ALWAYS WITH US

Substance abuse and mental illness have plagued us throughout history. Public attitudes and efforts to mitigate them have varied over the ages. Last week’s column spotlighted the recent “homeless encampment” at the Portland, Maine City Hall with concentrations of people plagued by these issues and such is the case with nearly all homeless in cities across America. During my lifetime I’ve witnessed widely different societal strategies for these chronic, human problems.

Tewksbury State Hospital in Massachusetts was mysterious to me as a young boy growing up a mile away in the then-rural town by that name. When my mother allowed me to ride my bike to the Red Roof variety store to spend the quarter my grandmother gave me each week, twenty-five cents purchased  two Superman comic books and a Hershey bar with almonds. I’d sit on a well cover outside the store eating my chocolate bar and gaze at the fortress-like, 19th-century complex across a broad field.

It was surrounded by high, brick walls behind which taller, red-brick, administrative buildings loomed near the main gate. Behind those were various wards in smaller, separate brick buildings sprawling over many acres and housing individuals who had themselves become wards of the state. All the wards were connected by tunnels allowing traffic between them without traipsing through winter snow. Surrounding the walls was a working farm of over 800 acres including a piggery, a dairy farm, greenhouses, barns, and vast cornfields.

Established in 1852 as an “alms house,” its mission changed as the state took on more societal burdens. It morphed into an insane asylum; it treated alcoholism, unwed mothers, paupers, patients with congenital birth defects, quadriplegics, and many others. Annie Sullivan, better known as “The Miracle Worker” as Helen Keller’s teacher, spend several years there as a child. Her brother, Jimmi, died there and is buried in an unmarked grave.

Later, as an undergraduate at nearby University of Lowell, I’d work inside those walls on every men’s ward for more than two years as a full-time orderly on the 3-11:30 shift. The alcoholic ward treated street people from Greater Boston. After discharge, some made it with the help of churches and private charities but most relapsed and returned again and again. Many, if not most, had co-occurring mental illnesses — but they weren’t on the streets. They weren’t in jails. They were provided with food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, guidance, and vocational training if they were inclined to take it.

Just prior to my employment there in the 1970s, Massachusetts had begun to implement a different strategy. It would provide halfway houses with trained staff to counsel, administer psychoactive drugs, and help reintegrate patients into communities. The mentally ill were released from the hospitals, but the above-described services were never provided to the extent needed. Many former patients refused to take their meds and there was no way to make them.

Fifty years hence, our jails are filled with untreated, mentally-ill substance abusers. Others live on the streets, eat in soup kitchens, sleep in homeless shelters, doorways, under bridges, and in parks. They are used to push a political agenda as we witnessed this summer at Portland City Hall. Institutionalization had been the practice during most of the 20th century and it had flaws. Defects with the subsequent, de-institutionalization model, however, are before us every day in cities across the country. In Portland, people are camped out in parks, panhandling on street corners, and crashed out in downtown doorways.

My wife did her undergraduate internship for social work through the University of Southern Maine and worked with the homeless at the now-closed Preble Street Resource Center under its founder, Joe Kreisler, for a year. We both agree that neither of the above, historical approaches work well and there is no perfect model. “The poor you will always with you,” said Jesus Christ, posing a challenge to our humanity. We can measure ourselves by how we deal with them.

My suggestion is a modified institutional approach. Round up the homeless and care for them institutionally even when it’s against their will, then offer them a step-by-step strategy to earn re-entry into society. Play out their tethers gradually and pull them back quickly when they relapse — much the way probation officers do for jail inmates when they’re adequately funded. Most importantly, allow them to keep trying. Such an approach would be more expensive, but more humane than releasing them into our streets to fend for themselves.

As an old selectman told me decades ago when appointing me General Assistance Administrator for my town: “We have the poor, and the poor have us.” And so it goes.

Understanding Beginnings

One of the first homework assignments my students get is to ask their parents three questions: “How did everything (the universe) begin?”; “Where did humans come from?” and “Is there meaning to human life?”. For those who answered yes to the last question, there was a follow-up: “If so, can you explain that meaning in one sentence?”

Answers vary. Most are classic like “the big bang” and “God created it,” to explain how the universe began. Also classic were understandings of where humans come from such as the Darwinian: “They evolved from lower forms of life,” to the Judeo/Christian/Muslim: “God created them.”

Answers to the third question about whether life has meaning included a simple “No” for several parents. Each of these had answered the first two questions with big bang and evolution, though others who had answered thusly did believe there was meaning to human life. Some of their answers included: “Become the best person you can be”; “Live life to the fullest“; Do as much good as you can,” and “Help others.” All who believed God created the universe and humans also believed there was meaning to human life. Answers were predictable and tended to be variations on: “To do God’s will”; “To make it to heaven”; “Love one another”; etc. Afterward, I ask students to answer the questions for themselves. As expected, students’ answers reflected parental’ beliefs, but not in every case.

Ideas have consequences. How people of any culture understand the beginnings of everything affects their outlook on other things, and American thinking was constantly changing throughout the twentieth century. Darwin’s theory of evolution, Nietzsche's “superman” (Ubermensch), “will to power,” and declaration that “god is dead”; Marx’s about communism, revolution, and atheism as well as Sigmund Freud’s concepts of human psychology, all had profound influence on 20th century US History. Debate over policy between groups of Americans with differing beliefs about the above ideas follows often-predictable patterns right into the 21st century, especially about the role of government and the influence of religion upon it.

Ideas also have histories. Many thoughts in the minds of my students originated in other minds centuries and millennia before they were born. Conflict between ideas often results in conflict between individuals, between groups, and between nations. World War II, the Cold War, and today’s war with Radical Islam cannot be fully understood if not in light of such ideological conflicts.

The textbook we use: Prentice Hall’s “American Nation” was the most widely-used in America when I chose it ten years ago. It’s boring and it has has a liberal bias, but the others I had to choose from were worse. The flip side is that my lessons can seem interesting by contrast and my bias is opposite that of the book. The text contains several paragraphs about the then much-publicized Scopes Trial in 1926, during which Tennessee biology teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of teaching evolution instead of creation. Eighty-four years later, the issue is still contentious in American public schools.

Mine are not science classes. I’m not teaching evolution or creation. My lessons are that ideas in human minds lead to behaviors which are beneficial or destructive at different times and in different ways. Ideas bring out the best and the worst in people when they’re propagated and when they’re repressed or resisted.

There was a time when I considered my thirteen and fourteen-year-old students too young to understand any of this, but I underestimated their capabilities. Not only can they comprehend classic ideological movements and conflicts, but that comprehension enhances their understanding of other aspects of history, economics and civics by providing an intellectual framework upon which to organize their understanding of disparate events in 20th-century US history. And, most like learning about them. I return to these ideas at various points in my 20th century US History curriculum.

It’s satisfying when my students offer me fresh perspectives on classic arguments. Many have been smarter than I am over the years as they grasp these concepts for the first time in their young lives. Their minds are less cluttered with bias and political correctness than those of adults and they ask very interesting questions. It’s exciting to be reminded of when I first chewed on these ideas and learned the nomenclature necessary to converse in them. The old becomes new again as I observe students jousting with one another in the arena of abstract thought.