“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

It was the spring of 1967 and I was walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkley, California and I was stopped dead in my tracks by something I’d never seen before.

It confused me. Standing in a line facing me were three young girls giggling and saying something I couldn’t make out because of all the racket on the busy street. Finally, I made out what it was. “Spare change, mister, spare change.”

I was pretty naïve back then, but I’d been pan-handled before when I was attending university in Vancouver, but that was always by older men – loggers and miners – down on their luck and trying to raise enough money for a cheap bottle of wine and a respite from the dark lives they were living.

But these were young, well-dressed girls in their early teens doing the same thing in a renowned university city next door to San Francisco, one of the richest cities in the richest country on earth. What’s going on here? Remember, this was 1967. Women didn’t pan-handle then. You might have been propositioned by one, but not pan-handled. That was strictly the terrain of seedy, old men in mackinaw shirts. Not young, high school aged girls.

And then it hit me. They were begging. They wanted money. They wanted me to give them some of my money. I was totally flummoxed. In all honesty, I don’t remember what I said to them, but I’ll never forget that sassy trio of ingenues laughing at me as they walked away.

Obviously, I had a lot to learn back then.

Many years later, more than a half-century later in fact, I returned to the “city by the bay” as San Francisco is often called, because in all my travels I’d never visited a more scenic and dynamic habitation. As it turned out, I was in for a major shock.

Oh, the soaring Golden Gate Bridge is still there. So is Coit Tower (pictured) and its famous paintings by Diego Rivera. Not to mention the celebrated City Lights Bookstore and the Haight Ashbury neighborhood that played a key role in launching the “Summer of Love” that gave us peace, drugs and good vibes that ignited the craziness of the 1960s, which literally changed the world.

Memories indeed, but San Francisco isn’t filled with love these days. Anything but as the once glorious city tries to dig itself out of a catastrophic cloud of homeless people clogging the streets, overdosing druggies crowding the hospitals and tents housing the losers in a Darwinian struggle for survival. Not pretty.

And you don’t have to travel to San Francisco – now being called by some a failed city – to see despairing scenes like this. Try Hastings Street on the downtown east side of Vancouver and to a lesser extent smaller cities all over Canada. And look around Cranbrook, which has largely escaped this grim crisis. But if you look hard enough, you’ll see the tents.

So, what’s to be done? I certainly don’t have the answer and neither do you or anyone else because there is no single answer. The provincial government thinks the answer is making drugs more accessible to drug addicts. I don’t agree with them, but many do. There’s the “lock ‘em all up” approach but many don’t agree with that either and besides there’s not enough room. It’s a grim situation and a deadly portent for the future. But there’s reasons for hope too.

Look around. In Cranbrook, at least, we’re fighting back with The Foundry now under construction downtown with a suite of support services including mental health and substance abuse supports, primary care and social counselling for people aged 12 to 24. the demographic where serious problems first begin to push people over the edge.

After more than two years of waiting, it was finally announced last week we’re getting a 40-bed men’s and women’s shelter. No reason next winter for sleeping “rough” at 30 below. It’s a start, but by no means a solution for the homeless plague now afflicting us and much of North America.

The future needn’t look so bleak if we all come together, drop our petty grievances and diligently work at it. If we don’t, I shudder to think of the consequences.

e-KNOW file photo

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who still digs San Francisco for reasons he doesn’t really know.

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