There was once a point when Dallas, Tx had the highest murder rate in the nation. Now days this is not the case and there are likely many places with more violent crime than Dallas. Nonetheless being on the streets in that town was eerie. Downtown is immaculate yet there is practically no one in it, birds drop dead on the sidewalk probably for lack of food or water in the desolation and heat. Tthough the women were both stunning and were the first to initiate a friendly greeting (something rarely seen in the northwest), beyond this almost all of the interactions I had with anyone outside of work while down there was characterized by some kind of hostile attitude. Three things stood out to me; hunger, segregation, and people treating each other like shit. Granted, there is likely a good side to every town if you’re willing to hang around and establish yourself long enough to see it.
There is no day labor within nearly five miles of downtown Dallas, there used to be but drugs and crime (so I was told) encouraged the day labor agencies to move away from the downtown area or the south side in general. The initial shelter I stayed at was immaculate as far as shelters go, probably because Dallas is not short on money or charity. There were at any time what seemed to be five or more paid guards on duty who along with the staff and the police were a lot more controlling than someone from the northwest is accustomed to. In the one personal encounter I had with a cop while down there, without even bending his head to look at me, the cop pointed his finger and commanded that I get on the sidewalk rather than walking in the middle of a nearly abandoned street. Whereas I’d usually flip out at this point and try to legitimately prove to the cop why he was no justified in talking to me, being in unfamiliar territory and feeling caught off guard by the blunt commandment over such a petty thing, I instead did as I was commanded.
Most ironic was that people themselves were unforgiving of each other. Many seemed to almost leap at any chance to knock the other down (not entirely metaphorically speaking). One might think being nearly the only white guy in the area I’d be a target of some kind but that was not really the case, except for dogs, a few of which nearly got me. The funny thing is that it was almost as if they were guard dogs kept off of their leash intentionally.
My first week was mostly spent sleeping in a plastic chair (mats were too full and they did not tolerate people sleeping in their wide open courtyard for some reason) while being closely monitored the entire night. Sick and tired of plastic chairs, one of those nights I took off and I was not allowed back in so I laid down on the sidewalk just outside. As it turns out someone had gotten beat to death with a baseball bat the night before only ten feet from where I was sleeping. As much as I disliked the attitude of the mission, that incident and the strict attitude of cops discouraged me from sleeping outside in Dallas.
The food was good but served in baby scoops. When I asked to go through the line again the guards seemed to think I was trying to be a smart ass and tried to make me feel stupid for asking. A few missions in Dallas (including this one) were obviously well funded as one could tell from the buildings themselves and the plain fact that they could afford to pay so many staff members and guards which is unusual for a mission. So why the complete scarcity of food in contrast to those other missions around the country?
In another one of the main shelters in Dallas the ‘guests’ would frequently complain about this. As in many missions chapel was held right after dinner at which time hundreds of homeless men would essentially be herded (they have a different way of doing things in Texas) into a lunch room where they spent a half hour complaining about how there is not enough food or how they don’t like white people. They would then go into chapel where a well-dressed white preacher - the likes of which was not to be found within a mile of this place at any other time - would begin his sermon. What stood out to me in his sermon was the message that life involves a lot of suffering. Whether or not this was the moral of his story was unclear (I don’t know I he had one), but he emphatically repeated it over and over. In response to this the very ones who just thirty minutes prior had complained about being hungry were now the ones to encourage this preacher the most. This is when I began to appreciate the term ‘bible belt’.
This is not to discredit ones faith through trials, it is rather to point out the irony that we were hungry in a town which had a lot of charitable and wealthy people in it who were pouring money into these missions. But the thing about Dallas is that there is a huge gap between giver and receiver when it comes to charity. The town itself is divided into distinct segments characterized by race, income, and crime rate, and things are also very spread out. With this spread out and seemingly segregated nature of the town, no one ever crossed paths with these people they were giving to. They never saw this reality. Unlike Portland most volunteers only volunteered through the mission which kept them securely on their side of the food line where they had extremely limited interactions with those they were serving. I believe they even used a separate secure entrance. With the reality the homeless were living all but hidden from those funding such places, and in the name of faith, the question of whether or not being hungry was actually a necessary tribulation had been lost.
After a week of trying to figure the town out to the point where I knew my routine I finally relocated to a shelter a few miles from downtown. I’d get up at 3 a.m. and walk about four miles to get to the nearest day labor spot. They sent me right out and I got something a day laborer rarely sees in the northwest; overtime. The first job I got was setting up tents as long as two hundred feet. I’d previously done a lot of demolition, trench digging, and roof tear off jobs so I thought setting up some tents would not be a big deal, but physically handling the massive rolled up tents, tediously interlacing them with the Texas humidity and sun reflecting off the material, swinging a sledge hammer to drive all the stakes into the rock hard ground, the long hours, the lack of sleep, and the daily need to walk miles at a time to get anywhere (or simply not being able to find a suitable place to just get off my feet) when taken together made it one of the most difficult jobs I’d ever done as a laborer. When I got back to the shelter they were at least tolerant enough to let me in past the five o’clock curfew as well as to overlook my absence from chapel. As I did not get paid until the end of the first week I relied on the mission for food; they gave me two pieces of bread, a piece of cheese, a piece of bologna, and a small orange. If I told them I had to miss breakfast to make it to work they’d give me an extra bag with the same in it. Being twenty four years old and still training on top of all this, food was still an issue the second week.
Considering the high level of tension between people, the daily confrontations, and the demeaning attitudes of those I crossed while staying in or near some of the worst parts of Dallas, it is clear to me that what I observed was yet another form of alienation and pressure among people which had to have been caused in some way or another. Whereas in the white suburbs it takes the form of social awkwardness, here it seemed to take the ironic form of convincing people to tear each other down. I cannot help but see a loose correlation between what I saw in Dallas and what I would see later that summer in Portland under the Burnside Bridge, only this was on a larger and longer time scale; cops, politicians, and developers essentially uproot people from how they naturally disburse and herd them to a select location where the peace which naturally occurs when people are free to make for themselves and disburse as necessary gets destroyed - all in the name of clearing the way for property development. Soon thereafter alienation ensues and those performing illicit activities seem to hold more weight in the community, and the majority of people who just want to survive in large part lose their power.
An older guy whom I had made acquaintance with made an interesting point to me that there are foreclosed and rotting homes in all of these neighborhoods. He wondered why people don’t get together and tear them down or do something good with them, because not only do they serve as a negative presence, but they also provide a place for illicit and destructive activities. Being as it is their lives being affected it would make sense that they should have a right to shape their neighborhood.
There is no day labor within nearly five miles of downtown Dallas, there used to be but drugs and crime (so I was told) encouraged the day labor agencies to move away from the downtown area or the south side in general. The initial shelter I stayed at was immaculate as far as shelters go, probably because Dallas is not short on money or charity. There were at any time what seemed to be five or more paid guards on duty who along with the staff and the police were a lot more controlling than someone from the northwest is accustomed to. In the one personal encounter I had with a cop while down there, without even bending his head to look at me, the cop pointed his finger and commanded that I get on the sidewalk rather than walking in the middle of a nearly abandoned street. Whereas I’d usually flip out at this point and try to legitimately prove to the cop why he was no justified in talking to me, being in unfamiliar territory and feeling caught off guard by the blunt commandment over such a petty thing, I instead did as I was commanded.
Most ironic was that people themselves were unforgiving of each other. Many seemed to almost leap at any chance to knock the other down (not entirely metaphorically speaking). One might think being nearly the only white guy in the area I’d be a target of some kind but that was not really the case, except for dogs, a few of which nearly got me. The funny thing is that it was almost as if they were guard dogs kept off of their leash intentionally.
My first week was mostly spent sleeping in a plastic chair (mats were too full and they did not tolerate people sleeping in their wide open courtyard for some reason) while being closely monitored the entire night. Sick and tired of plastic chairs, one of those nights I took off and I was not allowed back in so I laid down on the sidewalk just outside. As it turns out someone had gotten beat to death with a baseball bat the night before only ten feet from where I was sleeping. As much as I disliked the attitude of the mission, that incident and the strict attitude of cops discouraged me from sleeping outside in Dallas.
The food was good but served in baby scoops. When I asked to go through the line again the guards seemed to think I was trying to be a smart ass and tried to make me feel stupid for asking. A few missions in Dallas (including this one) were obviously well funded as one could tell from the buildings themselves and the plain fact that they could afford to pay so many staff members and guards which is unusual for a mission. So why the complete scarcity of food in contrast to those other missions around the country?
In another one of the main shelters in Dallas the ‘guests’ would frequently complain about this. As in many missions chapel was held right after dinner at which time hundreds of homeless men would essentially be herded (they have a different way of doing things in Texas) into a lunch room where they spent a half hour complaining about how there is not enough food or how they don’t like white people. They would then go into chapel where a well-dressed white preacher - the likes of which was not to be found within a mile of this place at any other time - would begin his sermon. What stood out to me in his sermon was the message that life involves a lot of suffering. Whether or not this was the moral of his story was unclear (I don’t know I he had one), but he emphatically repeated it over and over. In response to this the very ones who just thirty minutes prior had complained about being hungry were now the ones to encourage this preacher the most. This is when I began to appreciate the term ‘bible belt’.
This is not to discredit ones faith through trials, it is rather to point out the irony that we were hungry in a town which had a lot of charitable and wealthy people in it who were pouring money into these missions. But the thing about Dallas is that there is a huge gap between giver and receiver when it comes to charity. The town itself is divided into distinct segments characterized by race, income, and crime rate, and things are also very spread out. With this spread out and seemingly segregated nature of the town, no one ever crossed paths with these people they were giving to. They never saw this reality. Unlike Portland most volunteers only volunteered through the mission which kept them securely on their side of the food line where they had extremely limited interactions with those they were serving. I believe they even used a separate secure entrance. With the reality the homeless were living all but hidden from those funding such places, and in the name of faith, the question of whether or not being hungry was actually a necessary tribulation had been lost.
After a week of trying to figure the town out to the point where I knew my routine I finally relocated to a shelter a few miles from downtown. I’d get up at 3 a.m. and walk about four miles to get to the nearest day labor spot. They sent me right out and I got something a day laborer rarely sees in the northwest; overtime. The first job I got was setting up tents as long as two hundred feet. I’d previously done a lot of demolition, trench digging, and roof tear off jobs so I thought setting up some tents would not be a big deal, but physically handling the massive rolled up tents, tediously interlacing them with the Texas humidity and sun reflecting off the material, swinging a sledge hammer to drive all the stakes into the rock hard ground, the long hours, the lack of sleep, and the daily need to walk miles at a time to get anywhere (or simply not being able to find a suitable place to just get off my feet) when taken together made it one of the most difficult jobs I’d ever done as a laborer. When I got back to the shelter they were at least tolerant enough to let me in past the five o’clock curfew as well as to overlook my absence from chapel. As I did not get paid until the end of the first week I relied on the mission for food; they gave me two pieces of bread, a piece of cheese, a piece of bologna, and a small orange. If I told them I had to miss breakfast to make it to work they’d give me an extra bag with the same in it. Being twenty four years old and still training on top of all this, food was still an issue the second week.
Considering the high level of tension between people, the daily confrontations, and the demeaning attitudes of those I crossed while staying in or near some of the worst parts of Dallas, it is clear to me that what I observed was yet another form of alienation and pressure among people which had to have been caused in some way or another. Whereas in the white suburbs it takes the form of social awkwardness, here it seemed to take the ironic form of convincing people to tear each other down. I cannot help but see a loose correlation between what I saw in Dallas and what I would see later that summer in Portland under the Burnside Bridge, only this was on a larger and longer time scale; cops, politicians, and developers essentially uproot people from how they naturally disburse and herd them to a select location where the peace which naturally occurs when people are free to make for themselves and disburse as necessary gets destroyed - all in the name of clearing the way for property development. Soon thereafter alienation ensues and those performing illicit activities seem to hold more weight in the community, and the majority of people who just want to survive in large part lose their power.
An older guy whom I had made acquaintance with made an interesting point to me that there are foreclosed and rotting homes in all of these neighborhoods. He wondered why people don’t get together and tear them down or do something good with them, because not only do they serve as a negative presence, but they also provide a place for illicit and destructive activities. Being as it is their lives being affected it would make sense that they should have a right to shape their neighborhood.