Here I was in San Francisco. So happy to see this first thing, five to ten minutes from the airport.
I was in the land of startups, and filled with joy! Lyft had a pink Van on a pole in the sky! Y Combinator, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and so many more were in my realm, yet the center of my universe became the Homeless. My husband had booked his Salesforce work conference late, and the only hotel, well motel left within walking distance was The Alexis Park. Yeah, baby! We are talking smack dab our hotel was not on the dropdown list at registration for Salesforce. Nope! Certainly Salesforce knows there are a few hotels/motels in that area, but they were not on the list. We were the OTHER category. : - / Which meant to me the shame of San Francisco.
So what's the problem? Every city has homeless people. Yeah, well that's the problem. We shouldn't have homeless people in America, especially in the startup capital of the world. The wealth, the unbelievable wealth that has been created there, and still with all our startup brains we can't help this group? We can't stop them from living on the streets, from doing drugs, and becoming alcoholics. We can't stop them, which means we can't help them. : - (
This is a profound sadness in me, as I kicked my alcoholic brother out of my house, and then watched him live as a homeless person in my city of Denver. It broke my heart,when he was found decomposed in his apartment a few years later. I still felt I failed him even though he had grown his responsibility to get an apartment.. I failed my brother!I failed the homeless. To be traveling to San Francisco, and to end up surrounded by extreme filth, and a urine stench greater then I've experienced in the healthcare industry, and to see so many people, street after street, everywhere homeless! Yeah, we could walk to the Salesforce conference and be in some alternate world, that just didn't help my soul at all. Living on the street and smelling like a pig, or freshly showered dressed casual;attending a conference to better your work life. The hopeless or the hopeful. My soul was terrorized with conflict.
I felt guilty, I had a clean nice room to stay in. I felt guilty I was a responsible person who paid the bills. I felt guilty,and immense shame. I felt shame, shame, shame on me. How could I just walk past these people? I ignored them when we did, because I was afraid of them. Sometimes they would be fighting among themselves, and other times it was the mental illness spilling all over me like a waterfall of insanity. How can we have all this money in all these billion dollar startups and we can't solve this problem? It made no sense to me and to other founders who created startups and lived in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco. They too, felt this utter shame on us, and hopelessness to help, followed by the annoyance of the filth and smell.
Is San Francisco hardened? Have they grown used to this endless battle? I think so. It's the hardest battleground to conquer. No one has made any ground in any city in my opinion. Oh there are a ton of help groups that help the homeless. They feed and clothe them. That's why the homeless live around the places that feed and clothe them.They do rehabilitate and help the ones who want to be helped. But there are the ones who will never be able to return to what we know as a responsible person. My brother was one of those.
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| My brother Mark |
You could help him and he could be what we think is "normal" and responsible for a time. But he would always return to a homeless type of life. He couldn't live in our world of responsibility. That's the problem. The unsaveable, cannot live in our world of responsibility.
I have ideas to help the homeless, and so do probably thousands of others. I don't know, I think we should start working on this problem from the tech view, yet I ponder, maybe that's a wrong thought to think, cause maybe, it only hurts us to see them live this way. Maybe they are perfectly fine living the way we see as repulsive.
I never took any photos of these homeless people. I wanted to but my heart would stop my hands. As they lay strewn about the street sidewalks still asleep, I couldn't take photos of them because that's their bedroom. That's their bathroom. That's their living room, kitchen, garage, carport, yard. I wouldn't like someone wandering into my bedroom and snapping me. So I couldn't do it to them. To me that's the only thing I could give them.
