I live in downtown San Francisco where I constantly contend with scores of tourists deriding the homeless as a pollutant for an "otherwise beautiful city."
I hear, "It's a a shame (we) can't do something about the homeless."
I was born in San Jose, CA in 1973 and adopted a year later. My biological parents met as a result of the aftermath that ensued in the wake of shuttering the
(Agnew) asylum in San Jose. Because the circumstances surrounding the origins of my very existence occurred in the trickle down effect of deinstitutionalization, I have always felt a kinship and empathy for the scores of individuals making up the said population. My bio mother was a 
schizophrenic ward of CA state who had been released after the gavel fell on the Lanterman, Petris and Short Act. With newfound freedoms that included the right to forego medication, she fostered an on-again, off-again relationship with an itinerant romantic that resulted in my birth and acquiescence to foster care and adoption. I grew up in a hermetically sealed, homogenous bubble of suburban safety separated by the literal and figurative bridge and tunnel factor. Today, I live a block from the Powell BART station in San Francisco, a microcosmic combo of mall shoppers and mentally ill meandering among one another without mixing.
I hear, "It's a a shame (we) can't do something about the homeless."
I was born in San Jose, CA in 1973 and adopted a year later. My biological parents met as a result of the aftermath that ensued in the wake of shuttering the
schizophrenic ward of CA state who had been released after the gavel fell on the Lanterman, Petris and Short Act. With newfound freedoms that included the right to forego medication, she fostered an on-again, off-again relationship with an itinerant romantic that resulted in my birth and acquiescence to foster care and adoption. I grew up in a hermetically sealed, homogenous bubble of suburban safety separated by the literal and figurative bridge and tunnel factor. Today, I live a block from the Powell BART station in San Francisco, a microcosmic combo of mall shoppers and mentally ill meandering among one another without mixing.
One of the few times I was able to spend with my bio mother before she died 9 years ago happened to be Mother's Day. As we wandered around the Civic Center plaza, I was amazed at the way she interacted with the people I would have hurriedly passed by or viewed as a pox. She was relating on a peer level with a subset I had seen sitting on the sidelines in the shadow of statues covered in seagull shit. This was her element as
vicereine to the vice-ridden. Although the physical surroundings were familiar, I was finally able to view them without the filter of fear and fortune previously fogging my lens. Considered from where she was sitting, the scene seemed less simplistic.
The disparity between her reality and the one that I was raised with came into full focus the next day when I learned she had died. At her memorial service the following week, I met her (my) extended family and was able to gain a better sense of the tragedy her mental illness and its wreckage had invoked. An 8x10 b&w glossy of a would be cinema siren akin to Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor was situated on the altar. "That's when she was normal," said her brother. Her family simply didn't know how to handle the person they saw her dissolve into as her schizophrenia took hold. "We had a terrible time with her," he said, as he recounted an Eisenhower era European trip taken at the behest of their Sicilian immigrant mother that failed to produce a change in her behavior. "Behind the gates of Agnew (asylum), at least she would be safe," he said. And we'd be safe from her. That's really what we thought."
