Editor’s Note

DISCOVER OJAI MONTHLY

Bret Bradigan

DOWN AND OUT IN OJAI

The most recent count of homeless population in Los Angeles County was 66,436 in January — which accounted for 11 percent of the homeless in the entire United States. That was a 13 percent rise from 2019, and there hasn’t been an updated number since because of the pandemic. It is almost certainly higher, likely much higher. Skid Row’s tent city has expanded block-by-block into some of downtown’s Los Angeles’ nicest precincts, where the throngs of destitute are cheek-to-jowl with some of the city’s most prosperous citizens, bringing into sharp relief this apparently intractable problem.

Ojai has its own homeless problem. Clustered up behind the Arcade or along the bike trail, you see the shuffling disheveled downtrodden making their way from place to place, eyes bleary and legs weary. They have no place to go, and yet often seem to be in a hurry to get there. They are usually quite well behaved, known to each other in the camaraderie of shared sorrows, and only occasionally do they present problems when their mental illnesses and drug addictions get the better of them. The cops have an easy, first-name-basis rapport with them, and they seem to police each other with the spirit of mutual self-aid.

It’s a hard life, and while it may be the inevitable path of a road paved by bad choices, it is foolish to think that bad luck doesn’t play its part. Each bad choice makes the next bad choice that much more likely, until the downward spiral swirls toward the gutter like human flotsam. It reminds me of Orwell’s ‘‘Down and Out in London and Paris,’’ and how he describes his straitened circumstances as a dishwasher, working 17 hours a day until he has nothing left but misery relieved by scant hours of sleep. It gets to such a state that he witnesses a murder beneath his window: ‘‘The thing that strikes me in looking back,’’ he says, ‘‘is that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder [....] where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?’’

It’s an easy subject for moralizing and stern judgments — that is so much easier than working toward solutions. Perhaps the best we can do is take a step back and allow empathy to flow in under the transom of revulsion, the judgments, the withering glances. Even if it only gives us a chance to feel gratitude, the sense of ‘there but the grace of God go I,’’ it will be worth it. The worst part I believe is the precarious nature of not having any place to call your own, to make a stand, to be at home. Just by existing, you are breaking the law, several laws most likely.

Anatole France vividly captured this state of permanent delinquency: ‘‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.’’

If someone has solutions that come from a place of compassion and understanding, don’t keep them yourself. We need to hear them. Because it’s not getting better and it’s a blot that puts to shame our city’s identity as a prosperous and caring place. Ojai is known as a welcoming place, at least to some. Maybe by remembering that, as my dad used to say, ‘‘we’ve all got a long row to hoe,’’ we can keep it that way.

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