My Year at CVOEO (3)

November 6,2018

What I have learned: We are all looking for family

I: Those who have are quite lucky
(by what magic do they hold onto it?)

The economic engine chews people up: meat grinder
What is that thing?
How did it come to be built?
All we are saying is give us a
chance Don’t make us victims of your engine of privilege

End genocide
End exploitation
End ecocide
Share
Name the humanity of others as important.
Name life on Earth as important.

People who demand, live in fear of losing
People who give,
live in embrace
Build your life in embrace
lose your fear.

Today is the day when the noises outside provide the
landscape of thought,
Rain patters, tires stripe wet pavement,
Engines wind and fade.
How can we secure love?
Make the world a kinder place?
What makes us kinder? Can we be kinder?
Rain patter lulls me, gifts me with sleep under my warm dry covers,
thinking of my brothers in tents, trying to stay dry.

II:
My father wanted me to be tough. He miserated that I didn’t like football, thought I would be a sissy. He thought he was being a good father, being cruel, presuming his abuses would make me stronger, give me power, did he know it would make me angry? I think he wanted me to fight back, to bully the bullies, make them fear me. I never learned that lesson. I only learned that I hated him, and felt alone.

III: Todd had a black eye and cuts on his face. I saw Todd as I ate breakfast in the food shelf dining room. I asked someone, who said, “Yea, he got beat up last night.”

I am reluctant to insert myself into another person’s moment of tranquility, but I was curious, so I asked if I could sit with him. He was very happy to have me, and he was eager to tell his story. “If it will help someone else, I’m happy to do it!” he said.

Todd grew up in Kansas City Kansas, “a white clay middle American, man of God.”

He got clean for 10 years, the ten best years of his life, he claims. His mother was unable to take care of him as a child, basically he was homeless from childhood, so it was a miracle when he met someone, fell in love and built a life, he tells me, then he lost his wife.

He relapsed two years ago, became homeless again, took Benzos, steroids, became a full-fledged addict.

“This is harder for me than for younger people. Fucking no love out here. Goddamn beasts out here. It’s way different from before 9/11.”

“Here’s the problem with being homeless. You are so lonely, every time you get some money, you spend…” and “use it to anesthetize yourself.” “Man is not meant to be alone.”

“That’s the trap. Money is the trap. Because you don’t use it to elevate yourself.”

I asked him how he got to Vermont. He bought a bus ticket. But how did he pay for it? I asked. Day labor, one hop at a time. But why? “Cities in the northeast are safe, sort of.” Except that he got beaten up last night.

So what’s next? “Waiting to get into a detox program. Act I said they’ll have a bed in a couple of days.”

“The thing that set me free forten years was my encounter with Jesus.” Whatever it takes, I thought. “I knew that I knew the creator made it clear to me that he loved me.”

“I hope my story can help someone else stay out of trouble.”

I haven’t seen Todd since I met him.

My Year at CVOEO (2)

November 6, 2018

Forward 

Joseph Campbell discusses the journey of the hero. In it the hero journeys far and wide in search of some secret or power, encountering existential dangers along the way, given courage by the imperative to acquire that secret. Only at the close of the final ordeal, in which she or he both prevails and is transformed, does s/he achieve the new power, enlightenment or maturity, which allows them to go home with a gift, a new beginning or salvation. The hero can’t be sure she or he will survive the final ordeal until they have. Until then, the existential dangers remain active and threatening.

I am facing my final ordeal. What will I do with my experiences, my hard won new knowledge, my varied and often undocumented stories? Will I discover the secrets I was sent to find? Will there be secrets to name? Will I arrive home with a reward for the travails of the journey, or will my journey prove barren? I don’t know. I can’t know. And I can’t go back. Jan promised that this would be a year of discovery. She posited that my journey would inform the project. In the word “discovery” I was given no road map, no “right” or “wrong” way to follow. I was entrusted with a mission, a distant landmark, a mountain, heard of, anticipated, described, barely seen, to reach. Between myself and it, my thickets, my glades, my rivers, my dark and fetid swamps. Between it and myself, people of the villages, other travelers, to consult with me, to tell me how to find the mountain. No one lied to me, but few enough had answers to my questions. Kindness, earnest desire to help, but this would be my journey of discovery. Jan promised this would be a year of discovery, but what we did not know is how personal that year of discovery would be.

I have tried to understand how to be effective in the world. I have alternated between that constructive, pioneering confidence which seeks to contribute and create, that anticipates a better future, and that destructive despairing at my irrelevant, ineffective, lonely, pained, meaningless existence. More than a decade ago, in pursuit of this wisdom (how to be effective), I came to understand that effectiveness is a product of relationships. Healthy relationships, in which each partner feels a benefit of something meaningful being shared. I came to understand that the pain I felt, the alienation and hostility I projected toward others, that my inability to trust, to bond, to attach, fully explained my ineffectiveness in the world. To be effective, I would need to open my senses, feel what other people feel, respond with myself, put myself in relationships. I would have to do this in spite of my fear, in spite of feeling deeply, existentially, unsafe.

I do not believe that emotions or skills, supposed and projected in a persona, are real; I cannot simply decide to be different. The choices that I have are in the realm of what I do with my body, to whom I bring myself for interactions and relationships, to whom I listen, and my willingness to learn. The places and people I bring myself to, in turn, interact with the totality of who and what I am, producing changes. I change myself by choosing the challenges I must answer.

But I do not control the changes that result. I do not decide whether my inner resources are equal to the demands being made on them. I do not decide in what directions I grow or do not grow. I am an observer, a participant, and a choice maker. I am not the master of my fate. I am its occupant.

These efforts produced, since 2014, a series of new opportunities. That year, I began work with Vermont Associates, which placed me and paid me, so I did not have to ask for a job, but I got paid, and I began to rebuild my record of employability. The first year I was at the Daystation of COTS, where the homeless of Burlington taught me interpersonal skills like calm, respect, and empathy. Then I spent two and a half years at CEDO, where I “networked” with inhabitants of the political machinery of Burlington, and I practiced kindness, empathy and responsiveness to the needs of others, and made real connections.

While at CEDO, I was invited to participate at the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance. Here the process continued, but now as “a person with lived experience” of homelessness. I understood myself to have an obligation to the provide representation for the homeless community. I would try, within my limits, to listen, provide help or solace, and to convey the real needs of the homeless to the alliance, the City and the community.

In these roles, as a Vermont Associate and as an advocate in the homeless community, Jan invited me to be part of CVOEO, where I wrote a report to inform its future development.

Audacity, the willingness to challenge myself and others, has led me here. Pursuit of wisdom has led me here. And finally I learn why I am here. Each of these choices, each of these acts, which has engaged me and connected me with others, has been driven by one central feature of my life: Profound loneliness, the need to be part of a loving family. Remarkably, I discover this about myself because my strategy worked. I have engaged, learned how to love and give, how to listen, how to be generous. Feeling loved in my community has allowed me to feel the pain of not being loved, hence to heal myself, and to bring healing to those around me.

My Year at CVOEO (1)

November 6, 2018

Prologue

There are many mysteries, puzzles, riddles, and games to entertain the human curiosity, but there are two questions whose answers must be found, questions we are born asking, because without answers we cannot survive.

Who are my people? and
What is my job?

From the time that my family split up, when I was around 18 years old, and I had to work, the many and deep contradictions of my family life descended on me like so many tons of gravel. I tried many jobs, went to many schools, got several degrees, traveled around the US and Canada, in pursuit of meaning, a reason, to be in one place, doing one thing. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I was restless, because I felt rootless, without a home or a place to which I belonged. This was not the search of the hero, it was the search of the wretch, the man who felt worthless and didn’t feel find meaning anywhere or in anything.

People without a family, a community and a few good friends are lonely, and struggle to find meaning. When a person identifies with other human beings, he or she feels protected and supported, receives the comfort of a group.

This report explores the dimensions of community, and the role that CVOEO has, and might have, in the creation of our community.

I wanted to write a poem today

I wanted to write a poem today
But then I remembered
“They're all the same”

I wanted to write a poem today
But then I remembered
“I've written this one before”

I wanted to write a poem today
But then I remembered
“They can't be sung”

I wanted to write a poem today
But then I remembered
“Allan Ginsberg did that for you”

I wanted to write a poem today
But then I remembered
All of the sing-songy pretense to poetry I'd hated before

I wanted to tell you about my anger today
But then I remembered your telling me
“You're wrong!”

I wanted to tell you about my pain today
Then I remembered you telling me
“Feelings don't matter!”

I wanted to ask why I hurt so much
But then I heard you say
“You'll have to get used to it”

I wanted to tell you “You're hurting me!”
But before I could say anything you told me
“The world is a cruel place”.

I wanted you to embrace me, and tell me,
“You're safe, I will take care of you.”
But instead you told me “You need to toughen up.”

So I took the anger I was wrong about,
So I took the pain that doesn't matter,
So I took the hurt delivered for the world through you
So I thought of the embrace you would not give me
And went into the world to learn.

And through schools and books and the accumulated wisdom of humanity,
Through movements for peace and justice,
And churches where people love people,
Through the love of a woman in search of me,
Through therapy
Through the jobs I've had
the services I've asked for
the benefits I've received,
Through the cars I've owned, or driven for others,
and the buses and trains I've ridden,
Through the apartments I've rented, the places I've camped, and the cars I've slept in,
Through the meetings I've sat through, and the conferences I've attended,
while I searched for meaning and joy
And then I remembered, “You're nobody, You're worthless, nobody wants you around".

So when I awoke today
And heard you tell me
“You're not safe”

I made coffee
and sat at my table,
I stared at this page and lifted this pen,
struggled awhile with what I would mean,
and want to say,
And wrote this poem, today.

A few thoughts on paying for stuff.

Capital mobilization is a key problem for standard capitalist economies (it's in the name), and so it must be for us. I encounter this problem routinely when I am trying to articulate the sustainable alternative. How do you pay for it? 

First of all, in the experienced world where bio-physical limits don't do marketing to get attention, people don't experience any  boundaries between what is  sustainable and what is not. All they know is the world is or is not comfortable. So any effort to constrain economic activity within the boundaries of "sustainable" (such as the efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption) will be met with skepticism, or worse. And anything that constrains the flow of capital and therefore constrains comfort will be resisted. We need to disentangle comfort from wealth.

My argument has been "You can be poor and lead a rich life". The problem is not whether the economy is burning through enough resources and providing abundant material goods, the problem is whether people have access to the things they need, including health care, education, housing, a rich social and cultural life and opportunities to learn, grow and pursue status. Material wealth does not replace the social rewards which give meaning to life, and we can reduce that flow substantially without harm to quality of life. Conceivably a sustainable economy could function with less money flowing through it, but the rewards of comfort and a rich social life would exceed current levels. 

Another hugely significant factor is the gross imbalance in wealth as currently experienced. An economy could increase the well-being of those in the  bottom three quarters of the economy with a small fraction of the existing capital. The economy is constructed to provide the generation of new wealth (Oh what is money anyway?). Piles and piles of it accumulate out of reach of ordinary people. How much of that money is being used to produce actual value, and how much just grows cancerously to produce new, fictitious assets? (Lard on the economy that clogs the arteries of genuine economic activity.) So we have a money copier. As long as they don't try to spend it all at once, it holds its value. In other words, there is already so much money that we could never use it all! How much of that supposed value is locked up in property, whose "value" is really just what it is bid up to? A hell of a big pile of money would disappear if the upward pressure on the value of property were to disappear. Maybe we should be asking whether there is a tipping point, where the amount of available capital is so great that it begins to lose value? Maybe the economy should be spending down some of that excess wealth (prosperous times ahead!), doing some of the work needed to protect the health of the planet and bring people out of poverty. 

I imagine a world where the capital needed to fund projects is held by "middle-class" people. Instead of depending on an investor class to supply capital, we depend on the consumer class to be the investor class. I also imagine a world where the goal of economic policy is to drive everyone toward the middle. Our current system supports indefinite accumulation of wealth, actually taxing high wealth at lower rates than low wealth income. What if instead we increased taxes as the level of wealth increased? If you want a vigorous economy, tax and spend!