The cost of the first 25 Tomehawk Missiles launched in the first hour of the first day in the war with Iraq was more than fifty times the annual HUD budget to End Homelessness in America. [CNN- March 20, 2003]

Thankfully, 2002 is over. If you were poor, or disabled, or disenfranchised, it was a rotten year. If you were darkskinned, of a suspicious religion, or from a politically suspect country or culture, it was a rotten year. If you were homeless, it was worse than most years. And if you are homeless, all years are pretty bad.

Nationally, we saw the passage of the Homeland Security and USA-PATRIOT Acts. These give our government broad, sweeping powers that will purportedly save our country from terrorists. The only thing certain about these measures is that most of the civil rights that our leaders claim as the hallmark of our “free and democratic” nation have been extinguished.

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Against all odds, we have been making progress in building permanent solutions to homelessness, stone by stone. Yet this year, we could have our recent successes dumped in the garbage if we don’t stop the City’s impending budget cuts.

State budget cuts and dismal general fund revenues has led the City to outline $17.5 million cuts to public health alone, and a contingency plan to cut another $54 million.

The FY 2003-04 budget contains drastic cuts and outright elimination of large components in mental health, substance abuse, and other health services for homeless people. These cuts were passed by the Health Commission and are now in the Mayor’s office, which will release Mayor Brown’s budget in another month.

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Darnell Byrd chooses to locate his offices in the hub of the city, where he can manage many of his business needs from one spot. Five days a week, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., you can usually find him at the Tenderloin Self Help Center on Turk Street.

“This is the only shelter I know right now that is open five days a week and I have a place to come, to just stay out of the cold or the rain,” said Byrd, currently homeless.

If it weren’t for the center, he said, he would have to panhandle. But come July 1, when the new fiscal year arrives, the Tenderloin Self Help Center, a drop-in service for homeless men and women in the central city, will be closed, said Executive Director Jackie Jenks.

Central City Hospitality House, which operates the Self Help Center, this fiscal year has a $1.3 million budget, $567,618 from the S.F. Department of Public Health. The Health Commission has sent the mayor its 2003-04 budget, which omits Hospitality House funding.

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From the streets to jail and back again, there is a vicious cycle of incarcerations occurring to people who are poor and living on our streets.

Apparently, it is a crime to be poor, because poor people are going to jail.

And it’s because of California Penal Code section 647(j). 647(j) PC is a vaguely written law which prohibits lodging on public property. But we have a problem here, the problem is the city is spending scarce city resources on the enforcement of 647(j) PC citations — incarcerating homeless people for a life sustaining act. Law enforcement officers are writing so many of these citations to homeless people it is impossible for them to keep up with them without one turning into a bench warrant resulting in incarceration.

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If you thought Prop N was bad, wait until you get abreast of the implementation plan.

Prop N passed in November, and is scheduled for implementation July 1st. Prop N cuts welfare checks to San Francisco’s homeless adults by 85%.

Since Prop N’s passage, the floodgates are now open, and bad ideas are flowing fast and furiously out of Department of Human Services.

There is a ton of pressure on them to make Prop N look successful, so media darling Gavin (the man behind Prop N) can be elected Mayor and Trent Rhorer, Director of Department Human Services can keep his job!

Contrary to what was reported in the Chronicle on 2.30.03, they are requiring everyone to get finger printed in order to get a shelter bed as part of the implementation plan. They were calling it “finger-imaging,” now they are calling it “Finger-scanning” — as if that is somehow more palatable. Actually, the correct term is bio-metrics —- but why daddle over semantics?

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Cuando esta edición de nuestro periódico salga a la calle, quizás la masacre ordenada por George Bush contra el pueblo iraquí haya concluido o sencillamente habrá pasado a la segunda fase con la ocupación ilegal de una nación entera. Según escribo, bombas de precisión, misiles tomahawk, bombas de uranio empobrecido y todo el arsenal del horror llueven sobre una población indefensa. A los que nos hemos opuesto a esta guerra ya sólo nos queda desear que la carnicería concluya pronto y que las víctimas no sean muchas.

Eso y seguir saliendo a las calles, a expresar nuestra rabia contra esos hombres poderosos, encerrados en sus despachos y en sus búnkeres, decidiendo sobre la vida y la muerte de miles o quizás millones de otros seres humanos, como si dioses fueran.

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Como resultado de la aprobación de la Proposición N por los votantes de San Francisco, a partir del próximo 1 de julio el sistema de servicios sociales para personas desamparadas de la ciudad pasará por importantes cambios que sin duda afectarán a los inmigrantes que usan esas instalaciones.

Entre las muchas normas derivadas de la Proposición N, está la creación de un registro de personas desamparadas. Ese registro será obligatorio para las personas que duermen en los refugios, o que usan los centros de recursos (drop-ins), o incluso los programas de tratamiento contra el abuso de alcohol y drogas.

Con ese registro se quiere obligar a todas las personas que usan esos servicios a dar su nombre y permitir que les tomen las huellas. Aunque el Departamento de Servicios Humanos insiste en que ese sistema será de uso exclusivo de los servicios sociales, todos sabemos que nuevas leyes federales conceden al Departamento de Seguridad Nacional y sus agentes de la antigua Migra la autoridad para obtener información de todas las fuentes existentes.

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Police helicopters are circling San Francisco, thousands of peaceful protesters are in the streets, and I am in shock and awe myself by the notion of what must be going on in Iraq.

It seems nearly impossible to get my mind of the anguish of war, and anything can trigger an association: the sight of children at play, veiled women in front of a mosque, or even the guilt of attempts to relax. When there is a war going on, everything else seems frivolous, and it should.

Of course, the preoccupation with something so depressing can drive you insane, but I’m not talking about wall-to-wall TV coverage.

I don’t want more knowledge about “the mother of all bombs”, and I don’t need to know which part of Baghdad still has electricity. The essence of war is hidden beneath it all: horror. And I think it is this very essence that people in the U.S. have lost sight of.

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Let’s say you are a human being. Let’s say that means you have gotten a little upset about the way things are going here recently on planet Earth, what with war, poverty, environmental devastation and all. You may have even wondered, “Just what the heck is it that is holding back a nonviolent revolution around here, anyway?”

Martin Luther King made an observation about madness many times in his speeches. He noted that psychologists had a favorite word back then for people with psychiatric labels: The Maladjusted. King would often say that the “Salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.” Dr. King said we should never become adjusted to oppression.

For change to happen, someone somewhere somehow needs to be “maladjusted.”

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When the Hartland Hotel burned down, I first met David McGuire. The Mission Agenda was working with people displaced from the hotel in order to make sure that no one became homeless because. David was a tenant at the Hartland, and welcomed the partnership.

I remember about David was that after he had just faced an intense personal trauma, he was insisting on organizing a Hartland Tenants Union.

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