!’br / /pPCertainly, Vincent was joking. In fact, it might take a while for non-homeless Americans to understand the true meaning and gravity of his comments. But at the bottom of his perplexing remarks, Vincent was telling me that he already stands out as different, a kind of pariah, something to walk around and be aware of;and that this typical day-to-day closet bigotry and stereotyping of people in humiliating circumstances and been re-attenuated, re-framed by the experience of the 911 attacks. /p PAccording to Dennis Strickland, another Stewpot caseworker, homeless people see the disaster in terms of their own set of experiences. In other words, if homeless men and women have coped with the trauma of homelessness by drinking or drug abuse, they more than likely used the same means to deal with news of the attack. As extremists from the world’s dark side salt old wounds, Dallas’ homelessmdash;most of whom seem to know that they, too, are children of oppression and intolerance ;tell IEndless Choices /ithat they’ve lately felt especially vulnerable. Some talk of being invisible, or bereft of love and understanding. Others recoil into the same old rage: the familiar friends of anger, rebelliousness, and contempt for a world that they see as having abandoned them. /p P‘I’ve been working with one person who was very upset about the bombing,’ Strickland says. ‘He thought the bombing was the end of the world. As I talked to him, I concluded fundamentalist preachers have heavily influencing him. He was worried about his soul. He was afraid that, because he has;sexual thoughts,’ he was going to Hell.’/p PIndeed, the golem of the so-called End-Times has been one hot topic on the ‘homeless talk show scene.’ The apocalypse is on everybody’s mind in Dallas’ homeless community. The escalating incidents of street-preachers hollering through inner city canyons that the bombing is a Biblical event, that we are being punished for our sins, is plain-as-day evidence of the influence more simpleminded forms of Christianity command in this part of the nation. Those who are condemned to stand on the corner and listen to these often indecipherable rants while waiting for the bus to come find the presence of street preachers particularly tasteless since the attacks. Others stand and laugh. How on earth can supposedly religious people take advantage of a national tragedy and use it as a convenient excuse for evangelism? But they’re not alone in at least wondering what the future holds. Many Americans are looking for a way to understand this event. /p PViolent tragedy is impossible to understand, according to psychologists who are plumbing the mysteries of how trauma affects the mind, because the range of feelings that rush up to meet it is too wide for the reasoning mind. Modern-day experts and theologians throughout history have spent thousands of years trying to explain suffering or pointless violence. But of course no answers are ever completely certain. /p PWhen a person becomes homeless, he or she is forced to find a way to cope with the psychic violence of what homelessness does to the thinking, and many homeless people eventually find a rationalization that tells them to frame all their suffering in terms of sin and redemption. Many have been taught to see their situations in terms of fundamentalist Christian teachingsmdash;mainly because, they say, fundamentalists and evangelicals run several missions and shelters in Dallas. These well-meaning people, several clients of shelters and missions indicate, teach their worldview to a relatively captive audience whose only other recourse is to live outdoorsmdash;on the streets. /p PWhen you’re homeless and grasping at straws, you tend to identify with the beliefs of the people willing to help you, Strickland says. Consequently, he says, many clients of shelters and missions embrace an interpretation of their life situations as signs of coming tribulation and apocalypse, symptoms of personal shortcoming and the personal results of supernatural events they cannot control. Many critics of using homelessness as a way to make converts consider these tactics forms of religious trickery, a subtle form of coercion. When tragic world events actually do come calling, critics of this chicanery agree with Strickland: homeless people cling to the ideological explanations that seem to make sense to them, no matter how far from reality or reason they actually are. /p PMany of these people live in circumstances that are almost a bombing situation. They’re familiar with despair and with things not being as they ought to be. We all share similar feelings at one time or another. We’ve got to remember that; /p P;so I tried to reassure that man,’ Strickland continues, ‘that God loves him. I told him you can’t do anything to make God love you more--or less. Of course, that man in particular;he suffers from mental illness. But I couldn’t help but think that it was religious teaching that had really upset him. Fundamentalism isn’t my theological bent. Though a lot of us have some fears of widespread violence right now, I don’t see any of this in terms of signs from God. I also don’t think it does any good right now to dwell on the End of the World. That’s a horrible way to look at your life.’/p PBill Thompson, Director of Union Gospel Mission, says that since the attacks he has seen ‘the full range of emotions and opinions,’ but adds that anger and fear seem to predominate the mission’s clientele. ‘We Ialways/i make ourselves available to our clients, especially those who need to vent,’ he says. When you talk about wars, about people losing their lives, it causes you to try to reason it out. Many of our clients have had religious upbringings, and some do try to explain these circumstances in terms of what they’ve been taught.’/p PThompson adds that many visiting church groups that conduct nightly church services at Union Gospel have focused on issues surrounding The Book of Revelations--but that it is the mission’s policy not to control what is said by preachers and laypersons who witness to clients. ‘In our discipleship classes, we have been teaching that when there are people in the world who are controlled by sin, they are going to do sinful things. Specifically, we try to explain to our students here at the mission that, because of their religious bent, the extremists who committed these terrorist acts thought they were doing God a favor.’/p PBut unconscionable episodes such as what is coming to be known in some circles as the 9-11 bombings, have also caused confusing rationalizations of their own. Here’s how one homeless man, an Air Force alumni of the Korean War, reacted: ‘Thinking of this, I thought the world was coming to an end. That kind of played into my insane thinking. I’d been clean off drugs for seven months, but my head started telling me, lsquo;If the world’s coming to an end, why not get high? What’d I have to lose?’ I went out and used cocaine,’ he said. /p PHe adds: ‘I mean, you’re out there;right out there in the open;and you know something’s about to come down. Right out of the sky, man. You feel like you have to just get some kind of shelter somewhere immediately;even if it’s in the form of checking out emotionally. Now, of course, I could just kick myself. I lost seven months of clean time off drugs, man.’/p PJay Dunn, another Stewpot caseworker, tells IEndless Choices/i that clients asked him if they could watch the news on September 11. ‘Our clients had a real interest in what was going on,’ he says. He says he knows of no violent incidents among the homeless that were triggered by the recent attacks. However, he says, since September 11 the Stewpot has been rife with what he calls ‘anxious energy.’ /p PParticularly later in the day of the bombings, there was a real buzz,’ says Dunn. You could just feel it. Everyone was talking about it. Especially when the buildings downtown closed and workers began going home early, I noticed that a lot of our clients were visibly upset. Helicopters were flying over downtown. The homeless who were caught downtown were really scared.’/p PTomie Ann Owen, a Dallasite who claims she has been homeless, off and on, for nearly 18 years, was at Parkland Hospital’s clinic the day of the bombing. ‘I was afraid for my own safety,’ she says. ‘Most of all, I feel sorry for those New York people. A lot of people died. IChildren/i. I feel sorry for Bush and the government, too. The other night, though, the nicest thing happened. This couple from De Soto;a real young man and woman;came up to us while we were sleeping outside. They stayed up all-night and prayed with us. That was so nice’/p P‘We have the same feelings about this as everybody else,’ says one homeless man who identifies himself as Eric. Sitting at a table at the Stewpot, he says he is anxious about the bombings, and is afraid we’re about to start a ‘seriously bad’ war. ‘I think people are still in shock. Because of me being homeless, this hasn’t really registered. I used to live in New York. When I think of New York, I can’t see the place without those landmarks. I’ve also got a friend who works in the Garment District. I can’t get in touch with him.’ /p PLike many people in Dallas, there is little those in the Dallas homeless community can do right now other than keep their spirits up. But at this time, it’s the little things that count. /p P‘I sent a needlepoint cross I made to the President’s wife,’ one homeless man tells IEndless Choices./i Because Stewpot arts coordinator Pamela Nelson was travelling to Washington D.C. to firm up plans for a new job working for the Bush Administration, all he had to do was give it to her. Pam’s a former classmate of the President’s wife. She knows her. And that little cross? I did this out of kindness. I think the President and his wife must be under a lot of stress.. I hope they’ll appreciate my gift./p/td/tr/td/tr/table/div/p