Over the last several weeks, you might have witnessed a version of this: a major artery like Sunset Blvd. where most of the people on the street are the homeless. They simply have nowhere else to go. This is their version of “stay at home.” If you think this has been hard on you, consider what they’re going through. Just my opinion but I don’t think we’re “going back” to anything. I think we’re going to adapt, innovate and beyond that, show a lot of other states a safe and efficient way forward. However, some things from our past reality will still be with us. 

How we handle our homeless population is how we handle our health security in total. We’re all in this together, for better or worse, whether you like it or not.  

Ask anyone who does it for a living; helping people is one of the most difficult tasks you will ever undertake. No matter how good willed you are, how committed, how patient and open minded, humans can often escape your best intentions and remain immune to the effects of your great efforts.

It’s not your fault nor is it theirs. We are an exceedingly complex species and it’s safe to say that one size only fits one. You do what you can and hope for the best. Even then, the results can be at best minimal, and at worst, disastrous.

Helping humans in need can not be a “one and done” hero swoop. When it comes to people, nothing is easily or permanently resolved. Marriage leads to divorce, partnerships to litigation, etc. Even in the most thriving environments, like the United States, which Lincoln characterized as “the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil and salubrity of climate,” there are myriad problems created by the fact that there are humans everywhere. How to help? Those are the big ideas every politician takes on the campaign trail, from employment, healthcare, and education. If any of this wasn’t so borderline impossible to implement and maintain, this country would be a much different place to live in. But it isn’t. Because we are what we are.

The future of our amazing city I think is welded to how we handle its biggest problem and most perplexing challenge: our homeless population.  The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s latest figures show  there are more than 66,433 people on the streets —a 13 percent jump since last year—and that count was taken before the pandemic!  

All over the city, it’s hard to find a few blocks that don’t show evidence of homelessness. I’m willing to bet you’re not the type who finds any joy in seeing people living on the sidewalk or think that they’re all just a bunch of lazy do-nothings who don’t want to work. These are fellow human beings, often with very real mental conditions, in need of much more than a hot meal or some life advice like, “Get a job!”

How to help? What if, some incredible civic wand was waved and all the homeless were suddenly in housing, getting whatever treatment they required and those able, schooled and prepared to be put back into the workforce? It would take a lot of money. How much? About $657 million, according to a report from LAHSA in 2018. Sure, the homeless population has increased since then, but whatever it costs now, it’s nothing compared to what Los Angeles spends on other services. 

RELATED: Inside the Progressive Battle for the Future of Los Angeles

Take the LAPD for example: the city proposed spending $1.8 billion on policing this year before activists pressured them to slash at least $150 million from the budget. When it comes to homelessness, I will not accept hands being thrown into the air and “Well, that’s just the way it is,” ending the conversation.  

Meanwhile, it seems that new condominiums are sprouting out of the ground like they’re on springs. The dwellers can look from their balconies and marvel at the roaring rush hour charge to the 101 and the tents on the sidewalks below. The city is going ever more vertical. I wonder where the water is going to come from for all these buildings and what impact the increasing need for electricity will have on the power grid.

Will the future of Los Angeles be the many looking down, literally, on the less than fortunate? I don’t believe that’s who we are. 

I’ve tried to come up with plans to remedy this genuine humanitarian crisis but I simply don’t have the logistical, operational, or strategic smarts to employ. This witnessed-by-everyone real time catastrophe goes not only to the core of who we are as residents, but who are as a species and conscientious guardians of this century.

Homelessness in Los Angeles and California pre-COVID-19 was as dire a matter as it was complex. Perhaps the worst possible thing that could happen to a population that lives close together, without access to sanitation, testing, masks, and other safety measures, has happened. If this assessment is grim and less than sunny, so be it. Right now, economy-first science-denying happy talk is getting people killed. 

I realize that a lot of the above is a pre COVID-19 point of view. The present is evolving hour-to-hour and the future is what we’re going to make it, so right now, the old model is all I’ve got.

I had no idea how many things I took for granted. None.

Henry Rollins is a columnist for theLAnd magazine. His last column was “Land of the Free, Home of the Unforced Error.”

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On January 27, 1838, only weeks before his 29th birthday, in a speech called “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” Lincoln warned that the greatest threat to America was, basically, Americans. Any danger America might face, he said, “must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

It would seem that destruction from within is America’s lot. It’s what we do. We’re well over two centuries in and the constant acts of self-harm are now just the injustice du jour.

No matter how angry any act perpetrated by an elected official, cop or corporate executive may make you, to a certain degree, you’ve absorbed the shock and are still operational. I’m not saying you’ve normalized the American Horror Story of the last two years. But you have re-mapped the territory and found your footing.

This constant adaptation to that which must be endured until it can be changed is part and parcel of being American. I’m not talking about the heavy lift of American democracy and the impediments of compromise. I’m talking about the beatings Americans subject themselves to year after year. Creating a perfect killing machine like the AR-15, making it available to people who can’t even set their DVR, and spending millions of dollars to ensure said weapons will be at the ready for the next massacre, might strike many rational people as completely insane. That’s because it is. But it’s also American. Like school shootings, baseball and Fentanyl abuse. No other country plants a tree and painstakingly attends to it until it’s the tallest one in the world, only to render it into millions of clubs to bash the heads in of those who don’t have one.

It’s this premium quality self-sabotage, whisked into the roiling puree of the American identity, that makes progress, at times, impossible. When Trump copped the Reagan-era slogan “make America great again,” he inadvertently started a relevant conversation. It can be argued, “When was America great?” as well as, “When wasn’t it?” The truth is that America’s been both. At the same time. From the beginning.

It seems to be an American habit to remedy a bad situation only when the wrong people finally get caught up in it. Ronald Reagan and his wife were not overtly homophobic. They were quietly and patriotically homophobic.

The HIV virus was something that only affected “those” people. As his administration ignored the problem, millions of people had not an inkling as to the devastating virulence of HIV or the horrific effects of AIDS. Thus the world’s bestest country brought a modern-day plague upon itself, ushering in a new dark age, with all the ignorance you would expect—until Magic Johnson, a legendary heterosexual, contracted HIV.

It was around the mid-1980s when I realized America, while great, was a place I had to survive, protect myself against and sometimes rescue others from. Millions of gun owners never take their weapon out of their homes. When asked why they have a weapon or weapons where they live, they’ll tell you that they are a protective measure against harm from criminals and their own government. This isn’t an evolved point of view as much as a reflexive American reaction to what citizenship entails.

Even though it’s 2019, and even though I’m certain there are more rough times ahead, I will state for the record that I’m living in post-Trump America. Our history proves that America only gets better when what we’re doing to ourselves become so intolerable that even the most accommodating misery sponge has to tap out. America builds big, beautiful walls so everyone who wants to can beat their heads against them — but when those people find out it was an elective all along, things change.

Trump thinks he’s the greatest of the 45 presidents. He’s not, of course, but he might prove to be, albeit unintentionally, one of the most transformative. The rise of women in politics isn’t a bubble. It’s an ascent that will not be stopped. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School inspired more of their peers than Trump could ever hope to. In the decades to come, it will be the kids who hit the streets, protesting for their right to go to school and not be assassinated, that will shape the American landscape, not people in overpriced red baseball caps. It will be non-white Americans elected to political office who value equality and opportunity who will determine the outcome of the American century. Not people howling “Lock her up!” These diverse, game-changing young people are the text; Trump is a footnote.

It took me a few months of Trump’s presidency to realize that his administration was doomed. He was done minutes after he got the keys. Perhaps he knew he could count on the cowardice of the House and Senate majorities to sustain him for awhile. But soon enough, all those members who had supported him could do was look the other way and hide from media inquiry as they prepared their private sector exit strategies.

Perhaps a few of these scoundrels saw this coming, but most probably had no idea they were going to be so complicit in their own takedown, yet another example of the unforced error. It’s the American way.

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