Some Thoughts On How To Help
The Homeless In Your County
Whenever human beings go thru hard times, that are beyond their inner resources, mainly their nutritional storehouse, and are unable to adequately fend for themselves, society will have to provide a safe haven for them to dwell in, until they can once again restore themselves to having enough energy and clarity of thought to be self-sufficient.
Whether this is always to be on the taxpayers' bill, or should be taken care of by churches and other so-called civic organizations, will always be debated endlessly, while the needy suffer in depressed silence, or try to express in confused ramblings that may not make sense.
Nowhere more than with the homeless, especially those who have been homeless for a long time, is society indicted for not having fulfilled human needs. For society, thru its elected officials, to turn its back on the homeless, for instance, closing the national guard armories, without some better solution to replace them, is a cold-hearted and callous abdication of the responsibilities it has sworn to perform.
Human beings are like portable plants, but not too portable. We put our psychological roots down in our homes, our spot of habit, our location and our things. When we lose these roots, we are like plants being transplanted, left too long out of dirt, and starting to wilt. The longer this disruption lasts, the more psychological damage to our minds, the more we get nutritionally depleted.
Every atom in our bodies and every atom of our homes and yards has an x,y,and z axis, that is polarized according to our "spot", our position on the Earth's surface, inside the Earth's magnetic field.
When we are away from home, our consciousness is different. When we are forced to be constantly moving, from place to place, but no center of habit, no "spot", our minds become unstable.
People are packrats, and our toys entertain us, throughout life. Take away our possessions and our place to put them, disrupt our bathing and toileting and eating habits, and expect us to remain emotionally stable enough to go out and get another job? Who are you kidding?
In our society, who we are is so much our state of grooming, that when we lose a place to take a daily bath, brush our teeth, comb our hair, and put on our makeup, for women, and maintain our regular excretion habits, we lose more than mere self-esteem. We live in unrelieved stress, which further weakens our ability to get better, and go get another job, and pay our own way again.
Without eating right, our health suffers, and the unrelieved stress of an outrageously inadequate support system begins to accelerate our ill health.
Drugs and alcohol may numb our feelings, so that we don't have to face what we have sunk to, how badly we are succeeding in this life, but it adds a further insult to our real wealth, our health.
A brain cannot function well without a good diet, regular sleeping patterns, and consistency of location. Soon it is said that we are homeless because we are mentally ill. Perhaps we are mentally ill because we are homeless.
So, how can society do better at taking care of its homeless?
First, I would expand the existing "rest areas" by adding some kind of showers, on the model of the KOA campgrounds, or maybe the YWCAs and YMCAs, where a person can resume normal grooming habits, even if they do not have their own bathroom. I would include free lockers like at the bus station, so that they can keep a few things there, and know that they will still be there tomorrow. This would be a good start. Keep a guard on these lockers.
To minimize costs of heating the water for baths, use wood-fired water heaters and allow firewood to be donated. For one thing, think of all the tree prunings now brought to the trash dump. This wood could be brought to the refuge, sawed up in to stove sized pieces, and put to use in heating the homeless shelter, and the bath water. Think of all the junk mail that is left at the post office, or sent to every house. Designate a place to bring it, and you can build heaters out of 55 gallon drums to burn the junk mail in. Companies sell kits for the doors and legs and flue openings.
Don't try to take care of homeless human beings without giving them some stress vitamins and minerals and amino acids. The homeless people are victims of stress. For whatever specific reasons they became without homes, stress is what injures them. This is a silent earthquake of the economy. These are its victims.
You can't expect human beings that are in the middle of a transplant process, and daily losing more and more of their nutritional stores, to have enough energy to go out and get a job.
If you want to help these people get back on their feet, and become self-sufficient again, the most important thing is nutrition.
If you want to help them rise up out of their present helpless condition, you should set up a stress replenishment station, where they can come get their daily doses of B-vitamins, C, multi-minerals, and a drink of nutrition milk, which would be milk with some kind of protein powder, like Slim Fast. Cheaper recipes can be made from soybean protein powder, brewers' yeast, and amaranth flour. In the early stages of replenishment, they may have to visit the stress station several times a day.
One amino acid that is very important is methionine. When a person runs out of B-vitamins, it isn't long before they become insufficient in methionine, and that affects their ability to make antibodies, it affects their liver and kidneys, and their joints. When they run out of antibodies, they are more susceptible to infections, and we all have latent infections in our bodies, from all the antibiotics we all took. A little -known fact about these latent bacteria and viruses is that they make toxins that make people feel tired. It is just like a million micro snake bites, every day. The only way to fight them is to give nutritional support to the immune system, plus take herbal antiseptics like fresh garlic juice and echinacea.
I would say that one of the key amino acids depleted in stress situations is probably methionine. You need to always take B-6 with it, and a B-complex pill. Never give methionine without B-6 and B-complex.
It is important to take minerals in the form of a multi-mineral pill. They should be "chelated", meaning bonded to proteins so that they are absorbed. If not, the minerals will have to have proteins and enzymes in the stomach at the same time. In a stressed-out person, this is not likely.
Minerals exist in the body in definite ratios, so it is best to take a balanced multi-mineral pill, to avoid getting these ratios out of balance.
Brewers' yeast is a powerhouse of B-vitamins and amino acids, so I would try to make a palatable protein drink with it.
If a county would undertake a replenishment program, it could shop around and find out where it can buy the supplements by the case, like a health food store. If you don't know where to start, make friends with your best local health food store keeper, and start making contacts directly with their suppliers. Ask them to donate their profits. Form a nonprofit organization to handle this, so the donors can deduct the donations. A good source for herbs in bulk is PENN HERB, 601-F North Second, Philadelphia PA 19123. Send $1.00 for the catalog.
I am finishing up a new book on nutrition, like none you have ever seen. I call it "NutriZen\BodyEquations". It is the data files for my software by the same name, formatted into pages. There are over six hundred separate micro files.
Another avenue to pursue is to encourage people with stable homes and large yards, to build outdoor bedrooms, small granny houses, with a bathroom attached, that they can rent out for a small amount of money, or maybe trade for yard work or household help or some kind of health care attendance or similar. So many of the zoning laws and building codes work against common sense solutions to providing more shelter for the dispossessed.
A homeless person would be better off living in a unattached bedroom with bath and a small heater in someone's residential neighborhood, where they could work for their keep, and remain in the same geographic location, the same "spot", magnetically, so that their minds could stabilize, until they felt strong enough to get a regular job, and go find a bigger apartment again.
Backyard refuge shelters should match their yard's prime dwelling in architectural style, and have regular style doors and windows, electrical wiring, insulation and plumbing to the bathroom, but would not have kitchen facilities, at least at first. The dislocated person needs to be included in the family of the prime dwelling, at mealtime, as much as possible, especially so that they don't have to collect their own pots and pans and dishes and everything.
They should be treated like teenagers not ready to fend for themselves yet, but expected to do their chores and start building constructive work habits. A program of "adopt a homeless person" to fill these granny dwellings would give these people a place to put down their psychological roots even though temporarily.
Many of the elderly become too weak and tired to do all the household chores and have plenty of empty bedrooms. Some of the homeless, after going thru stress replenishment programs, could sign on for these sort of "live-in" jobs where they can have a "same spot" assignment for several years. This would fill in the blanks where an elderly person has no grown children, and might need to go into a nursing home as they age.
Human beings in all these avenues should be afforded the highest respect and understanding for their situation, and not subjected to blame and shame for having failed. They are victims as much as anything, of our society's failure to provide enough jobs, good enough schools, and a safe wholesome diet.
In former times, the well-off could afford to support the less fortunate and lots of artists were maintained this way. They also had more monasteries where people could come for refuge, and spiritual healing.
A plan to replace the Forest Service
If any of them are not able to read, it should be mandatory that they engage in being tutored, and able to use self-teaching programs like Hooked On Phonics, that make it easy to learn. If they do not have a high school diploma, or even if they do, and need more jobskills, they should be made to go to some kind of school, or apprenticeship program, part-time, and work part-time.
Every human being needs adequate nutrition, like a plant needs fertilizer to grow and produce vegetables. The mind needs something constructive to do, proper nutrition, good sleep, one's own space in a "same spot" situation, and hope for a better tomorrow.
Enabling those who have not found themselves jobs, who are falling thru the cracks of society, to stabilize their minds in a "same spot" situation, where they can be safe, and have some regular chores to do, is a rescue of their humanity.
It is inhumane to leave them to fend for themselves, when it is already obvious that they are unable to do so, and each day their body is less able to maintain good health.
These are some solutions which will help you to better manage these people, to guide them into constructive activity, toward a goal of stabilizing themselves and your public officials better understanding stress, and nutrition, and how these affect human behavior.
It is going to be a lot worse before it gets better. Companies laying off people day after day, employers leery of commitment, people needing something constructive to do, people needing hope; we might need to organize more opportunities for volunteerism, and barter for when cashflow is stagnant.
Part of the problem is that when government creates jobs, they must be in the private sector, adding tax money into the Treasury, not public-salaried employees, subtracting money from the Treasury.
Too many social service agencies draining the Treasury, when a better investment would be to stimulate job locating in the private sector. The cause of most domestic violence, and depression and mental illness, is lack of something constructive to do: a job.
When there will never be enough fulltime permanent jobs for the citizens that are already there, no country should allow any new immigrants to come in. This concept is common sense, borrowed from the cattle-ranching concept of "carrying capacity". Provide jobs for the ones who are already there first, and prevent the problem of ethnic violence. Also starvation leads to not having enough RNA for "new thinking", so old reruns repeat historic patterns of ethnic conflict.
SHARI SOZA, "NutriZen\BodyEquations",
Yreka CA 96097
jobs/homeles1.htm
Copyright 1994-1996, Shari Soza
ESSE {SHARI SOZA ENTERPRISES}: Personal Sovereignty Support Systems, Philosopher Futurist Consultant, NutriZen\ BodyEquations, Mensan, Time-Matrix Translation, Reality Change Consultant, Management Consultant, Stress Depletion Consultant, Dispute Resolution, Creating A Future
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