There's no Place Like Home (Skid Row)

Photo of Skid Row in Los Angeles

I hardly ever watch the news anymore, it's just too depressing. On the L.A. news, there is nothing but car chases, kidnappings, police brutality, serial rapists etc. On the national news all I see is Bush, war, hunger and chaos. Who the hell wants to come home from a long day and watch that shit??Last night, while I was making some beer battered coconut shrimp (I had been craving it all day for some reason.. This is NOT a normal occurrence!) my boyfriend (the notorious kitchen sink filler) was watching the news. A story comes on about how local hospitals are dropping off patients with nowhere to go on Downtown's Skid Row. Now, if you haven't been to Skid Row... believe me, you don't want to. It is a street lined with card board box huts, old sleeping bags & flea infested blankets, urine stained sidewalks and some of society's most forgotten and most invisible people. It is a crying, sad shame that people have to live like this.

Anyway, up comes security camera footage showing a car driving up Skid Row, slowing to a halt, the passenger door opens, an old lady with a hospital gown on gets out and the car pulls off. This lady (who turns out to be 65 years old) commences to walk aimlessly up and down the street, walking in circles, pacing back and forth. I couldn't help but cry as I felt the confusion and fear radiating from her old, weak body. After about 30 minutes of pacing, an employee from a nearby homeless shelter took her gently by the arm and lead her inside.

I couldn't believe that a hospital, a place dedicated to saving and healing people, would do something like this. So, I did a bit of research and this is what I found:
(From ABC News web site)
"Three hospitals acknowledge putting discharged homeless patients into taxicabs and sending them to the downtown skid row area, the Los Angeles Times reported. Representatives of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles and Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center said they were helping patients because skid row offers them their best chance of getting services and shelter. Patients are sent to skid row only if they are healthy enough, the representatives said."

Another article continues -
"As part of the probe, investigators for the city attorney's office have been digging through records at the Union Rescue Mission and other skid row service providers to examine the circumstances in which patients discharged from hospitals are being left there. Andy Bales, the head of the mission, said Wednesday that he had given investigators admission logs and a videotape showing an ambulance dropping off a man at the facility who was in a stretcher and appeared to be having convulsions."

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!! Are these people out of their minds?? I am seriously pissed off and dumbfounded that these idiots would actually have a policy of doing such a hideous thing!! And really, of ALL the places in L.A. County, why the hell do they drop these poor people off in the nastiest of nasty places? I don't give a SHIT if there is a "Rescue Mission" there, there are hundreds of other shelters in the County that are in far less dangerous areas.

My question is, if California is so damn low on money that they have to drop hospital patients off in hell, why the HELL has our governor been documented spending $222,577 on a speech coach, $69,000 for campaign jackets and t-shirts, $2.5 million on travel (mostly jets), housing and meals, $66,000 rent for the Hyatt Penthouse in Sacramento, $300,000 threat assessment and security, $14.7 million on dozens of consultants, $37,293 commemorative pens, $9,384 valet parking and millions on his re-election campaign? HOW THE HELL DOES THIS MAKE ANY KIND OF SENSE? Can't they see that people are starving? People are alone. People are desperate. People are freezing. People are suffering. People have nowhere to go.

I am sick.

Have hope for Peace.