Identify Society

21/09/2024

The more an individual associates their social status with self, the more involved that person's limbic system gets involved in making decisions.

11/09/2024

I've been writing about the impact of relationships on homeless people, dissecting what I know about relationships from my experiences observing others and in my own personal life, I've delved into all the study I've done into psychology, human evolution, philosophy, religion, and time and time again have come up with relationships and how our brains form relationships to be the core influence of human health and wellness. As well as human suffering and poverty. It's the angry nun at Catholic School that wacks my fingers with the ruler when I look out the window. I stumbled upon this study while perusing my Newsies. Watch your company folks, your quality of life depends on it.

It's not money, it's not fame or glory. It's all about healthy relationships. Enjoy this masterful TED talk!

01/09/2024

After seeing homelessness, and learning so much I have come to a simple stance. My hardline is Guaranteed Shelter for all people in America. This doesn't mean give everyone an expensive apartment for free.

Guaranteed shelter makes a bed available to everyone. This is not a pie in the sky idea. There's more than enough space and resources to do this. Housing First is destined to fail. Shelter first makes sure that all homeless people are offered shelter immediately, regardless of their situation, including addiction.

This applies to illegal immigrants "refugees" although I do believe if a person entered this country illegally and they are not in danger in their own country they should not be granted citizenship. So I am not against deportation. Although, Shelter First would help figure out an immigrants situation, while they are sheltered.

You might not agree with the last paragraph, but keep in mind that impoverished countries have a history of loading up boats full of criminals and sending them to America.

Shelter first is the best approach to solving some of our state's biggest problems. It's not housing first, that was done terribly. Shelter first is cheaper, more efficient, and would be effective if services were allocated properly once someone is sheltered.

30/08/2024

In society I see the many faces of suffering. Some people have a hard fight for various reasons: Appearance, Family, Poverty, Mental ability, level of emotional resilience, intellect, physical ability, Social ability. All this plays a role in a person's ability to achieve goals, it also plays a role in a person's choice of goals.

This hierarchy begins in school, and develops as we mature. Some seem destined to succeed, where others seem destined to struggle.

Nature and capitalism have strong parallels. Socialism seems to fail on the high end of the socialist spectrum, and varies depending on availability of resources, but can succeed when coupled with enhanced human rights and freedoms.

In Massachusetts we've adopted a mirage of socialism where socialism is preached by politicians, billions of dollars are spent, yet poverty expands exponentially, and the divide between the wealthy and the poor grows day by day.

What we see as the Homeless crisis, the Addiction epidemic, and the mental health crisis are symptom of a failed Political ideology that is Capitalized Socialism. I believe this now. We are just beginning to see the devastation Capitalized Socialism will cause on our social and economic systems.

This is a picture of two different countries at night. One is highly Socialist the other is Powerfully Capitalist thanks to America. The Capitalist Country has actually surpassed American Capitalism in my opinion. This is North and South Korea. Take a look at what politics will do to a nation of people.

26/08/2024

Getting caught up on writing. Only a month left of this journey.

8/24/2024 day 329, Saturday

When I drove out of my camp at the entrance of the highway I looked right in the path My truck takes to get on the highway and there was an old rusted bicycle. The bicycle was hanging from a tree. Someone had placed it there decades ago. It seems that somebody came to my camp and threw the bicycle in front of my driving path. I'm guessing the plan was to pop my tires. There was a man some months back during the winter who approached my tent claiming to be environmental police. I was guessing this was a lie. This man asked me questions that I refused to answer. Ultimately I told this man to f**k off. I wondered if it had been the same man that came back checking on my camp, and possibly made an attempt to sabotage me. I was pretty upset about this. I got out of my truck, I picked up the bike, and I threw it back in the woods. While I was driving I thought to myself that I should have taken a picture and done a video right there on the spot. I guess I'll wait till I'm back at my camp to do this.

One thing I can say about being homeless and living outside is you are vulnerable. The fact that you are vulnerable makes you feel uncomfortable or in danger constantly. I can understand how drugs and alcohol diminish this emotional response. Sometimes you get comfortable after you've been out for a while. It's instances like this, where somebody purposely intends harm upon me, that I'm reminded that not only am I vulnerable, there are some people that feel entitled to take advantage of that vulnerability. I may live in a tent in the woods, but it's still my resting place, my home. I would never go to another man's home and throw old rusted metal in front of that man's truck in the hopes that it pops his tires. I feel fear, I feel threatened, I also feel anger.

One of the themes I have also grappled with is the fact that it wasn't too long ago that human beings were adapted to nature. They would grow their own food, and raise their own animals. They were able to provide for themselves on a piece of land. They may have needed to buy and trade here and there for certain amenities, but they could provide for themselves from nature. There was structure to this, even when human beings were hunter-gatherers there was structure in their lives in Concord with the environment.
Now human beings in society are wholly dependent on a supply chain of products and industry beyond their control or understanding. They are either forced to make money to provide for themselves or be provided for by the working class, the wealthy, and the governments. This has left people helpless in the circumstance that they become destitute and cannot provide for themselves. They must rely on social handouts. The one hand out that is not guaranteed is shelter. And sometimes the shelter is worse than actually being on your own and staying outside. The homeless person that cannot generate income is fully dependent on charity. Their life is only as structured as what is given to them. They have nobody to take care of them and provide them shelter. A lot of times they form negative relationships with people, their environment, and mind-altering substances. This lack of structure, lack of quality relationships, lack of productivity, and lack of self-reliance erodes a person's motivation and descends them into deeper states of suffering, mental illness, and helplessness.

23/08/2024

I'm getting caught up on writing. This brief interplay on a common stage had a meaningful impact on me. Obviously I've wrote much over the last year. Figured I'd share this with you maybe it resonates:

Before I got to Hyde Park Open Streets I stopped at McDonald's. When I went in to order my food there was a young Haitian kid at the counter. I ordered two breakfast sandwiches, two hash browns, and a latte. It seemed like it was this kid's first day and he was having trouble taking my order. I felt really bad for him. He asked some of the other workers to help him but they seemed too busy to care. He would lean towards me whisper and ask what my order was again. This went on for a few minutes. Finally he said I don't know how to order the coffee. I said, listen don't even worry about it just give me whatever else I asked for. There was a woman in line behind me and she witnessed this. I think she felt bad for the kid too, because he had trouble with her order as well, but she was very patient with him.

While I was standing waiting for my food to come out an Asian woman came in and ordered a coffee. She spoke very loudly. Then she sat down. She began yelling belligerently. Both in English and in her native tongue. People were looking at her. I felt really bad. I wondered if she had Tourette's or possibly schizophrenia. When my order came out I sat down at a table across from her. I looked at her and I said hello. She said hello back. She continued to yell belligerently, and all the customers and the workers were shooting her strange looks. I felt extremely sorry for this woman. After I ate my food and I was getting ready to leave I walked up to her and I said, have a nice day. She looked at me and she said, thank you, you have a good day too. I could tell that she really appreciated this interaction. All the people in McDonalds demeanor changed once I interacted with this woman who they perceived as belligerent and crazy. The kind pleasantries exchanged between her and I softened the mood and brought understanding to their hearts.

This world is filled with suffering. Many of us walk around uncomfortable in our own skin not even understanding that we are all connected to the larger scheme of both luxury and comfort as well as pain and suffering. We are all selfish on some level, and I think at certain times in our lives we get glimpses of the larger picture. If anything has ever been worthwhile in my life, I can say it has been relieving some of the overwhelming suffering that exists in this world.

13/08/2024

When I'm in the city I see all kinds of religious people, with their stands and their tables giving out pamphlets, trying to convince you of their ideology, while there's homeless people all around them. I have an idea, instead of selling your religion, why don't you live it!? Why not go around talking to people that really need a good conversation, lift them up, sit with them, eat with them, live with them.....

That's one of the biggest problems in this country everybody's trying to sell you something. We even sell charity in this country.

When I crunched the numbers of money spent on homelessness compared to the amount of homeless people in Massachusetts it came out to almost $80,000 per homeless person. That's a low ball #. That's enough money to house every homeless person in the state.

12/08/2024

11/08/2024

Free Karen Read!!!

08/08/2024

What makes sense on a political level doesn't always make sense on a social or economic level. And what makes sense on a social and economic level sometimes doesn't fit the current politics.

17/07/2024

A stream of thinking of mine going back a couple years now has been how people deal with adverse emotional states, and a person's ability to think critically. I had these two psychological functions on separate lines of thought.

It has dawned on me, through some of my own emotional and logical inquiry into experience, that these two mechanisms work in concordance to improve decision making, mental health, and physical health.

I believe developing a course on understanding and working with adverse emotional states, followed by a course on critical thinking could greatly improve a person's quality of life.

I write this here, not only to share, but so I don't forget I thunk it and I can work on developing these courses in the future.

12/07/2024

People have Criticized me for living homeless for a year and documenting it. I am a person who learns from fact, and logic, coupled with experience.

Timing is everything and I ran the stats on addiction a few years back and learned that increasing rates of Homelessness were a symptom of the fentanyl crisis and Hyper-liberalism was propelling this crisis in some of the most populated areas of our country.

I wrote about this in my prologue. Now Congress has outlawed homelessness in public areas. This is a direct attack on addicts who tend to congregate more in public than more adept chronically homeless people, who are better at hiding themselves.

We are now shifting from Hyper-liberalism to hyper-punitive measures. I have my ideas on how this will play out. What I do know is there are some good middle of the road solutions. More to come on this later. Here are my writings from before I started my journey:

8/2/2023 THE PROJECT

This project idea came to me about a year ago while working on Tiffany's Recovery Inc. the Nonprofit I started with some friends and a pro bono Lawyer about 3 years ago. Tiffany's Recovery Inc., aka TRI Recovery, was created to improve service and resource sharing for Recovery Resources, which was mainly meetings, activities, and events for people in recovery. Given how difficult it is for people to recover from substance use disorders I figured the more options, and access to options, people had the better.

When Tiffany's Recovery Inc. officially got incorporated, I was working as a Recovery Coach Lead for the In Home Addiction Treatment Company Aware Recovery Care. Resource brokering was a big part of my job.

It is very difficult for people to break deeply ingrained behaviors. Addiction is a behavior that causes serious problems to people's mental and physical health, to the lives of the people that care about them, and to society in general. Addictive behavior will most often develop when a strong psychological reward is attached to an act. Rewards come in the form of: euphoria, escaping problems or responsibility, neutralizing negative emotions, increasing social confidence or social connectedness.

I've heard it mentioned that Substance Use Disorders can be traced to trauma in people's lives. I do not believe Trauma is always the root cause for addiction, although it is a major factor, and plays a major role in most cases. The fact is SUD can develop without significant trauma being present. I have encountered many cases where people developed SUD from experimental or recreational use, SUD develops from boredom, SUD also mimics a relationship in our mind (the old friend, the toxic love). It's also important to take into consideration that every human being experiences life differently, so the trauma origin theory is very hard to gauge and verify in all cases. The repercussions of having Substance Use Disorder in itself can create trauma, which can cause someone to continue using, creating a self feeding cycle.

I think it's important to have an open mind when dealing with SUD, along with other Mental Illnesses, and avoid Confirmation bias as much as possible. The way we do this is to ask probing questions into people's behavioral reasoning, and also ask questions about a person's history in an effort to discover possible subconscious causes for accumulated behavioral patterns.

THE AHA MOMENT

The Aha moment came after constantly being reminded about how socially misunderstood SUD is, and also how shortsighted our policies are at finding long-term solutions for this problem. What I also saw was a large portion of the homelessness and housing insecurity in Massachusetts is fueled or exasperated by some form of addiction.

Recovery from addiction is an internal process. A person must come to a conclusion that they no longer want to suffer from the addiction, make a conscious effort to change, and work towards maintaining freedom from the addiction. With the many services in Massachusetts, including the justice system, I noticed each service's solution fell somewhere on a spectrum.

EnablingPunishing

The problem was that for care to be effective in helping people overcome addiction it should fall in the center of this metric, and care should be consistent enough to account for the amount of time it takes for a person to change behavior. Many services are short-lived. People are tossed from one person or place to another causing a broken continuum of care. This type of system leaves people dejected and demoralized causing them to just accept the condition of their life.

Effective Care needs to take into account the importance of the influence needed to affect internal transformation in people. You can't just give people whatever they want and hope their behavior changes, that actually prolongs behavior. It's also unproductive to hurt people so badly that they are hateful and untrusting of other human beings and society so that they act out destructively on themselves and/or others.

What I saw was that many of the addiction, justice, and social service providers would fall on either end of the spectrum above. Enablers give people the means to continue in their current situation. Punishers aggravate people causing them to dig-in and continue their behaviors out of spite and/or helplessness. The most effective solution, placed in the middle and labeled Healing, consists of making a problematic behavior uncomfortable enough to not be worth engaging in, while offering the support and resources that fulfill human needs, provide support, promote inner growth, and foster psychological development.

Society is up against a wall now that fentanyl is on the scene. A cheap, powerful and extremely addictive form of synthetic opioid, this new he**in, has flooded our market and completely taken over. It's said that all street opioid products are fentanyl, and fentanyl comes in many forms: pill, powder, pressed into other drugs, in co***ne, etc… and can be consumed through any route: smoked, sniffed, ingested, and injected.

We have seen unprecedented overdoses and addiction treatment spending over the last 13 years. Homelessness is rampant, and new policies allow for intravenous drug use in our streets. As a nonprofit I networked around asking questions and trying to figure out how a united front of charities could work together to combat this growing epidemic, and was stymied time and time again. What I found is many charities segregate in bubbles, and compete for funding. This isn't a unified fight, it is a playing field with many different ideologies, services, providers, civilians, and professionals trying to fill a need of the suffering.

The charity market is heavy on the material needs offerings: food, clothes, shelters (although with so many shelters they are often full), hygiene products...

The state provides free healthcare, which includes many medicines for addiction, many of those medicines being just as addictive as the street version they're meant to cure (more on this later). There are also state, private, and nonprofit places where people can gain access to Homelessness services or addiction recovery services such as recovery centers, drug treatment centers, drop in centers, and I'll group AA and NA in as nonprofit Addiction/Recovery providers, there's more options than I can list now……. And therein lies the conundrum, I realized I would never be able to understand it all, what's working, what's not working??? I had to live it!!! Who the funk am I to connect with and help others who are suffering from the comfort of my home? So much spaghetti is getting thrown at the wall to find solutions for these problems, there's no way I could possibly take a side. I forgot to mention the rampant corruption and waste 🤯.

I decided funk that, the only way to effect change is to live it, write it, record it, document it, and share what I find with the public!!!

The only way to get to the bottom of Addiction, Mental Illnesses, and homelessness in Massachusetts is to be homeless for a year.