Living in Community: The Price of Vulnerability

The purpose of this blog is to answer the following question: "What is the meaning of community?" Allow me to answer that it means to be voluntarily vulnerable.

I am going to use this space to recount, as best I can, the concepts we discussed late into the night last night because I just had this feeling we touched on some truths. I learned today that there is a "nod from the universe," when people speak the truth. I felt like there were several nods last night and I want to write them down before I forget them.

The conversation involved five people, then two people, then three people, then two people.

People talk more willingly when the sun goes down.

Safe, vulnerable environments have been created in the anonymity of addiction recovery meetings where people share no last names and also in the strict dogma of the Catholic Church confessional.

People are funny, interesting, frustrating, crazy, lovable beings.

We are all hiding; and in this way we are all the same.

We are so desperate in our hiding that when somebody finally reveals even a smidge of themselves, we fall in love.

We all have a host of different past experiences which shape our fears.

People's vulnerability is most easily seen through their strengths.

Community members cannot reach a level deeper than "roommate status" without sharing more about themselves.

I cannot make somebody be more open; I can only be more open myself.

I cannot make somebody be more vulnerable; I can only be more vulnerable myself.

It is the secrets that kill us; and in this way we are all the same.

If we are to live in community we must look at ourselves and we will not like what we see.

The live the ideal of community is to strive for the ideal of 100% self challenge.

Ideals, by definition, are unattainable.

What one man calls integrity another calls stupidity: to strive for ideals despite their inattainability.

People's Park

After sharing with the homeless staff who run our agency toward the second week of my being here that I was here to learn from them, one particular intern took me up on the offer and asked me if I wanted to see People's Park.

People's Park, located on the campus of University of California at Berkeley, is a public place where the police, and the students, look the other way while the homeless live out their lives in the park. The contrast is stunning: chipper, fast-paced, self conscious white college kids hurry from place to place on the outskirts while all ages and races of bums wander, sit, smoke, read, and sleep in the park.

After the dust settled I wasn't sure which group had it figured out better.

Mike and I drove up to People's Park on a mission, although I wasn't quite sure what it was. I knew he wanted to show me Oakland, and, being involved historically with the hippie movement and currently a homeless hangout he felt it an appropriate place to visit. Our assignment was to interview homeless people and, I later found out, ask leading questions designed to lament the outpouring of Hurricane Katrina funding in the face of daily hurricanes on the street of Oakland. While I agreed with the sentiment I could not accept labelling the interviews as objective.

Our first candidate marked his territory with a large blanket. He had bags of groceries and personal items organized around his legs which were wrapped in antoher blanket. He was sitting up rolling his tic tacs in glue and had long brown and grey hair and pointy features. Everything was long: his legs, hair, his face, his finger nails. He accepted our invitation but refused to talk with us until we explicitly mouthed the phrase, "I hate you." He felt like this levelled the playing field nicely. Seeing I was uncertain he said, "come on, you don't have to mean it, just say it." So I did and we began our interview. I realized quickly we encountered what many people think of when they see bums: the romantic. Apparently the Carl Sandberg, "I choose to be homeless," type of homelessness does exist, albeit far more rarely than any Beat Poet would lead you to believe. He was not, to my colleague's chagrin, distressed over the Katrina funding--for him generosity was generosity in whatever form it took. So as the interview faded I asked him why he made people tell him they hated him before beginning conversation. The answer was fascinating. He said it was the only way he could be sure to trust people. Let me repeat: saying "I hate you," was the only way he could trust me. His other "friendship tester" was "the push"--he would reach up to gently yet steadily place his hand on the front shoulder of his newfound partner. If they returned the favor, peace was maintained. He said a lot of times he stays with people for a while--in the park that is--and for some time they continue to say "I hate you," and they continue to push but one day he might go to push somebody and they back away. That way he knows it's time to leave.

Maybe the idea was to bring to the forefront of conversation what would inevitably underlie it: maybe I already hated him and he just wanted to make me say it. Many of us, and for long periods of time, live in self-denial. We comfort ourselves with self-congratulatory thoughts of our monthly cash donation or our annual weeklong presence at the local "community building," activity. Even when we help, so often, it's more an ego boost than anything else: "here's your crumb...and you be grateful for it too!" Often followed by the even more delicious "you lazy bum."

Is it with anything other than hate that we treat homeless people? Who, might you ask, do I mean by the phrase "we?" I mean anybody who has a home. It's not hate with with your thoughts or your words people, but with your actions! It's default hate.

Homelessness, or the lack therof, is the most outrageous self-bamboozlement to criss cross this country--and there have been many. They are the most invisible statewide army of 633,000 people I have ever unseen.

As studying for the GRE has me running to the dictionary more than an American businessman in Tijuana runs to the toilet, I decided to look up the word "intense" before I wrote on it. I found four definitions: (1) Possessing or displaying a distinctive feature to an extreme degree; (2) Extreme in degree, strength, or size; (3) Involving or showing strain or extreme effort (4) Deeply felt; profound; tending to feel deeply.

Working here certainly involves a show of strain or extreme effort. While expounding on this may be a good stress reliever and even better for my ego, such a description does little to separate this job from any other; and describing what makes this job unique is a tenant of this blog. I intend, instead, to focus on (4). The same event is often both positively and negatively intense.

Example. A totally harmless 65 year old man wants to get his open container ticket dismissed. I walk him through the homeless court process and, after realizing his tickets are alcohol related, tell him he'll have to prove his sobriety by going to AA meetings. "I'm 65 years old and been drinking since I was 17...it's going to be hard to stop." The easy, classic response would have been "nobody said it was going to be easy." Instead I just nodded and thought that, if I was in his situation, I'm not sure I would quit either. I felt pity, and at the same time gave up on the situation.

Last week he came back and had his AA card filled out six times--all at the Champion Guidance Center.

Example. During a walk to work a few weeks ago I watched as a man approached me, his eyes intent on the grass where the nearby fence touched the ground. He reacted with a celebratory fist pump, exactly the kind you see Kobe Bryant do after ducking and weaving, when he found a dirty needle. He immediately hopped into an approaching car and I immediately became an advocate for needle exchange.

Example. A smart, good looking, computer-savvy man with a host of handy man skills can't progress on account of his mental illness.

Example. A tired, partly blind 63 year old man asked me to help him fill out a housing application. He has a thick Southern Accent, wears perscription sunglasses that aren't his perscription both indoors and out, lives out of a slummy hotel, and, in his own words, "I know more about my paperwork than the people filling it out, I can answer all the questions, I just can't write it too good." Despite this and all his years of substance abuse and manual labor with the local labor union moving concrete, he exuded wisdom. I remembered this because during our community meeting he was the only one who said that, rather than taking ownership of the issues which was the point of the conversation, most of the participants were simply pointing fingers at each other. He told me the Southern Accent gets in the way of people understanding him so I told him I went to school in Mobile and he told me he was from outside of Hattiesburg. The small towns he kept naming reminded me of weekend countryside joy rides through the rural deep south--a memory I treasure from my college years. He was surprised, indeed, shocked that I was able to pull up the phone number of the labor union he worked at a decade ago in under thirty seconds with the aid of the Internet. "So that's the Internet, huh?Damn, people who can't read miss out on a lot don't they?" I immediately pulled up google maps and showed him satellite pictures of Laurel, Mississippi, his hometown he hadn't seen in 40 years. The rental application was the least of our accomplishments today: I had the pleasure of witnessing a 65 year old man learn, for the first time, the joy of reading.

I relayed these stories because of their intensity: they were deeply felt by all parties involved. The feeling was, at once, positive and negative, sorrowful and joyful. The feeling was intense.

Drugs are so fucked up.

You use the drugs
And you use everybody around you.
You lose the capacity to love

Yourself.