Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. (Psalm 23-5)

He wore a blanket over his shoulders, and people in Little Five Points called him "Iceberg." One summer afternoon in 1995 when Food Not Bombs was serving soup in the Square, the man wearing that blanket walked up to our table and whispered in my ear, "Don't call me what those others do. My real name's James! When I tried to get him to talk some more, he only babbled. Then after staring at the ground for awhile, he slouched away and leaned against a wall. Sliding slowly down to the sidewalk, he hugged his arms around his legs and hid his face in his brown wool blanket.

The next Saturday James was lined up for soup again. I tried to get him to talk, but just as before he didn't make sense. Flustered, I asked James, are you on some kind of medication? He stared me hard in the face and rapidly clenched and unclenched his fists. Speaking in a clear, strong voice, he declared "They say I can't get by without 'em, but those pills make me stupid, stupid! I don't need 'em and I won't take 'em!" He paused to let that sink in before saying he hated that hospital, hated their pills and their doctorshated 'em even more than jail! And then he walked off without eating a bowl of soup or a single slice of bread.

Over the years, I sometimes managed to catch James when he was better able to converse. Yes, he said, Yes! He'd often been in Georgia Regional Hospital, and every time he left, he was put out broke, homeless, and hungry; all he got was a list of shelters and a MARTA pass. So James ate out of garbage cans and slept in abandoned buildings and in the woods. Shelters wouldn't take him in because he was incoherent and didn't have ID, and he was often too disoriented by his illness to even find the soup kitchens. James was stuck in a rapidly revolving door of hospitals, jail, and the streets. Somehow he took marginal care of his personal hygiene and appearance, but underneath all his layered clothing, he was skin and bones. Most people in the Square avoided him because of his unpredictable and sharp tongue. He could be persistently obnoxious in a baffling kind of way, but I never heard anyone say that he had ever hurt anyone. On his best days, James could be well-spoken and considerate. He knew far more about the world than the world ever gave him credit for knowing.

But now it's too late to mount a rescue, because James is dead. His decomposed body was found in the summer of 2003 in an abandoned building, in what the homeless call a "cat-hole." The cause of death was undetermined. He may have died of malnutrition, pneumonia, suicide, or even murder; but whatever the medical cause, I charge that James was neglected to death, and that his senseless, premature passing should shame us all. If James had received proper treatment at Georgia Regional Hospital, if he had been placed in a loving group home, if he had been assigned a competent social worker with the right knowledge and ample resources, then maybe his life might not have ended in some grimy cat-hole, alone and in some desolate part of town.

Saving mentally ill people like James is not a high priority for the Georgia Legislature. They shut down the Georgia Mental Health Institute (GMHI) in 1998 while cutting thirty million dollars out of the annual mental health budget, while falsely promising at the same time to "deinstitutionalize" the mentally ill to community group homes. In service to Atlanta's business interests and real estate developers, our lawmakers also authorized the demolition of Techwood and Capitol Homes, depriving thousands of the poor of affordable housing and making at least hundreds of these same people homeless. Just as hey closed GMHI, our lawmakers continue to "balance the budget" at the expense of the sick and poor. Yet, even as they throw our most defenseless out on the street, they and their accomplices in the Department of Human Resources still manage to congratulate themselves for being "compassionate."

Simply put, those who are too disabled to ever work or pay taxes are regarded by the Bureaucrats in Charge as bad investments. People with mental illness, AIDS, hepatitis, diabetes, addictive diseases, and any number of other chronic or incurable conditions, are tossed out on the street to die or to rot in jail. Permanently traumatized veterans who fought in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf languish year after year on the streets, and those with addictive diseases are put on waiting lists for months or years for detoxification in the ever-dwindling numbers of public facilities still funded for that purpose.

On July 20, 2003, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in an editorial that "there may be as many as 85,000 (adult) homeless people in Georgia with a mental illness, an addiction or both." Since Georgia has only nine million adults and children, that figure of 85,000 represents almost two percent of our entire adult population. Most of those tens of thousands so cited who aren't living on the street are likely to be incarcerated. According to the same editorial, the Fulton County Jail alone housed 700 mentally ill inmates, while Atlanta's Regional Hospital holds less than half that number. In Atlanta, as in the rest of the country, there are more mentally ill and addicted people in jail than in hospitals. And why is that? Because jail is cheaper than hospitals or group homes. Real compassion is never cheap.

The practice of throwing sick people out on the streets started in earnest over twenty years ago when President Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator," discontinued the mental health programs of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. Instead of spending money on the sick and poor, Reagan increased military spending and cut taxes for the rich. Simultaneously, the states followed suit by cutting their own funding for mental health and opening up new jails and prisons. Now, under President Bush, neglecting people to death is an unrecognized epidemic. Bush's stated goal is to privatize public health altogether and to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. For those of us who "work in the trenches" with the homeless, it is obvious already that anyone who is poor, sick, or disabled is in very real danger of being abandoned and left to die on the streets. The "safety net" is being ripped apart, and the result is an accelerating war against the poor and homeless.

In 2003 Mayor Shirley Franklin convened an elite "Homeless Commission" to study "the problem" and propose solutions. Bankers and lawyers, Central Atlanta Progress, real estate developers, and downtown business and neighborhood associations were the main constituents represented in the Commission.

By no coincidence, these "experts" on homelessness just happen to represent the same financial interests that are largely responsible for "the problem" in the first place. It is for their benefit that Capitol, Grady, Perry, and Techwood Homes were demolished to make way for a forest of condos and lofts, and it is they who benefit the most from the minimum-wage workforce, which is composed entirely of the poor and homeless. These business interests want to drive the poor and homeless out of downtown Atlanta. They want to make downtown lucrative for investments, which unsurprisingly, means lucrative for their own investments.

Last year Shirley Franklin's Homeless Commission opened its long-awaited "Gateway Center" in the old Atlanta Jail facility, just next door to the new lock-up. According to the April 24, 2005, edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, this is the first installment in the Mayor's plan to "eliminate homelessness in Atlanta by 2013." What it actually does is provide 30 "emergency" beds for women and children and 270 beds for men. Only fifty beds are designated for people with mental illness and addictive disease, despite the fact that the mentally ill and addicted make up at least fifty percent of the homeless population. Like the Salvation Army, which charges $12 per night for the homeless to stay in their shelter, those who need help the most are least likely to get it. The Gateway Center provides assistance to less than five percent of the city's homeless on any given night. It's better than nothing, but not much. As homeless activist and civil rights leader Timothy McDonald says, the Gateway Center is no more than "a Band-Aid on a lethal wound."

Those most in need should be helped first. The last will be first and the first will be last! Downtown business interests and their Mayor should not be allowed to drive the homeless out of downtown. Shirley Franklin's Homeless Commission should be exposed for what it is, an advocate for the rich and an enemy of the poor.

Addendum: Food Not Bombs

A grassroots movement founded in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists Keith McHenry and C.T. Butler, Food not Bombs is a world wide collection of autonomous all-volunteer groups. They share free vegetarian food with hungry and homeless people and protest war and poverty. There are no formal leaders and include all in the decision process. Now, at the cutting edge of positive social change, FNB has often been first to serve warm and nutritious meals after crisis. They delivered truckloads of food and supplies into the Gulf region after Katrina and are one of the few groups to share daily meals in New Orleans early in the post Katrina period.

Bob Darby founded the Atlanta Food Not Bombs group in November,1994. At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, while the city attempted to hide its large homeless population, FNB held a meeting of members from around the world. This large gathering served many hundreds of homeless and hungry every day at central downtown Woodfuff Park.