Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Kate and I drove in to Minneapolis today, to the Smack Shack.  The Smack Shack is not, as you might justifiably think, a boutique heroin market, but a food truck doing a transformer move into a very large seafood restaurant.  The featured menu item is boiled lunch complete with your choice of a 1.5 or a 2.0 pound lobster.

This was a holiday lunch with Anne, Kate’s sister, who lives in Waconia.  A smattering of west suburban upper class types were there and the prices wouldn’t shock any of them, but if any of our neighbors showed up they’d grimace.  The food is o.k., but not worth quite the bite it takes out of the wallet.  Still, for the purpose, it was great.

Kate and I shared a boiled lunch and Anne had one to herself.  We both had plenty to take home.  The lobsters are red and look very much like their coastal nickname, bug.  On the plate were several grade b skin on red potatoes, two links of polish sausage, two fresh ears of corn, a half lemon wrapped in cloth, two small metal containers of cole slaw and a pot of melted butter.

Bibs in place we dug into the meal.  Both Kate and I remember the days when, at least in the midwest, surf and turf was about as fancy as food got.  Lobster was the pinnacle of haute cuisine, even one step higher.  Surf without the turf.  Now I find lobster ok, but usually tough and not as flavorful as I remember from days gone by.  Of course, that could be my taste buds.

The sisters compared arthritis in their hands, spoke of sewing and retirement.  Anne turns 62 this year and finally, as a result, rotates onto the day shift at a metro County Jail.  She commented on the increasing number of drunks, mentally ill and generally decompensating people that show up in our culture’s catch basin, the county hoosegow.

Just the other day five of the 11 women in her charge had serious mental health issues, one screaming and another lacerating her arm with her fingernails.  It made me recall those days in the late 60’s and early 70’s when deinstitutionalization had reached its moment.

They were exciting times.  People were to be freed from the Victorian confines of state hospitals for the retarded and the insane, places with institutionalized violence and clients aberrant adaptations to an aberrant, abnormal living situation.  The watchword was normalization.

Normalization meant re-introducing these populations to society, helping them in the process through community based services, residential for those who needed them, supportive services for those who didn’t.  Community Involvement Programs employed me for 8 years in its residential training program for developmentally disabled adults.

C.I.P. was an example of the best of the community based services.  We took folks straight out of Fairbault and Cambridge State Hospitals, put them in their own apartments in a 32 unit building we ran and trained them in budgeting, cleaning, cooking, shopping, making appointments and integrating into the community.  It was good and important work.

What happened though a confirmed cynic would have foreseen, but we didn’t see it back then.  As states cut funding to their large state hospital systems, the money was supposed to flow into the community based treatment programs.  And some of it did.  But not anywhere near enough.  This was the root cause of the first wave of homelessness, developmentally disabled and mentally ill citizens released from state hospitals to the streets our major cities.

This is one of the great tragedies of our time, but it has gone largely untalked about. The people who suffer are the marginalized among the marginalized, the folks whose disabilities render them vulnerable to shifts in income, housing, treatment.  The answer, of course, is not more state hospitals, but increased funding for community based treatment.

But in an era of Republican budget cutting, which has largely dominated the political scene since the early 80’s when Reagan came into the Whitehouse, this kind of state and federal funding has proved easy to slash.  The result was–to use an overused but apt metaphor–a perfect storm of liberal policy releasing thousands of our society’s least able to cope into cities where prevailing political realities made them largely unhelpable.

This is a big reason that our county jails have now become our community based treatment centers.  They resemble in many ways small outposts of the old state hospital system, run by authoritarian hierarchies that respond to the needs of bureaucracy first, not inmates.

And Anne, in her role, sees the results and has to deal with them.  Surely we can do better.