marichiko

Yesterday morning I got up at 5:00am to drive my friend, Clarity Rose, down to the local Independence Center for the disabled. It was a cold wet morning with clouds and fog blotting out the mountains to the west. Clarity Rose was waiting anxiously for me by her front gate when I arrived. Her long red hair was the one bit of color in her grey neighborhood in a grey chilly dawn. "Play that song," she exclaimed as she climbed in the passenger seat of my car. I knew that she meant the song, "I can see clearly now." I found the CD and slid it into my car stereo.

"I can see clearly now, the rain has gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It's gonna be a bright, bright sun shiney day!"

Clarity Rose and I sang along in unison and she made me repeat the track three times in a row on our drive downtown. We pulled up to the entrance of the building and saw that at 6:00am, there were already three people huddled out in the morning cold and damp, waiting for the doors to be opened at 8:00am. One was a young man with Down's Syndrome, another was a Gulf War Vet in a wheelchair who flashed us a peace sign, and the third was a man who had three heart attacks, followed by cancer of the larynx. He couldn't talk, but he was able to write quickly on a yellow paper tablet he carried. He wrote the number "4" on the tablet, tore it off and handed it to Clarity Rose with a smile.

I had driven Clarity Rose down to the Independence Center that morning because she had recieved a letter in the mail informing her that a wait list for 25 precious housing vouchers would be made available on a first come, first served basis, starting at 8:00am that morning. We live in a city of over 500,000.

Clarity Rose suffered a brain aneurism several years back. She was in a coma for three days and almost died. After her surgery, she was in rehab for 6 months, learning how to walk and talk again. She's friendly and cheerful and can't add a column of simple numbers or fill out a simple form without assistance. She was a housewife most of her life - married twice, divorced twice. After her aneurism, she met a man who was also handicapped and they lived together for some years until he died of a heart attack last October. They never married because Clarity Rose's SSI would have been taken from her, and her friend didn't get enough from SSDI to support two people. As it was, Clarity Rose's SSI was stopped for 4 months when she got a small insurance payment of $4,000.00 after her friend's death.

Her SSI will be $579.00/month when it resumes - the maximum disabled people on SSI can get in the state of Colorado. I am worried sick about her. How is she going to pay rent, utilities, and the most basic living expenses on that tiny sum? She needs a housing voucher, but housing vouchers have become as scarce as ivory billed woodpeckers or black footed ferrets or any other endangered species. People have heard of them. They are supposed to exist. But no one has seen one.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, 3.5 million Americans experienced homelessness in 2004. 36% of them were either children or a member of a family with a child or children under age 12. Here in Colorado 18,938 people were homeless last year for 6 months or longer. 12,054 of them were members of families with children. The monthly income of a single adult on SSI falls $10.00 short of the fair market value of the average rent nationwide. Their income is about 19% of the income average for single Americans as a whole. And these folks are the disabled - those in our society least able to care for themselves, least able to dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

A young man who was blind in additional to having a developmental disability of some sort was dropped off from a van and tapped his way with a cane over to join us. The mute man handed him the number "5". "That's 5," I said to the blind boy. "You are number 5 in line." He turned his sightless eyes toward me and thanked me, then tapped his way over to the brick wall of the building and leaned against it, his collar turned up against the unseasonable chill. A man who appeared to be schizophrenic got number 6, a woman using canes got 7. A slender black girl who said nothing to any of us got 8. By 7:00am, the mute man handed out number 25. Those who arrived after that turned away with their shoulders slumped and walked away silently.

When we were finally allowed into the building at 8:00am, 3 clerical workers handed out application forms and we were herded into a meeting room to fill out forms (I helped Clarity Rose with hers). A tired looking administrator told the assembled group not to expect anything. They'd only been admitted to a wait list. "Go on about your lives," she said. "It could be years."

When Clarity Rose and I walked out back to my car, I tried not to let her see how defeated and worried I felt for her sake. "I'll get one!" she said cheerfully. "I think God wants me to have one."

God might, but the American people don't. I've been angry for the past two days.