Homelessness and Reagan Deja Vu

At the time they began dreaming up Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day (HPMD) and hoping to make it the real annual occasion it has since become in about 100 U.S. cities, a group of New Yorkers gathering in 1984 faced the daunting prospect of a second presidential term of Ronald Reagan.

It was the year George Orwell chose for the title of his dystopian novel, an exploration of how truth and facts can be manipulated in society, particularly while under totalitarian rule.

Newspeak, according to the marvelous fiction writer, uses only simplified grammar and a limited vocabulary to limit a person’s ability for critical thinking—which is the wellspring of liberal democracy, a political system that depends on an educated citizenry as a founder of the country, Thomas Jefferson (whatever his flaws), correctly pointed out.

And to those socially conscious New Yorkers, it seemed that Newspeak, the politically constructed, stultifying language in the dystopia envisioned by Orwell, insightful anarchist that he was, bore a striking resemblance to what Reagan uttered in such phrases as “peace through strength.”

By that phrase, Reagan tried to justify huge expenditures on military “defense” while the country’s current wave of homelessness was under way. His administration’s policies grew the disparity in resources available to Americans, widening the country’s economic gulf to extremes—one extreme being the scandalous increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness (PEH) in the world’s richest country.

Now, as a former President’s second term is upon us, homeless advocates might feel daunted as did those who created HPMD 40 years ago. The President-elect is in many ways an unserious person whose election, as his leading opponent had said, would (and now will) have serious consequences for us all.

Indeed, in defying listeners’ capacity for critical thinking, his unsettling, mind-bending public pronouncements far exceed Reagan’s 1984-ish phrases.

“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes,” wrote Theodore Reik, the mental health professional who pioneered in making psychoanalysis a legit practice carried on by non-M.D.s, whether social workers or psychologists.

The challenge now upon us is not to create HPMD as a commemoration in 100 cities but to ensure the events we hold that day (Dec. 21) matter in regard to our own morality: Unless heavily obligated to do so, we don’t go on living and spending time with family and friends in our heated homes.

But if we do, we aren’t indifferent to the plight of PEH here to the point of needless death on our streets. But we take some time out to recognize the fact that the people who’d experienced homelessness in Fresno in 2024 were indeed people (possibly known to us as our neighbors) and so are deserving of a memorial.

Moreover, the National Coalition for the Homeless, which since 1990 has sponsored HPMD wherever it’s held, recognizes the legitimacy of “public policy advocacy” in a separate event on Dec. 21.

Like Reik’s pioneering accomplishment bringing a scientific technique available to a larger public, much of homeless advocacy has to do with ordinary people, non-experts, assuming important roles to care for the needs of PEH.

Despite the claims of a certain faction in local government—what we might call the North Fresno faction, having over the years been comprising Fresno County Supervisor Steve Brandau, Fresno City Council Member Mike Karbassi and their ilk—homeless advocacy cannot solely rely on such “expertise” as only the Poverello House and the Fresno Mission possess in this city.

In their coziness with the nonprofits, the faction ignores the scale of the local crisis of homelessness, which far exceeds any single City Council district or neighborhood and has engulfed all of Fresno since September 2014, when the City of Fresno completed a series of demolitions of encampments, thereby dispersing their former occupants to the streets in many parts of this city.

The faction is fond of using such slogans as “some people don’t want help” (a half-hearted apology for the existence of high levels of homelessness that shifts the blame to those people who experience it from local officials who want to play it safe on this hot button issue and appease voters’ NIMBY attitudes by relying heavily on an impressive-looking Homeless Assistance Response Team rather than taking the political risks inherent in convening a broader community dialogue to honestly face the realities of the ongoing housing crisis and the inexorable conclusion that some unsheltered people here will have no safe place to go—and to remain—unless provision is made for them (as the city of Tulare has with its open campground since January 2023)).

Another such phrase is “Save Shaw Avenue” (a call to send all unsheltered people to certain nonprofits, namely the Pov (Poverello House) and the Mission, that actually are far south of Shaw Avenue, so that someone north of Shaw might childishly pretend they can be put out of mind by being put out of sight).

But, as in the mathematical field called game theory, the challenge is akin to the “prisoner’s dilemma”: It’s up to prisoners (council districts) to cooperate with one another and coordinate their escape (the greatest-possible response to the local homelessness crisis) by making wise use of all resources at their disposal.

Communities that have ended chronic and/or veteran homelessness have given what’s known as an all-of-community response. In Fresno—which is indeed “one Fresno” regardless of whether the concept furthers anyone’s political objectives—the kind of response we desire embraces yet transcends the mayor’s faith-based cabinet to bring more secular voices in his earshot as well as those entities that are called collaborative participants in the local planning body known as the Continuum of Care (the county Department of Social Services, local hospitals, the two dozen or so nonprofit homeless service providers, among others).

Whatever is happening in national politics, it’s morally incumbent on a community (Fresno) to do our best to address the basic needs of those people here (fellow Fresnans) who are homeless or who are in any vulnerable or weak position. 

Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day