
I’ve carefully followed both sides of the Sebastopol Inn Homeless issue in the news and on Nextdoor, and I have come to the conclusion that the Sebastopol Inn would not be an appropriate site for a homeless shelter.
First, we have no guarantees regarding who it will house. Currently it is projected to be for those 65 and older or with health issues, but that may change.
Second, oversight or management seems sorely lacking and without that, this appears to be a house of cards waiting to crumble.
Third, Sebastopol does not have the infrastructure to handle the needs of those with severe health or mental concerns.
Fourth, the current owners have a history of bad business management for which they should not be rewarded. This looks more and more like a bailout than a business deal.

That said, I must now take exception with the bashing and demonizing of our homeless population by some posters on Nextdoor—not all, so hold your outrage!
Opioid addiction is an epidemic in America. The Sackler Family who owns Perdue Pharmaceuticals was just fined a record $8 Billion for flooding the streets with their drug, Fentanyl. No one plead guilty, no one was arrested or did jail time. Their multi-billion dollar family fortune is still intact and they continue to enjoy their lives while too many families in this country mourn their dead or deal with the heart breaking consequences of addiction.

But you deal a joint on the corner and you do 20 years.
“Well, that was the choice those junkies made,” many here have said.
But I have a friend from the mountains of Kentucky. His family, like most there, goes back to the founding of the US. He told me there are so many dying every day from Fentanyl, that the mortuaries are beyond capacity and use grocery store freezers for the bodies. This is Middle America, conservative, tough, religious, hard-working and independent. Those people didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become immoral, degenerate addicts. So why have so many small towns just like his, whether in Kansas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, or Ohio met this fate?
The answer is the one that no one in the opposition wants to discuss: ECONOMICS.

And no—before I’m accused of wearing rose colored glasses again—it doesn’t cover every individual we see on the streets today, or absolve many from their poor choices. But the system is designed to move the bulk of the nation’s wealth from the bottom to the top and that consolidation has a profound effect on the 99%.
The abyss between the haves and the have nots is greater than even in the Robber Baron age of Morgan, Rockefeller, Astor and Vanderbilt. Millions of jobs have been lost to cheap labor in Asia. Real wages adjusted for inflation have not risen since the mid-70s. A recession every 8-10 years, as regular as clockwork, has cost many millions of homes to be taken by the banks and the result of all these foreclosures is another epidemic—one of homelessness. Nothing like a little recession to speed up land redistribution, because as one of those Robber Barons said, “When a man doesn’t have a home, he doesn’t have anything to fight for.” And without an address, you can’t vote.
When a person loses their job and their home, their dignity and pride often are taken as well. Studies have proven the generational impact of poverty and dislocation on the human psyche, and the effects are profoundly destructive. During the Great Depression we saw a spike in alcoholism as people sought to blunt the pain of a world they did not create. Today it’s drugs. And just as with those folks in Kentucky, I doubt any of the street people we see said, “Boy, I can’t wait to grow up to become addicted to Fentanyl and live in a box.”

So, whatever your position on the current solutions being offered, I for one, would appreciate a more humane and compassionate view of the people involved, because they are people. And to those who’ve posted some of the most disparaging remarks, remember: standing on the shoulders of the less fortunate to make yourself look taller isn’t advancing the discussion in any positive way.
Tossing ideas around on where to house them, or even treating their addiction, is a losing sum proposition because next year, next month, next week, there will be another generation of lost and damned UNLESS the cycle itself is broken!
And to the most vocal here—and your continued unwillingness to address the root economic causes of homelessness, while avoiding the REAL societal reform needed to truly fix it—I have to ask, “Why?”
America has not always been this way. It doesn’t need to remain this way. But the cure will require a real reallocation of our resources, as other nations have managed. We can’t just a rearrange the deck chairs as another generation of American hope sinks beneath the weight of an economy stacked against it. Are any of you up to it?

For more information:

Mark Pavlichek majored in journalism, creative writing and critique at U.C. Berkeley where he was selected to study with Pulitzer winner M. Scott Momaday, and PBS’ “Critic At Large,” David Littlejohn. He is the principal in West County Productions, a PR firm that created the Nature Conservancy’s first national campaign, Gift’s Of The Land; a cross-marketing partnership featuring endangered species that generated nearly $1 million in sales and international press. And he is a founding partner in JAM Manuscript Consulting–A Full Service Editorial Team.
United We Stand by Cliff Zyskowski
Certain days in our lives leave a permanent imprint, like a hot poker brand on cattle, a tattoo, charged with total recall, like it happened just yesterday.
United We Stand
9/11 I’m visiting clinical sites in Vallejo. My psych tech students are completing their internships at an out patient treatment center for folks with dual diagnosis. Autism, bi-polar, schizophrenia, developmental delays, head injuries: the students get to experience a patch work mental health quilt of many varied sizes, shapes and colors.
Ziggy cries out, “Why did they do this?” as we all watch the horror play out on the big screen TV in the day hall that morning. He has Down Syndrome. He is sensitive. He is a caring, loving human being laid to waste by tears as the story of the epic destruction of those twin towers unfolds.
Several of the participants begin to pace the perimeter of the room, their anxiety building, their coping strategies pushed to the brink. A staff person ushers Artie into a side conference room.
“Breathe Artie. Your breath like the ocean, remember? Breathe in the relaxation, breathe out the tension. You can handle this,” she implores. He’s hyperventilating, sweating, eyes open wide, piercing, pupils dilated, biting his hand, rocking back and forth at an increasing rate. She pages the off-site nurse for a PRN medication.
“I knew those Commie Pinko Fags were coming to get us. I heard them scheming last night. Their time has come. Our time is up…we’re next,” exclaims Josh.
Josh has paranoid schizophrenia. He’s hiding under a chair in the far corner of the room. Silently screaming in his mind’s eye, rubbing his head along the underside lip of the chair.
Mitch, the director, enters the room with authority. Turns off the TV. “Break up into groups of five. Today’s discussion: addressing our greatest fears. What is it that scares us? How do we cope with what we can’t control? How have we overcome obstacles in our past? How do we muster the courage and conviction to face our fears head-on? Meet back here at 10:30 before break.”
Divided We Fall
July, 1966 Hot, muggy, Mid-western summer day. No breeze off the Lake. Mom rounds up us four kids from the yard into the house early before lunch. Me and my best friend Vinnie had planned on riding our Schwinn bikes down Rumble Hill to visit the old man with his roost of homing pigeons. Not today.
“The blacks are marching past Portage Park to Norwood Park. They say 800 people will pass by our neighborhood and walk right past St. Monica’s church down the block from us. We’re all staying inside. People been throwing rocks at the marchers. I won’t let any of you kids get hurt. We’re not causing any trouble.” Not today. She looks worried, scared, pale. We obey without a fuss.
There are no black folks living in our neighborhood. This is the summer of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Martin Luther King is marching for equal housing rights. I’ve never even met a black person. Dad says when they move in, we move out ‘cuz, “They cause the property values to crash.”
“But isn’t your favorite baseball player Ernie Banks, a black guy?” I ask him.
No comment.
While Mom shakes Jiffy Pop with one hand and stirs the cherry Kool-Aid with the other, my curiosity runs rampant. I sneak downstairs and climb out thru the basement window. I hear hundreds of voices singing in the distance. This Little Light of Mine, We Shall Overcome, the voices gather strength, rising louder and more boisterous as the throng approaches the corner of Nottingham and Carmen Avenues and the steps leading to the entrance of St. Monica’s Church. Nobody out in the streets but them. Vinnie’s mom, Mrs. Funsch, peers out between the drapes of her front room window. I’m hiding in the bushes across the street from the Rectory. MLK, the man himself, approaches the church entrance. He silences the crowd by raising his right hand, palm open to the sky, as he surveys his followers with steely determination. Gesturing with both arms raised to the heavens, he gets down on one knee and says, “Let us pray.”
“Almighty Lord,” he cries out. “Hear our prayer,” respond the marchers, all genuflected on one knee. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, thy kingdom come thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”
Heads bowed to the earth, prostrated on one knee, the congregation recites the Our Father…the same prayer I recite every night before bed. I find myself praying along, flushed out of the hiding brush, bent on one knee, “. . . forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, Amen.”
They pray, they feel, they sing, they kneel—just like us. My cup runneth over with faith in humanity.
Smile a Little Smile
Fall 1969 Summer of love passes. The annual 8th grade fall dance held in the basement of St. Monica’s rectory. I’m a nerd. One of three classmates wearing horn-rimmed glasses. Teacher’s pet. Too smart for my own good. But I made the basketball team. Tom Kowalski felt sorry for me and gave a fellow Polack a chance. In class, I sit behind Joanne Arcaro, 8th grade cheerleader. I whisper her a few answers during the math exams. Sister Felice proctors the tests. She is deaf.
Joanne believes in me somehow. When it’s time for the last slow dance, she comes up to me and grabs my arm without a word, pulls me across the room to the middle of the dance floor. The 45 drops onto the Magnavox turntable playing Smile a Little Smile for Me. This isn’t one of those tightly held slow dances. Sister Jeanette wouldn’t allow such behavior. For the first time, I feel like a man—a woman asked me to be her dance partner. I find a cure for my case of nerd fever.
For the first verse, we alone take center stage. She looks straight into my eyes, smiles, as we rock back and forth in unison to the song’s chorus, breathing as one, the class nerd making waves with the babe of his dreams. Loving kindness endlessly travels through time captured by a memory.
Birds, by the thousands, drop dead from the orange.
Ravens chant Nevermore.
A robin picks at a toasted worm, upended
from the parched terrain.
Bees labor back to the hive with ash-laden pollen.
Sunflowers strain to lift their heads to the sky.
There is no sun.
My mask blocks the virus, filters the smoke,
hides the shame we face:
Profit over Planet.
“They muddy the waters to make it seem deep.”
What legacy will we leave our children?
“You guys just stood around while
watching the West Coast burn?”
Who will unite ranchers, developers,
conservationists?
Who is prepared to build a coalition,
a consensus among polarities, concerning issues of
Black Lives Matter,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
gun control,
global warming?
“We are the first generation
to feel the impact of climate change
and the last generation
that can do something about it.”
United We Stand, Divided We Fall
Save the Earth,
Value its worth,
Before we dread
The sky bleeding red.
September 9th, 2020 The Day the Sky Bled Orange
playing John Hiatt’s Have a Little Faith at Sonoma’s Farmer’s Market
Cliff Zyskowski is a retired psychiatric technician and a Chicago native now living the good life in wine country. When not hashing out a long-winded memoir, he plays the piano for inspiration. His work has appeared in The Bohemian and The Sonoma Sun.
Share this:
Like this:
3 Comments
Filed under #vote2020, Commentary, Fire Season, Guest Bloggers
Tagged as #BlackLivesMatter, #immigration, #vote2020, global warming, wildfires