living and dying in an America gone mad without brave new world soma to blur the details

    It doesn’t take a genius in pain to turn on a TV and watch CNN, FOX, or WHATEVER FACT AND SPIN to know my country tis of thee has done gone and plunged itself into the shitter in more ways than Nevermore, Dorothy and readin’, writin’ & 'rithmetic ever could have imagined.

    It doesn’t take a genius in pain to cruise the Internet, Facebook, X, Reddit, Truth Social, YouTube, Rumble or Whatever to see 1984 and Brave New World were not Science Fiction.

    It doesn’t take a genius in pain to know that you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you might find you get what you need.

    But if you hide from it in chemicals that alter your experience, you might miss a few details.

    A grapes of wrath catcher in the rye wasteland from Poetic Outlaws yesterday provoked old and ornery me into a rant of sorts.

You’re Painfully Alive in a Drugged and Dying Culture

By: Erik Rittenberry

POETIC OUTLAWS

APR 25, 2024

Photo: Kavan Cardoza

“It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares anymore; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”

— Richard Yates 

 

It’s quiet here in the early morning and no one’s around—just the way I like it. I’m sitting on a bench, sipping black coffee on an old dock, looking out over the ancient lake. I watch with an incredible sense of serenity as the fog dies out with the rising sun. There’s a peculiar stillness here in these early hours. 

The sky grows lighter and lighter. A subtle breeze makes small ripples in the water. The fish jump and splash, the birds chirp and flutter, and everything seems joyful and harmonious. The great hum of life.

Behind me, the world is not so joyous and harmonious.

Behind me is a society I, too, belong to—a society teetering on the edge of all-out madness. We, the people, seem to be half-asleep at the wheel and completely entangled in a web of false narratives and social delusions. Our semiconscious society of disenfranchised people is at war with each other over manufactured illusions and irrational beliefs. We are completely alienated from each other, our deeper selves, and the soil that sustains us. 

“Every realm of society is permeated with falsity and falsification,” the great Henry Miller reminded us so many years ago. He’s still right—probably more so today.

As the morning unfolds, the commotion begins much like it did the day before. Alarm clocks fire off. The TV’s flick-on and the news prompt us as to what we should be afraid of today. Antagonizing headlines heave us into a partisan frenzy before we even step foot in the shower. No one cares too much about the TRUTH because our minds are already made up.

This is the modern world.

The water splashes the face. The coffee is brewed. The social media is checked and updated and the emails are read over breakfast. Tired and heavily medicated souls make their way onto the billboard-littered highway to inch along in bumper-to-bumper traffic to a job they despise.

The kids are dropped off at their prison-like education camps, where they are segregated by age and forced to submit to an outdated national curriculum concocted by some inept bureaucratic process. Here, the inherent curiosities of little unique individuals are smashed out, and their little minds are molded and standardized and taught the “virtue” of conformity and obedience.

They become much like ourselves—well-adjusted disciples of the status quo, well-fed but inwardly starving, and spiritually depleted by a senseless haste that seems to be required to function in modern culture.

I sit here in complete solitude as an accomplice to the new born day. The rising sun, with its trembling rays, seep into my eyes. The morning chill dissipates along with the warmth of my coffee. A cardinal sings on the wood railing of the old dock. I breathe in the pure air of a fresh dawn. 

I read somewhere recently that more than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. And yet, here I am, alive, and it’s good to be alive. But so many of us take it for granted — this miracle of breath, this accidental thing we call LIFE.

Sitting here I can’t help but look up at the skies and ask — what the hell is happening to us as a species?

Most of the big cities are uninhabitable. Our communities have all but disintegrated as the pockets of our overlords have fattened. The vast array of self-help books that fly off the shelves daily haven’t helped us all too much. Money and an abundance of toys and possessions haven’t made us happy. The filters on our posing faces can’t disguise the truth of mortality. 

Everyone is afraid. This once beautiful land is now a land of dread. Something is ending. We are at the precipice of something none of us understand.

How did we get here?

How did we arrive at a point in the United States where unbridled consumerism, endless war, vast surveillance, addiction, conformity, obesity, illiteracy, loneliness, victimhood, bitterness, infinite division, mindless entertainment, and an insatiable appetite for OUTRAGE came to be the defining characteristics of American civilization?

Looking around you can’t help but feel this grave, disquieting anxiety slithering all through our culture. A recent article revealed that a third of adults right now in the United States are walking around in a concussion-like daze due to stress and lack of sleep.

More than three in five Americans are feeling lonelier than ever before. Suicide is one of the most persistent causes of death among young people. Obesity, depression, and anxiety rule our days. Chronic disease is rampant along with various kinds of addictions. 44% of older millennials already have a chronic health condition. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are taking at least one prescribed medication and half are taking more than one.

As Richard Yates wrote in his brilliantly intense mid-20th century novel, Revolutionary Road, “You’re painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.” Indeed, we are.

Look at us.

Woven nicely into the fabric of a sick society, plagued with an aching sense of emptiness and self-entitlement, passions snuffed out by the nine-to-five or no work at all, no time for voyages and adventure, too timid and afraid to live creatively and authentically — just good folks splashing around in the shallows as the pills are gulped down and the lights slowly dim.

Author, journalist, and one of the most fiercely lyrical, no-nonsense writers of our time, the late great Charles Bowden, had his finger on the pulse of our whimpering nation when he wrote:

We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young.We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us.

We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life.

And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life.

We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.

Is this life? — this apathetic mode of existence that we’ve created for ourselves? Living at odds with nature, at odds with our natural instincts, unable to cultivate a connection with our own spirit, forever in exile from our own being?

Is this it?

To live in a kind of forgetful fog while letting ourselves be dominated and pushed around by the whims of these institutional-minded bigwigs and so-called experts?

To keep buying and consuming our way toward this phantom idea of happiness? To work soul-sickening jobs to keep up the illusion of success? To be given the miracle of breath only to become life-long servants to the myriad of rules and dictates imposed from the outside?

Is it any wonder why so many of us live lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau noticed?

Are we the society that George Orwell warned about so many decades ago? A society “marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting — three hundred million people all with the same face.”

Seems we’re mighty close. All the ingredients are here — rampant fear, anger, ignorance, blind obedience, feverish consumerism, and immense resentment.

We are people who have turned the elemental emotions that make us human beings — fear, anxiety, sadness — into “illnesses” and “disorders” that must be “managed” and “treated” by an ocean of pharmaceuticals rather than taking the necessary measures to get down to the root of it. As Dr. Gabor Maté once reminded us, “The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.”

You can’t help but see it in the eyes and hear it in the voices — the despair, the fear, the animosity. A society of weaklings walking on eggshells, afraid to speak, afraid to offend, afraid to live. A society of indignant complainers and fraudulent do-gooders and sanctimonious political hacks strapped with a fanatical biased worldview constantly projecting their inner shortcomings onto the fruitful.

Somehow, this is the world we’ve created for ourselves — it’s our way of life. We all see it. We know something is severely off in today’s overly-managed society. Everyone is angry and divided because everything is politicized, and no one seems to care too much about the insidious narrative that has been fed to us since birth. 

We’ve lost the appetite for LIFE long ago. 

Instead, we’re eaten alive by our own self-righteous concepts. Because so many of us have neglected our inner lives, we’ve become deluded slaves to our surroundings, blindly giving allegiance to the fear-soaked narratives of our “drugged and dying culture.”

Bowden again:

“… we are all on a train and it is racing toward a bridge that is out but no one on the train cares because they are busy arguing about train security measures or who gets to sit in which car or whether the train is only for people or whether the train is only for one sex or the other or maybe the train should be divided up according to race or language or religion and still the train races toward the bridge that is gone, races toward some chasm that will shatter it and so the people argue and do not care that their behavior means that they can never reach the future.”

Now what? What do we have to do to “break the mold,” as they say? Is there an escape hatch, or are we all destined for the looming chasm?

I surely haven’t found the answer to that question. Perhaps there is no answer, or maybe it’s too late. 

One thing is pretty clear, though — there’s no Department of “whatever,” or a coalition, or some half-smiling partisan handshake coming to set things right. No one is coming to save you or the world you inhabit. No one is responsible for the affirmation of your life. Only YOU. 

It’s on each of us to untangle ourselves from the fear-ridden narratives of our deathbed culture. It’s on us to live beyond our limited, fragmentary selves— the job, the labels, the nation, the race, the sexuality, the politics, etc., and come into full possession of our inner drives, the fire within.

And I know nobody wants to hear it. We seem to need labels and categories to function in this society. We need other people or some irrelevant institution to tell us how to live—the politician, the law, some guru, the preacher. Very few people want to take on the responsibility of their own consciousness, their own brief, miraculous existence on this godforsaken planet.

But it’s the only way.

As the French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre reminded us:

“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

We must awaken and deepen our understanding of the world we live in. The essential task is to provoke a radical sense of self-awareness and transform our passions into action. We must live LIFE directed by our own real interests as unique human beings rather than becoming subjects of external causes who never possess the “true acquiescence” of our spirit, as Spinoza put it.

Becoming free, or at least as free within the contingencies of our finitude, results from intense awareness, effort, and extreme courage. Erich Fromm explained that “in order to achieve this freedom man must become aware of those forces which act behind his back and determine him…If you remain blind and do not make the utmost efforts, you will lose your freedom.”

I want to end once again with the inquiring words of the great Charles Bowden:

“Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. 

Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness…

Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act.”

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter 

 

Well, shucks and hell, Erik

why dontcha tell us how you really feel :-)

dat there old status quo thinks 

it’s God Almighty

and anything that tries to disturb its peace

a mortal threat 

deserving lethal response

all that programming and brainwashing 

its own religion

layers and layers and layers 

of big brother code writing 

fact warping

biological computers 

the status quo's one foundation

mega-wired lemmings gospel choir

suckers born every minute

clueless of strings yanking their chains

so saved by Jesus

they never get to know him

think they are the chosen

even though he said 

many are called

but few are chosen

You nailed it, 

it’s every man, woman and child

for themselves,

if not now,

then eventually,

stone cold sober

no brave new world soma 

to blur the details 

pain aplenty

physical and soul 

and it really does help

I find

to feel the presences

of something a hell of a lot bigger

and smarter than the status quo, 

our coding,

for without that

what’s the point? 

We only exist for a brief moment

in space and time 

and that's it

it’s all over 

finished

kaput

forever?

There is no Eternity,

no Infinity? 

What we do here today

irrelevant in the big scheme?

Certainly,

what we do here today

Is all that matters today.

The rest, 

well, 

who can say

who has not been there

and come back to tell it?

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

How a living American dinosaur views his country

    How truly fortunate this old American, who once practiced law, feels to be able to see on TV and online former U.S. Republican President Donald Trump hijack former U.S. Republican President Richard Nixon’s view that the U.S.  President can do no wrong and is immune to prosecution, on which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today.

    How truly fortunate this old American feels to be able to see on TV and online U.S. President Joe Biden giving Israel whatever it wants to finish the obliteration of Gaza and perhaps starting World War III in the Middle East. 

    Despite my Jewish ancestry through my Polish great grandfather on my father’s side of the family, I do not see why America feels it has a duty to God to give money and arms to Israel, which has caused many problems in Palestine, because it is convinced God wants Israel to be there, and thus Israel can carry on against its neighbors like the Israelites carried on in the Old Testament against their neighbors.

    Israel is run by religious fanatics. Hamas is run by religious fanatics. Hezbollah is run by religious fanatics. Iran is run by religious fanatics. Radical Islam is run by religious fanatics. The U.S. Supreme Court is run by Christian fanatics, thanks to President Donald Trump and the Christian Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, even though Amendment 1 of the U.S. Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

    I have had many dealings with religious fanatics.

    My mother used me to prove to my father and his and her parents that she was justified in leaving their Baptist Church and becoming an Episcopalian. She forced 11-year-old me to attend grueling Episcopal church services, instead of Sunday school, which I had liked at the Baptist church. She forced 12-year-old me through Confirmation classes every Saturday afternoon, MY DAY OFF, for I hated school, viewed it as being sent to prison. When the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama came to her church and performed the confirmation ceremony, my first taste ever of communion wine went down my throat wrong and it took every ounce of my will not to let on that I was choking to death on the blood of Christ.

    My mother told me that she started smoking 2 packs of Pall Malls a day at age 15 to rebel against her Puritan parents. When I was in law school, she contracted lung cancer and died quickly, and got her divorce form her parents and her husband, whom she had tried to divorce, but gave that up after her mother told her, “If you divorce Sloan, it will kill me.” So, my mother buried herself even deeper in her Episcopal church in Mountain Brook, Alabama, aka The Tiny Kingdom.

    Last night, I took a neighbor lady friend out to dinner. She is from Long Island. She worked in New York City. She knows more about Donald Trump than his MAGA base and the Republicans in Congress and elsewhere in America will ever know. She has no use for Trump as a person, nor as president. She marred a Frenchman, and they lived many years in France, and many years in Birmingham. She speaks French as well as she speaks English. She has dual citizenship. She has a view of America that Americans who have not lived overseas cannot have. She gets my email blasts, and in that way, and in our private conversations, she knows how I feel about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Republicans, MAGAs and Democrats.

    We talked last night about old people like her and me, ailing physically and medically, getting older. We face ending up in a facility, which I can afford, thanks to an inheritance from my father, but she cannot afford. She said over in France, old people are allowed to choose how they die, it's between them  and their doctors. Whereas in America, merciful graceful exit is prohibited by religious fanatics such as President Biden, the U.S. Congress, and state governors and state legislatures-  lackeys of retrograde Christianity and huge commercial industries, which depend for their very survival on people like my friend and me living for as long and painfully as possible. 

    I think it would be a blessing for America and the world if the Lord took President Biden and Donald Trump today. I think it would be a blessing for the world, if it was free from religion as it is practiced in America, Israel, and much of Islam. 

    I told my friend last night that Donald Trump isn’t really the problem. The problems is the people who support him, oblivious to his disdain for them. The people who support and praise him and give him their money, because they think that makes him love them. They back him because he tells them what they want to hear, he stacked the Supreme Court with their ilk. It’s that simple. They do not see that he knows how to pull their religious fanatic strings.

    They are convinced they are God’s chosen people, and those who oppose them work for the Devil. It is not possible for them to entertain that they work for the Devil. They are America’s version of radical Islam and radical Israel. They are America’s version of Iran, Putin Russia, Red China and North Korea. They are America’s version of the Inquisition and Nazi Germany.

    While President Biden is trying very hard to start World War III.

    My advice to young Americans is they have U.S. passports and enough money set aside to leave America, if they wish to do so. For dinosaurs like me, leaving America is not particularly attractive, except to go to Canada or France, where we can decide when a doctor will put us down when we don’t feel we can endure what beloved pets are never forced to endure. Except Canada doesn’t want us, and I don’t speak French very well. So younguns, get fluent in a foreign language of a country where you might wish to live.

    If I were America’s president, I would ask Congress to give elders in America the same escape hatch elders in Canada and France have. I would cut Israel loose. I would tell NATO countries to help Ukraine, and America, as a member of NATO, will do its fair share. I would ask the United States Department of Justice and Congress to leave no stone unturned investigating Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and Saudi Arabia, and Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine.

    Saying all of that another way-

In a world where a depraved presidential candidate
sells red, white and blue bibles
to suckers born every minute 
to line his own pockets,
and his opponent keeps giving money and munitions
to one side of a religious freak war,
I wish I had renewed my passport,
but since I didn’t, 
and even if I had,
Americans ain’t all that welcome 
to live indefinitely 
like they once wuz,
at least not in Canada,
and since I have plenty of 
demons running amok nearby
and within,
I’m left with,
resolved,
or not,
to take yet another look 
in the mirror on the wall,
old and ornery,
wondering why the fuck 
I’m still here?
But since I am...  

Penni

Costa Rica is pretty accepting and it is warm and beautiful. Still- you may be needed here where the anti Christ continues to gain power even through the sales of the bible he thwarts at every turn.

Sloan Bashinsky
Spent 2 months in CR, early 2000. It was lovely then. Have heard it now is not so lovely. American expats back then had to take, or pay someone, to carry their passport, or visa, out of CR every six months, and bring back in through customs and get it stamped and renewed. Met several expats who had built homes, and that caused them to be stuck there, because no buyers. I don’t have a passport, and such now is more difficult to get. Have a throat doctor to take with me, if I want to remain able to talk

PERSONALITY DISORDERED

I felt that so deeply. I wrote a poem pondering the same thing. From the day we are born we are dying. In the flesh we no longer recognise. 
I’ve found a new hope in Christ. Yes I know what you’re thinking… I didn’t consider myself worthy, was skeptical about the whole Christian dedication thing. Though I’ve always been a ‘lukewarm’ non practicing Christian trust me, it was no easy feat and plain sailing. For I resisted the call until practicing new age opened some doors that were not meant to be opened. My story is far too complicated for your comments section! 

I just wanted to let you know that I wholeheartedly welcomed your poem. It was as if the Holy Spirit had made it known to me. I came across it completely by chance. You are a very talented writer 😃

Sloan Bashinsky

I think no such thing. Jesus and Archangel Michael shanghaied me in early 1987, after I  realized Christianity and the New Age, and moving out west, had not helped me and I asked God to help me and offered my life to human service. Those two, and some of their associates, turned me every which a way but loose, and upside down and inside out. They stood me before endless mirrors, looking at me. Their course in mirrors changed my perspective of everything. It included some miracles, which is my take on A Course in Miracles and Jesus in the Gospels. To the extent people live as he lived and taught, they are saved by him. Not Christendom’s view, but it is what I was taught. A really steep path, as Jesus in the Gospels said it was. A poem that fell out of me in the spring of 1995 still seems to sum it up. regardless of what name we give God, or whatever is running things.

“Sacred Prism” 

Earth,
The sacred prism
through which souls are refracted
into their elemental parts,
Purified in Holy Fire,
The one-forged
and sent on their way
to not even God knows where,
Simply because they are all
Unique Emanations of God,
Evolving . . . 

Donald Trump’s pecker is on trial in Manhattan- if he was a colonial America woman, he would be burned at the stake as a fornicating apostate witch

    After two brief sojourns down homeless people memory lane, my attention returns to a very different homeless arena- separation from God. 

    The Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America says it is “One nation, under God,” and on America's money is stamped, “In God we trust,” and its Declaration of Independence  claims Nature and Natures God as its authority:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...

    America's former president Donald Trump is selling his own red, white and blue Bibles for personal profit, claiming God sent him to save America from the evil Democrats.

    American evangelicals believe God sent Trump to save them from the evil Democrats, who are conducting witch hunts against him, while the cold hard truth is, if Donald Trump was a woman in Colonial America, he would be burned at the stake as a fornicating apostate witch.

    To see that hard cold truth, Trump and his mega church congregation need only to view the hard cold evidence unfolding the a New York state courtroom in Manhattan, where the great pussy grabber by his own declaration stands trial for claiming hush money he paid to a famous prostitute Stormy Daniels while he was running for president was a business expense.

     The prosecution’s first witness was the owner of the National Inquirer, who artfully helped work the Stormy and similar deals to keep American voters from knowing the great pussy grabber did a great deal more than grab, and he did it when he was married to his foreign immigrant wife Melania, who seems to be just fine with her hubby’s pussy adventures, since she is not raising bloody hell about it in a divorce court, and the good Christians who support her hubby seem just fine with him paying stormy to hush for not having sex with him, according to her hubby.

    What amazes me is the national news media and the social media have not been saying the obvious, which is that the owner of the National Inquirer is named David Pecker. That’s right, folks, his last name is pecker. And there is no way to get around picking from that very large jar ballad of cosmic pickled peckers. 

    Very simply, Donald Trump’s very own pecker is on trial in that Manhattan courtroom, and given it is said Stormy Daniels likened his pecker to a mushroom, I can imagine the jury and the courtroom sketch artist anxiously wait to see that evidence to help them decide whether Stormy told the truth about having sex with Donald after Melania gave birth to their son Barron, and then Donald paid Stormy to be quiet about it, because he was running for president and didn’t want his adoring Evangelicals to pick the Christian extremist Ted Cruz as their candidate, and he didn’t want Melania to take him to the cleaners in a divorce trial.

    Even as Ted is not having much to say these days about David Pecker testifying in the Manhattan courtroom that the National  Inquirer published a fake story, on purpose, that Cruz’s father was in on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

    I seriously doubt even the most loyal Christian Trump backer can't see plain as day that this here trial in Manhattan was arranged by God Almighty, because that is where Trump was born and raised with a silver spoon is in spoiled brat mouth; that is where he built Trump tower, an obvious extension of his pecker; that is where he made his mark as the great pussy grabber, because he could get away with it; and that is where all them chickens flew home to roost.

    Now how the case will be decided by a jury, this once upon a time practicing attorney who had divorce clients has no clue, but I saw and heard Trump complain on national TV yesterday about New York City being a Democrat stronghold, and the jury in the Manhattan courtroom are Democrats, and I bet the farm Trump knows people remember when he ran with the Clintons and the great female sex trafficker Jeffry Epstein, and claimed he grabbed pussies because he could.

    Text back and forth last night with a friend who calls Donald Trump “the orange turd” (OT). My friend worked on Wall Street his entire adult life.

Him

Hey Ted Cruz. About time you really told us how you feel about OT.

And I really think this case is less about convicting Trump on questionable charges than it is showing what a true scumbag he is, in case you haven’t already figured that out. So what do the Evangelicals do now, thy pompous soul??

Me

The Evangelicals need to read Salvation on Sand Mountain backward.

Him

Like reading Hebrews, right? Or maybe chanting around the fire in front of Stray Adults Tent at Horse Pens 40??

[Horse Pens 40 was a lovely country mountainside place north of Birmingham where there was an annual music festival several friends and I not entirely happy with our lives and America attended a few times.]

Me

Did you read that book? Salvation on Sand Mountain

Him

Nope

Me

You are in for a treat. By Dennis Covington, his personal experiences as a visitor in a snake handler church on that mountain. They kinda liked him until he started talking about women needing to have more say in their religion. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

America Christians' dilemma: their savior was homeless

Matthew 8:20

“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, 

but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

    I mostly was homeless from mid 2000-2005, because I ran out of money and was not able to make a living wage at what I knew how to do: practice law and write.

   I slept on the ground, on sidewalks, in doorways, on piers and beaches, in church backyards on Maui and then in Key West. I slept in a friend’s old camper on his land in Key West. I slept in a tent on a friends’ land in Key West and in Helen, Georgia. I slept in the homes of friends in Key West, Helen, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Birmingham, Alabama. I lived in an apartment in Birmingham rented by a woman I had met and was in love with, and then I lived in her apartment in Helen. I lived in the Brother Bryan Mission in Birmingham. When sometimes I had money via a Christmas gift my father gave to his children, I rented an apartment until I ran out of money. When I got another Christmas fift, I slept in a Youth hostel in Key West. I slept in a tent twice in tents in the woods in Key West. I slept lots more nights on the ground in Key West.

    During that time, I came to know a young lawyer named Sam Kaufman, who today is a Key West city commissioner. We met at the request of homeless men I had gotten to know well, who found out I had practiced law and wanted me to bring a lawsuit for them in the federal courthouse in Key West, to stop the city from enforcing its open container alcoholic beverages law only against homeless people. When Sam asked me what I thought about the case, I said I felt the city could not enforce the law only against homeless people, but I could not ask a federal judge to rule homeless people had a constitutional right to drink themselves to death. Sam decided not to take the case.

    Regardless of what some people might think or feel, regardless of political correctness, compassion, my experience in Maui and in Key West was 95 percent of people living on the street were booze addicts, and where they would get their next drink was the most important thing to them. If they had food stamp cards, they sold them at discount to people who did not live on the street, who used the cards to buy groceries. As time passed, I saw some homeless people using the street drug “spice" to their menu. I saw homeless people have violent physical and psychotic spasms after taking “spice”.

    In 2003, I lived several months in the Florida Keys Outreach Coalition shelter in Key West. Sam Kaufman was FKOC’s chairman of the board and the CEO was a Catholic Priest named Father Stephen Braddock, whom I also got to know. FKOC required its clients to be clean, and random booze and drug tests were given. We had to attend 12-Step programs daily and get attendance sheets signed by people leading the meetings. The angels running me applied the 12 Steps to me, and it was no darn fun at all, and it taught me the 12 Steps are a  true spiritual path. I observed that FKOC’s clients had a high relapse rate. I still drank some beer back then, when I could afford it, but not when I was in the FKOC program. 

    A homeless man, who had a tent in the woods near the Key West airport, where I also had a tent, explained his job to me. About 10 p.m. each night, he rode his bicycle into Key West and roamed the streets and side streets looking for pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and cigarette butts on the ground. Beer money and tobacco for rolling his own cigarettes. Around 3 a.m., he did it again. 

    Another homeless man I knew, who lived in a tent, was approached by his childhood friends, who invited him to come home with them, they would get him a place to live, get him a job, get him back on his feet. They asked me what I thought? I said it was a good gesture, but he might not go for it. He went with them, had a great time, then told them he wanted to go back to Key West.

    In 2004, Sam Kaufman and I convinced the Key West City Commission that if they did not stop having their police arrest homeless people for sleeping outside at night, we would put them in federal court in Key West under the Pottinger v. Miami case, in which a federal judge had ruled the City of Miami could not use its police to try to run homeless people out of the city by arresting and jailing them for life-sustaining activities, such as sleeping and cooking food outside. The Pottinger court ruled prohibiting those life-sustaining activities was cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by Amendment 8, U.S. Constitution. Sam would bring a class action in the Key West federal court, which was in the same federal district as the federal court in the Pottinger case, and I would be one of the named plaintiffs.

    That led to the Key West City Commission building an overnight homeless shelter on Stock Island, named KOTS, next to the Monroe County Sheriff Department and Detention Center. At different stretches of times, I slept nights in KOTS. Eventually, I was banned for life from KOTS, because of what I wrote on at my goodmorningkeywest.com blog about KOTS and the people running it, and because the people running KOTS said I threatened to kill homeless people at my blog. What I wrote was i thought long term homeless addicts would be better off dead, than continuing to use and be homeless.

    Twice I attended homeless conferences in Key West. 

    The first conference, 2014 perhaps, was sponsored by the city and county governments. There was a great deal of talk, but nobody had any solutions, because there were no solutions. I recommended Key West build its own drunk tank and put its homeless addicts in there to cool off, instead of put them in the Sheriff’s jail or the local hospital on Stock Island. Seemed sensible to me, but not to anyone else.

    The next homeless conference, 2015 perhaps, was sponsored by FKOC and a public service law firm on the Florida mainland. One man on the panel of homeless experts said he was a lawyer who was homeless. The other panelists had never been homeless. Their pitch was “housing first”. Put homeless people into free housing, then help them turn their lives around. I told them FKOC was already doing that for homeless people who weren’t using their drug of choice. But as for the city and county government building new housing, there was no available land for it, and the scarce land that the state government allowed new building permits was out-of-sight expensive and gobbled up by real estate developers. I said putting addicts in free housing would not work out well for the landlords. I did not ask the panel of experts why they had not done their homework?

    By and by, the federal court in Miami dismissed the Pottinger case, because there was no longer any need for it in Miami, which had tried the housing first approach, and it had not worked. Same had happened in Salt Lake City. And in other cities. 

    By the time I left Key West in 2018, the city’s police were using its no camping ordinance to prevent homeless people from sitting or lying on towels or blankets on the ground, although tourists were allowed to do that the city’s beaches. Homeless people were being arrested for hanging out around shopping centers. Homeless people banned for life from the city’s homeless shelter were being arrested and put in the sheriff’s jail. His jail was the city’s second homeless shelter, for which the city paid nothing. 

    In that context, I read online yesterday that the United States Supreme Court has accepted a case arising out of Grants Pass, Oregon, which looks to me a lot like the Pottinger case. I have no clue how SOTUS will rule, but however it rules, it will not solve the growing homeless roles in America. Perhaps the Christian Justices will consider that they think the most famous homeless person in world history saved them- Jesus.

    Below is a comprehensive article about that case, which covers the basics, but offers no solution, because there is no solution. As for me, but for inheritance from my father, I would be homeless, or dead.

SCOTUS Blog

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/04/supreme-court-to-hear-case-on-criminal-penalties-for-homelessness/ 

 

Supreme Court to hear case on criminal penalties for homelessness

By Amy Howe

on Apr 19, 2024 at 2:00 pm

Grants Pass, Ore. has enforced ordinances that bar the use of blankets, pillows, and even cardboard boxes while sleeping within the city. (Manuela Durson via Shutterstock)

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Monday in a case that one legal expert has called the “most important Supreme Court case about homelessness in at least 40 years.” The issue before the court is the constitutionality of ordinances in an Oregon town that bar people who are homeless from using blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within the city limits. Defending the ordinances, the city contends that the laws simply bar camping on public property by everyone. But the challengers in the case counter that the ordinances effectively make it a crime to be homeless in the city.

The court’s ruling could have a significant impact not only in the small city of Grants Pass, Oregon, whose ordinances are being challenged, but in cities across the United States, where similar laws have proliferated. The “camping ban” model of legislation has been adopted more widely in recent years as state and local governments try to grapple with double-digit increases in the number of people who are homeless. Data released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development indicated that more than 600,000 people in the United States were homeless on a single night in 2023.

The dispute before the court on Monday comes to the justices from Grants Pass, a city of just under 40,000 people in southwestern Oregon. With a vacancy rate of one percent and essentially no affordable housing, the city has as many as 600 people experiencing homelessness. The chief operating officer of a nonprofit in the county where the city is located that serves people who are homeless said in a declaration submitted in the case that almost all of the people who are homeless and live in the city do so involuntarily. “There is simply no place in Grants Pass for them to find affordable housing or shelter. They are not choosing to live on the street or in the woods,” the nonprofit COO said.  

At a 2013 city council meeting to discuss possible solutions to the city’s homelessness problem, the city council president suggesting “mak[ing] it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city so they will want to move on down the road.” The city decided to increase enforcement of ordinances that bar the use of blankets, pillows, and even cardboard boxes while sleeping within the city.

The ordinances impose a $295 fine for violations; the fine increases to $537.60 if it is not paid. After two citations, police in Grants Pass can issue an order that bans the individual from city property; a violation of that order exposes the individual to a conviction on criminal trespass charges, which carry penalties of up to 30 days in jail and a $1250 fine.

In 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in Martin v. City of Boise that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment bars the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting or sleeping outside by people experiencing homelessness who do not have access to shelter.

Shortly after the court’s ruling in the Boise case, John Logan and Gloria Johnson (along with Debra Blake, who has since died) went to federal court in Oregon to challenge the constitutionality of the Grants Pass ordinances on their own behalf and on behalf of others who are involuntarily homeless in Grants Pass. Logan has been homeless at times in the city for over a decade and has sometimes slept in his truck outside the city so that he was not ticketed and fined for sleeping in the truck in the city. After she was evicted and could not find other housing that she could afford, Johnson slept in her van, where the ordinances were enforced against her on “dozens of occasions.”

A federal district court issued a permanent injunction that barred the city from enforcing the ordinances at all at night and under some circumstances during the day. Relying on the Martin case, a three-judge 9th Circuit panel upheld that ruling; the full court of appeals denied the city’s request to rehear the case by a vote of 14-13. The city came to the Supreme Court, which agreed earlier this year to weigh in.

In its brief at the Supreme Court, the city insists that the Eighth Amendment regulates cruel and unusual methods of punishment; it does not regulate the substance of criminal offenses. “Modest” punishments like fines and short jail terms are not cruel and unusual, the city argues. The Eighth Amendment, the city contends, was modeled on the English Declaration of Rights, which was in turn “a reaction to cruel sentencing practices under King James II.” Indeed, the city notes, the amendment’s ban on “excessive fines” in another clause indicates that fines may be imposed – they simply may not be excessive. Otherwise, the excessive fines clause would not be necessary.

In 1962, in Robinson v. California, the city continues, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibited the state from making it a crime simply to be a drug addict in California, even if there was no proof that the defendant had ever used drugs in the state. That is, it barred the criminalization of status (being a drug addict), but not conduct (possession or use of drugs). But, the city notes, the court explained that the state could still make it a crime for addicts to engage in conduct related to drugs – buying, selling, using, or possessing them.

The court of appeals, the city argues, wrongly “stretched Robinson’s narrow holding that” the cruel and unusual punishments clause “forbade punishing a particular status, decoupled from any conduct, into a sweeping constitutional rule that prohibits any punishment for purportedly involuntary acts that flow from a status.” But, the city contends, its ordinances pass muster under Robinson because they do not make it a crime to be homeless in the city. Instead, they only apply when someone has committed an affirmative act that “society has an interest in preventing” – in this case, “occupying a campsite on public property.”

The city tells the justices that the 9th Circuit’s rulings in the Boise case and this one “have proved practically unworkable.” “The lack of constitutional foundation” for the decisions, it contends, “has thrust federal courts into the inappropriate role of legislating homelessness policy and yielded a host of complex rules that micromanage local governments on that pressing issue.” The city cites the difficulty of determining, for example, whether someone who is experiencing homelessness is doing so voluntarily – for example, whether someone has declined to stay in a shelter because her dog would not be able to stay with her – as well as the difficulty of determining how many beds are available each night and how many people need shelter. As a result, the city cautions, encampments of people who are homeless “have multiplied unchecked throughout the West because generally applicable restrictions on public camping no longer play their critical deterrent role, resulting in spikes in violent crime, drug overdoses, disease, fires, and hazardous waste.”

The challengers push back sharply against the city’s characterization of the ordinances at the center of the dispute and, by extension, the question before the justices. Although the ordinances “nominally prohibit camping,” they concede, the weather in Grants Pass is cold and rainy, so that anyone who does not have access to shelter must have a blanket to survive. As a result, they say, the real question before the court is whether the ordinances violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment “by inflicting punishment on the City’s homeless residents for simply existing in the community without access to shelter.”

The court of appeals was correct, the challengers tell the justices, in holding that the answer to that question is “yes.” The Supreme Court’s ruling in Robinson easily disposes of this case, the challengers contend, because – just like the state law in Robinson – the city’s ordinances punish people who are involuntarily homeless based on their status.

Nothing about the lower court’s ruling, the challengers maintain, infringes on the city’s power to address the problem of homelessness. Indeed, they say, the district court acknowledged that the city retains the “broad power” to do so, “including whether to offer shelter options or other social services, whether to restrict when and where homeless residents may sleep, and whether to prohibit tents and clear encampments.” The city can also continue to enforce its health and safety laws, including laws that restrict litter, bar the obstruction of roads, and prohibit the possession of drugs. “But just as California crossed the constitutional line when it criminalized simply being in the state while having a narcotic addiction,” the challengers emphasize, “punishing people for existing in the community without shelter is cruel, unusual, and impermissible under the Punishments Clause.”

The $295 fine per violation increases to over $500 when not paid – which, the challengers say, is “devastating,” particularly when the increase is almost an inevitability when someone is already experiencing homelessness because they cannot afford shelter. Police can fine someone experiencing homelessness repeatedly in a short period of time: Debra Blake, one of the original plaintiffs in this case, was fined three times in one morning and, by March 2020, owed more than $5,000 in fines. Such a scheme can perpetuate a “cycle of homelessness and poverty,” the challengers add. And when people experiencing homelessness accrue unpaid fines, those fines can lead to the suspension of their driver’s licenses and lower credit scores, which can in turn make it more difficult for them to obtain jobs and housing.

In a “friend of the court” brief, the Biden administration agrees that the core of the 9th Circuit’s decision in the Boise case is sound. Cities, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar writes, cannot make it a crime for people experiencing homelessness who do not have access to shelter to reside within their limits at all. However, Prelogar stresses, cities can enforce restrictions to ensure the health and safety of their residents, including by prohibiting tents, stoves, and fires in public spaces and by closing encampments.

At the same time, the Biden administration parts ways with the challengers by arguing that the principle outlined in Robinson requires an individualized inquiry into the specific circumstances of someone who is homeless. It is not enough, the Biden administration suggests, for courts to conclude that someone is involuntarily homeless and therefore cannot be charged with violating the ordinances simply based on the ratio of people experiencing homelessness to the number of beds available in shelters. Such an approach, the Biden administration posits, “would alleviate many of the practical concerns that” the city and its supporters “have expressed about the effects of the court of appeals’ decision in Martin and this case.”

    Postscript:

    Texts with an old amiga after she read all of the above:

Her

Your article today was very said. Heartbreaking.

Me

That was the summary. The full Monty might sink several ships.

Her

??????? very said

Me

It was a major part of my life, it changed my perspective of many things. It enriched my life. I don’t want to do it again.

Her

I understand, we were extremely poor growing up. 12th grade, I had two dresses and one pair of shoes. My father hardly worked, we thought he was lazy. He died at 46, so he was sick. All of us kids had a drive in us to make something of our lives and did not live like we did growing up. In a way I am thankful of my poor life bercause I am generous but don’t have advantage taken of me and my heart hurts for poor poor and homeless. I thank God down to a piece of bread. I can’t imagne people homeless. USA has our priorities wrong place. Look at how much sports take in. A lot of people could be helped and academics. Kids could get a better education. Don’t get me started on churches. Every penny they take in they don’t give back out should be taxed.

Me

Give them what for😎

You are a bogey.

Her

lol

You are too funny.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com