I stopped on a sidewalk in front of an old school, neighborhood, hardware store. A few feet away, an elderly employee wearing a company vest was on a smoke break. I looked up at the store’s ancient reader board, you know, the kind where someone has to use a long pole to change the letters. The sign read: Congrats Harvey. Thank you for 30 great years!!

I asked the man near me about Harvey. Friday had been his last day. He was in his 60s.

Harvey had worked in hardware for 30 years at the same independent family-owned store. He probably earned a living wage. He probably received health insurance, perhaps even a little pension plan. He has a great first name, long out of popular fashion. More Harveys! More Elmers! More Larrys!

Harvey knew how to fix or remodel anything. He knew every inch of the store. He could figure out any measuring computation in his head. The man knew paint and plumbing. He had the tools and he had the talent.

I wonder what he’ll do in retirement. I wonder what’s like to have the same job for 30 years, one you started in your mid 30s. A lot has changed since Harvey started that job. How did he change with the changes? Did he go from CBS Evening News with Dan Rather to FOX News and Tucker Carlson. God I hope not!

I walked away from the hardware store thinking about Harvey. He must have been a good employee and a good guy to have earned his name on the reader board. And was so good he earned two exclamation points!!

I work assiduously on my new book about the homeless. It was incredibly liberating to cut 190,000 words from it.

I am reading Sometimes a Great Notion again. This is the fourth time. Something new and masterful always emerges from a rereading. I plan on teaching a writing workshop related to the novel in the fall. I sense this might be the last one I ever teach. I’ve just moved so far beyond my teaching persona that the act of teaching, even for only a few hours, seems increasingly irrelevant. I love interacting with the participants in the workshops, but the actual teaching doesn’t really interest me all that much anymore. I have always wanted to teach a workshop about Sometimes a Great Notion, so this is why I’ll probably end on this note.

I recently watched the new Viking movie called Northman. It might be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. A total mess. To think of the amount of money allocated to finance such a terrible project is mind boggling. Was there no one smart or brave enough around to tell the director the truth during the production?

I picked up a George Jones greatest hits CD for a buck and listened to it driving around Portland. I’d never really listened to him, and man oh man, the lyrics are heartbreaking. “The Grand Tour” might be the saddest song I’ve heard heard. But for some reason, listening to country songs like this one feels strangely cathartic.

I’m also reading a history of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and the gradual rise of Ronald Reagan as a viable candidate. If Carter had merely serve alcohol at White House social functions and drank some bourbon with Democratic House Leader Tip O’Neil, the course of American history would have been changed forever (better) and we wouldn’t be where we are today. I’m not kidding. The Democrats had massive majorities in Congress Over 200 in the House! Insane! And they never passed a significant bill in Carter’s only term!

No national health care plan. No national child care plan. No codifying abortion into federal law. Hardly any movement on the federal minimum wage. Nothing.

As I read this book, it is clear that the radical Right outworked the mainstream Democratic Party and the Leftists by an exponential factor. They never gave up and never got sidetracked.

I continue to see homeless men and women exhibiting new types of deranged behavior on paths, sidewalks, streets, roads and highways. The most recent sight was an older man wearing a tiara and a Marie Antoinette-costume-ball-kind of mask while pulling a piece of luggage.

I watched Raging Bull the other night for the first time in 30 or so years. I first saw it in high school my junior year and it was the last time I was ever carded for an R-rated film. I think I reviewed it for my school newspaper.

What a film and dissection of unique American brutality.

The city is wearing me out.

Are the homeless people I encounter typical of homeless people? I have no idea. The ones I meet and interact with are not obviously insane or drug addled demons. Wait, there is that one man. No, make it two. But that’s it. No, a third comes to mind.

An elderly homeless man with flowing white hair proudly showed me a cashmere long coat he’d purchased at Goodwill for $40. He said he’s preferred long coats and cashmere was his favorite material. He also said he preferred Polo or Nordstrom dress shirts but they were getting harder to find. It was also becoming increasingly more difficult to find a good silk suit. I asked him if he often wore suits while living outdoors and he said yes.

Charles Bukowski also wrote: “There’s music in everything, even defeat.” Is there in the homeless crisis?

It seems beyond insanity to realize that Americans built an incredible amount housing space the past 40 years and now can’t house everyone but there are millions of underutilized housing spaces.

Consider this: houses used to be 950 square feet and housed five people. Now a home is 2500-3500 square feet and two people live there. Or one.

All previous models of homelessness and diasporas are useless for comparison. What unfolds now is something entirely new in American history.

The other morning I saw someone in an encampment living in a kid’s plastic, multi-colored, outdoor two-storey, playhouse. That was an arresting sight, a first, but I thought it a practical use of something a home owner set out on a sidewalk.

I heard a homeless man say he sets up a signal fire by his encampment near a river when he wants to hire a prostitute. Apparently he has arranged this system with someone who is also homeless in the area and works as a prostitute, but camps at a higher elevation and thus can see the signal fire at night.

When Americans started wearing pajamas in public, that was a sign.

Sometimes when volunteering and I meet a homeless man or woman who is an asshole, a surliness creeps up inside me and I think: we’re trying to give you a hand up and you want a rickshaw ride. It feels awful to feel that way, and it always goes away. Perhaps one day it will not.

I wonder if any elementary teachers are having their students make dioramas of homeless encampments as a starting point or culmination to the study of the homeless crisis. What would students and parents think of such an assignment? I think it’s a helluva great curricular idea. Hands on. No goddamn Internet. Construct tents and tarps. Build a freeway overpass. Find beat-up Match Box cars, trucks and RVs. Purchase plastic army men and dogs at the Dollar Store.

A friend told me she’d recently purchased a wooden train set for her son and it also contained tents, cars and RVs for some unknown reason, unless the manufacturer intended the child to set up a pretend homeless encampment along the tracks. That would seem highly unlikely, but then again. I have seen Portland kids playing “homeless” on the streets with toy wagons and empty cans, so you never know.

I observed what I believed was a baptism of a homeless man in a kiddie pool in an encampment. I will carry that image in my mind forever. A man living in his pickup camper pitches horseshoes almost every morning in a city park near a river. I saw a sign hanging from a sawhorse in a homeless encampment that read: VIP parking spot. I witnessed a homeless man pushing a five-foot tall, red, Craftsmen tool chest on wheels down the sidewalk. He was living out of the chest and I thought that an ingenious way to live as a homeless person if you wanted mobility and to neatly store and safeguard possessions.

The photographer Walker Evans wrote on his goal for his work: “Images whose meanings exceed the local circumstances that provide their occasion.”

I want this writing project to attempt that.

A reader said I was asking too many questions in my writing about the homeless and not answering them. I can’t answer any of them. I am trying. I want readers to try with me.

I sense I am getting much better at asking questions of homeless people when a question occurs to me. I know it must be asked right then! because the opportunity will never come again and by not asking means I may have blown a chance to help that person or enlarge my understanding.

Something that should sometimes be asked of entitled homeless people (there is such a thing): how do you feel about all the taxes rich and poor people pay to enable/facilitate your homelessness, money that could be funding child care, senior services, animal welfare, education and watershed restoration? Why are you worth it? What do you say to the volunteers who donate their time to help you when they could be donating their time (and money) to other causes that are not intractable (such as you) and frankly a more promising investment in humanity, watersheds or shelter animals.

The typical military ratio is: a command needs ten troops in the rear to support one in the line. We need exactly the reverse of this addressing the homeless crisis.

Homeless people care for their dogs better than they care for themselves or others, which is true of a lot of Americans.

The sight of homeless people using phones to play games such as checkers or solitaire is something that always boggles me and I think I need to let it go. If they were playing a board game or using a real deck of cards, I would think it charming, perhaps hopeful. At least in the playing of games on their phones they are still somewhat connected and using their minds. Maybe they are thinking of something else when they play—a new notion of how to live better, or survive. Or they just might be emptying their minds and trying to relax.

Many Americans are pursuing a life of liberty and sadness at the same time. The small sample of homeless people I meet and interact with do not generally seem sad.

There are an estimated 4500 homeless people in Dallas, 32,000 in Florida and 1100 in Des Moines.

I have been shocked and impressed with my fellow Oregonians that more vigilantes haven’t taken matters into their hands when it comes to dealing with the homeless and cleaning up or clearing out their encampments. I have read of it happening a few times around Oregon, in big cities and small towns alike, and realize more incidents have gone unreported (even on social media). But one can tell that more vigilantism might be close at hand and could easily be unleashed by a certain kind of demagogue.

Howard Zinn wrote on moments of national crisis, “Everyone is involved. There are no experts.”

As I wade into the homeless advocates purported area of expertise with my comments and observations, if they take one second of paid time to rebut anything I’ve written here, then they’ve wasted time and money and confirmed every suspicion about their abilities and agendas.

I’ll get involved to help raise awareness any way I see fit and will not adhere to anyone’s agenda. I don’t have an agenda with this project.

I started compiling a list of the songs that best illustrate my mood as it relates it to the homeless crisis:

“Gimme Shelter” and “Shattered” by the Rolling Stones

“Everything is Broken” by Bob Dylan

“Life During Wartime” by the Talking Heads

“What’s Going On?” by Marvin Gaye

“Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young

“Sign ‘o’ the Times” by Prince

“Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto” Lou Rawls and the Philadelphia International All Stars

At the moment, the number one such song is “Takin’ it to the Streets” by the Doobie Brothers. That song is certainly worth listening to again. That opening line: You don’t know me but I’m your brother…that really gets to me.

A friend of mine recently told me of her year-long experience on the Oregon Coast of living in a van in the parking lot of a small, independently-owned grocery store where she worked. Her preference was residence in an affordable apartment, but there was none to rent. She established the arrangement with the owner of the parking lot in a most usual manner: while singing a karaoke duet with him in a dive bar. I’ll let her tell the story: The song was “Close My Eyes Forever,” a duet with Ozzy Osborne and Lita Ford. I sang things like, ‘Can I live in my van in your parking lot forever?’ and he sang back something like ‘You can live there for the rest of your life!’ in very dramatic Ozzy fashion. We both just ran with it from there and it was terrific because it solved the whole asking for permission or not dilemma!

Help is where the heart is. That sentence just came to me as I wrote the previous paragraph. I’m not sure if someone said it before me and I’m not going to google to find out.

In an introduction to his collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin wrote: “I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are.”

I am not the subject of this project. I want to believe I am not deluding myself as I write about the homeless men and women I encounter. It is requiring every ounce of stamina I can summon not to descend into disillusion.

In this introduction, Baldwin also goes on to say: the American writer must explode the mythology of American life and discover what is happening here, on the ground, face to face. He said it was up to the American writer to do this. He didn’t mention another profession.

What are the myths of the current American crisis of homelessness? That is something I must consider from every ideological position. One myth that I held was that there wasn’t any humor in this story. Oh, there is, I assure you.

In Columbus and Other Cannibals, the author Jack D. Forbes introduces the Cree word wetiko and defines it as “a disease of aggression against other living things, and more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions … for one’s own private purpose or profit.”

In other words—in Forbes’ words—“cannibalism.” He called it the “greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” He called it “insanity.” It began with the genocide of indigenous peoples and the destruction of nature, and expanded to slavery, imperialism, colonialism, endless wars of greed, religion, racism and conquest, legal and illegal pharmacopoeia, and—unique in American society—mass incarceration and probation.

Are the homeless people being cannibalized by a disease of aggression built from a savage economic machine that has led to such vast and obscene inequality in American life? Are they merely the raw material of rapacious consumer capitalism? Are their bodies and souls feeding the blast furnace to power our lives? Are they being threshed by a huge industrial machine, the Combine, as Ken Kesey so memorably put it?

It make perfect sense. It is so obvious. Forbes presents wetiko and cannibalism as a thesis. It is no thesis if you spend any significant time around the homeless, as I have in rural and urban Oregon the past six years, with a new experience every single day that activates all five senses.

So what do you do about it? Jack Forbes wrote the only way to kill wetiko is to perform “acts of beauty.”

What is an “act of beauty” in connection to the homeless crisis?

Define one yourself. Go forth and enact it. Don’t stop.

I read in Street Roots a poem titled “Money Shot” by a poet named Dumpsta D. Actually I read it five or six times. In the poem, Dumpsta D assumes the identity of a soulless and conniving female television news reporter who helicopters into a homeless encampment and picks out a “photogenic waif” to produce “poverty porn.” Such a production, the poet tells us, will land her a book contract or TED talk and pay for her plastic surgery that will make her a network star.

It is a remarkably cynical and savage poem and the first one I have ever read where a poet judges and excoriates the life of someone the poet doesn’t know, say a media starlet, in precisely the same odious manner as the poet does not want the life of someone, say, a resident of a homeless encampment to be judged and excoriated.

It feels like Dumptsa D took the wrong approach with “The Money Shot.” The poem took me nowhere I wanted to go. It led away from the heart.

In that same edition of the newspaper, I read a column by the editor excoriating the stepped-up sweeps of homeless encampments in the Old Town area of downtown Portland where her office is located. She writes: “Here’s what mostly happens (with the sweeps): people experience the trauma of displacement and further erosion of trust. Then, it’s that much more difficult to trust other services offered by the same city that sweeps you.”

The word “trauma” is deployed ad nauseam by advocates for the homeless, but is only applied to the homeless themselves in the context of the inflicted traumas that led them to become homeless and the the inflicted traumas of beings swept from their encampments. There is so much more going on with “trauma” in the homeless crisis than trauma on only one side, and the writer might consider exploring this in future columns and consider writing columns to the homeless people themselves. I’ve read this publication for years and never read that kind of column from an advocate and that seems like an inexcusable oversight. We are all in this together and reciprocity must exist. Yes, a column about reciprocity would be important, very important. It’s what everyone I know who talks about this issue is talking about. If we give you a hand up, will you take it? How about asking that in a column and quit with the nostrums and jargon?

I have not witnessed first hand a sweep of a homeless encampment. Perhaps I should. I suppose I could go online and see where one is scheduled to unfold and then drive or bicycle over to see for myself and talk to some of the displaced people. But I don’t want to do it for the writing. I want to do it for the learning.

The homeless I have observed are never dull. And to quote Charles Bukowski, “What interests me is non dullness.”

A friend recommended I read Poor People by William Vollmann.

Published in 2007, the book was a culmination of Vollmann’s two-decade long, worldwide exploration of poverty where the writer began each encounter by asking a poor person a single question: “Why are you poor?” Then he took it from there and I followed him.

What about a similar approach for my writing about the homeless crisis? When the opportunity to talk one-on-one with a homeless person arises, and they do almost every day for me, why not ask: “Why are you homeless?”

In fact, I have never asked this question of anyone homeless I’ve met. Sometimes the reasons have emerged in our conversations, such as release from incarceration with no place to live, tired of dealing with slumlords, an addiction, or kicked out of a residence, to name just a few.

Many writers have asked, “Why are you homeless?” and the answers have appeared in media platforms ranging from newspapers to podcasts to feature films. The question interests me but the following questions interest me more and I’ve occasionally asked them:

How are you surviving?

Do you want out of this life?

How can I help?

Why Old Crow?

What are you reading?

How does your dog help you?

Why all the collecting?

How did you get your RV?

My thinking here is that these questions lead to other openings and nuances in how a person might discuss their homelessness. This has already happened in my writing about the New American Diaspora. There’s no theory nor strategy to this approach. I’m going on intuition, and largely making it up on the spot.

One of the stranger moments during my writing about the New American Diaspora was spending a romantic evening on my 57^th birthday with a spectacular woman at McMenamins Edgefield resort in Troutdale, east of Portland. A fancy meal, fine wine, soaking pool, wonderful intimacy, a collection of Lorca’s poems as a gift. I say strange because it all took place in what formerly was the Multnomah County Poor Farm, and our dormitory-styled room once housed indigent, infirm or mentally ill men and women (including many families) who worked primarily as agricultural laborers on county land to earn their room and board. Their labor contributed all manner of food and dairy products to the local community. There was even a brewery!

There we were having an incredible time together in a complex whose mission a long time ago was to house and employ poor people and keep them from ending up on the streets.

When it opened in 1912 with 211 “inmates,” the Multnomah County Poor Farm was considered a visionary social welfare program. Today, it would be considered a punitive, even barbaric measure to alleviate the homeless crisis in Oregon and elsewhere.

But it worked reasonably well and provided a sense of community for decades until post WW II prosperity and changes in the American character rendered it largely unnecessary or undesirable. Is such a social welfare program targeted at homeless people willing to participate viable today? Could a smaller-scale model be adopted?

It is clear to me in my interactions with homeless people that many of them have created a powerful sense of community and camaraderie, sometimes unhealthy, sometimes destructive, but not all the time.

I have wondered if their current communities are stronger than the ones they experienced before, if they experienced any community in their former lives. Perhaps living a shared story of surviving homelessness in the richest nation in the world is significantly more compelling, than say a bullshit job, endless bills, an abusive family life or crushing loneliness. I don’t know. I am speculating here. But when I hear homeless men and woman sitting across the table or a sidewalk from each other, talking about how to survive, how to navigate, laughing at their travails, recounting their moments of joy, of former adventures, of getting fucked up on legal and illegal drugs, cursing common homeless enemies who steal and perpetrate acts of violence, championing their favorite books and movies, or how to care for dogs or fix a shot engine on their 47-year old RV, something connective is going on. And I suspect most homeless people engage in more face-to-face conversations than typical Americans, who increasingly seem to be avoiding face-to-face conversations. Never in my adult life have I experienced the level of degree of shared community I’ve observed with some homeless people and realizing that astonishes me. When I mentioned this to my 90-year old father who served as a combat Marine in the Korean War, he remarked it was obvious to him: it was like serving in the front lines of a war where you and your buddy pull together in a foxhole. You help out. You share the illicit pear hooch you found on patrol. I thought about what my father said. There is an internal one going on in the United States; the casualties are everywhere.

In the aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination, newspapermen wrote millions of words trying to fathom the tragedy. Most of them took the conventional editorial path and composed homilies about America’s loss of innocence and hope. New York Herald Tribune columnist Jimmy Breslin, however, went another direction; he interviewed JFK’s gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery and turned in one of the best columns in the history of journalism. He was looking where no other writers were looking and I have taken to calling that method the “Breslin Angle,” meaning a writer should seek out the silent margins of a critical, unfolding story and investigate places where other writers aren’t looking.

I want to believe I am applying the Breslin Angle with my writing about the homeless, finding the JFK gravediggers in this tragedy.

It was a bright Sunday morning. I sat on a park bench that overlooked the Willamette River and watched the captain of a dilapidated sail boat called the Now Voyager complete a graceful maneuver of turning the vessel 360 degrees around with his hands and ropes.

In the past year, I have sat on this same bench and regularly observed the captain living on the New Voyager and perform routine maintenance on his floating domicile. Several times I have seen him ride his BMX bike away from the dock, presumably to a store for supplies.

This turning-around-the boat initially confused me and then I identified the reason: the Now Voyager now had a solar panel installed on the stern and the captain had positioned the vessel to enable the panel to capture more direct sunlight. Of course the panel’s installation raised a dozen questions and one day when I’m in the mood, I’ll walk down to the dock and ask the captain. He seems like a gregarious guy because he’s always talking to anyone on the water who rows or paddles or motors by within conversation range.

Drifters, John Audubon, riding the rails, Jack London, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Into the Wild, Walt Whitman’s loafers (not shoes), the blues men’s eternal wanderings, The Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man,” Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” this American notion of moving, always moving for kicks, seeking, running away.

I had seen this type of moving on the Oregon Coast. Then the Great Recession came along and gradually changed it. There were more people on the move and a different sort of mover. Then some stopped moving altogether.

Why stop moving and live under a freeway overpass? I can understand stopping and living alongside a creek.

I’ve learned to tell the difference of someone camping out of a car as opposed to living out of it.

Many homeless choose to live in close proximity to nature and every small town in Oregon town has a group of homeless living nearby close to a river, lake, beach or stand of scrawny forest. In most cases they are destroying that local ecosystem and I have observed that first hand.

Interestingly enough however, the homeless crisis is generally thought by most people as an almost exclusively urban problem with urban origins and urban solutions.

In the most recent primary election in Oregon, voters from both parties in the state’s urban areas identified homelessness as the number one issue. In their campaign ads, various candidates for Governor were filmed visiting or driving through homeless encampments and then talking about personal responsibility. I think there was even an ad promoting a crypto currency millionaire running for Congress that showed him talking to homeless people but of course we don’t hear from them.

The homeless crisis is the one issue in Oregon with the potential to unite many warring regional, religious and political factions. Or at least the crisis could create the impetus for a temporary truce so we can lay down arms and attitudes and go to work together. That might result in something positive we can build on later. I know I can work with someone from Hermiston, Klamath Falls or Coos Bay. Can they work with me? The vast majority of rural Oregonians blame Portland for everything they perceive has gone wrong in the state, even the existence of homeless people in their cities and towns, somehow forgetting that these homeless people generally grew up in their local areas.

I know this Portland blame game exists because I’ve heard it with my own ears many times and lived in rural Oregon for almost 25 years. Still, though, I believe this emergency offers a way, perhaps the only one left to us, to generate a relationship that could lead to real action.

Consider some of the insane and obviously addled accumulation displayed in some homeless encampments (but certainly not all). These accumulations result because people with a surplus amount of nice and useless shit inventoried their shit and put it out on the sidewalks in what they thought was an act of generosity. (Tell that to the beavers who have to dodge divans and propane tanks floating down the creeks.)

The shit gets picked up. It gets displayed. Pool tables, china hutches, dining room sets, flatscreens, couches, vanities, propane grills, lawnmowers, table lamps, hat and coat racks, a piano, a mantle, fireplace screens, a grandfather clock, a jet ski, a trampoline, a row boat, a doll house, a playhouse, bicycles, more bicycles, shit and more shit.

It’s all its own form of bizarre conspicuous (second hand) consumption. Look what I have! A kind of superb mocking performance art for those who put their superfluous shit on the sidewalks and thought they were doing something noble.

But then again, if you look closely, some of the shit gets used as designed or finds new life beyond its original purpose, as art, firewood, construction materials, scrap metal, and someone actually is living in the playhouse.

I always look for art in homeless encampments and occasionally see it on display. The art usually takes the form of obviously posed juxtapositions of different pieces of traditional art, such as watercolors or needlepoint. I have seen mashups of pop culture such as a photograph of Marilyn Monroe alongside a Barbie doll hanging from a noose. I have seen weird collections of figurines or toys. I even recall a sculpture involving a stack of VCR players. Undoubtedly, artists procured all these things from sidewalk giveaways.

Interestingly enough, I have yet to see seen a single lawn gnome in a homeless encampment. I would have thought I’d have seen hundreds.

We want homeless people to work because we work or worked. We don’t want them idle. Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. Who said that?

They came from somewhere and never grew up aspiring to being homeless. They haven’t been homeless their entire lives. I eavesdrop on them all the time and hear stories or work, recreation or families.

Every homeless man I’ve met and somewhat got to know reads books from street libraries. One recently told me he has two of my books selected from a street library stashed in a truck parked inside a friend’s garage. That truck is his home. What a distinction for an author! I’ll take it!

I haven’t met the real hard core, fucked up, sidewalk, tent/tarp dwelling homeless men and women living in downtown Portland. I don’t want to. Is it critical for my writing on the homeless? No, it is not. I don’t need to check all the boxes.

They are doing nothing except invading and polluting our public (and some natural) spaces and that unnerves us and pisses us off. But consider this: Jeff Bezos has a larger carbon footprint for one year than all the homeless people on the West Coast combined for the rest of their lives.

Their doing nothing helps save the planet from ruination.

The subsidized rich can do nothing and be lazy. No problem. The subsidized poor do nothing in front of us and we despise them for it.

We don’t get the trash. I don’t. It’s just a common courtesy to a neighbor, a neighborhood, a watershed and no one gets a free pass on that. I agree that some of them are terrible neighbors, but terrible neighbors who live in fine homes, condos and fancy RVs exist everywhere.

Am I injured by their presence and pollution? Yes, watching people dying in front of me is injurious to the soul. I’m living in the middle of it. This misery is affecting me and undermining my belief that we can ameliorate the crisis. I no longer believe it will be solved in my lifetime. I wonder if people said the same thing about segregation in 1947.

This issue exhausts and disillusions me. I sometimes find it hard to keep up a fighting spirit.