Hurricane Katrina in the Mind

Last night I watched my beloved New Orleans Saints totally dismantle the Atlanta Falcons, 23-3. The Saints played a disciplined, energized game in front of a frenzied crowd in the first home game in the Superdome in over a year. Throughout the broadcast, ESPN showed images of the devastation across the city, much of it still unrepaired. I don't get that at all.

Several times in my life I've found myself with almost no discretionary cash at all and huge jobs to do. I'm currently landscaping a barren yard on a very, very narrow shoestring budget. Your own labor can make up for a great deal of money. It takes effort, but all of that debris can be hauled away and those lots can be cleared off if you're willing to set yourself to the task and just do it. My little pickup truck is worth about $500 and with that, some work gloves and a hand saw, I didn't see much in those pictures that couldn't be hauled away.

Turn off the TV. Get your work gloves. Clean up your frickin' yard.
All of this is a long wind up to suggest some amount of experience behind my libertarian economic leanings. I just don't believe that the government is an efficient tool for much of anything. Defending the country, building roads, providing emergency services and maintaining order are crucial jobs for the government. Most of our current social services are not. The debris still left over from Katrina proves that. For some reason, the people who lived in those houses haven't cleaned their places up yet. The videos shown by ESPN showed sunny days and no one working. That makes no sense at all.

That's an even longer wind up to this. I would be willing to pay a very, very steep price for socialized mental health services. Today's Wall Street Journal has an article written by Gary Fields (subscription may be required) that describes training programs for police officers to deal with the mentally ill homeless. Included in that article is part of a training video that gives you an idea of what it's like to be schizophrenic. It shows a bus ride from the point of view of a mentally ill person, complete with hallucinations and disembodied voices. It's very, very sad to see.

Here are some key excerpts. First, we don't care for these people. We imprison them.

The problem follows the shuttering of state-run mental-health facilities a generation ago. Prisons helped pick up the slack. The Justice Department estimates that about 330,000 of the nation's 2.2 million inmates are mentally ill. When released, they usually end up back in prison, in part because of a lack of outside treatment options.

We're not talking about criminals who can rationalize crimes. We're talking about people who are tormented continuously by mental illness.

We endlessly increase funding for the education industry while people like this are left to die.
The article goes on.

(The officers) learn about psychiatric disorders and listen to firsthand accounts from mentally ill patients. A student at Arizona State University told the officers he had heard voices "every waking moment" for nearly 10 years. "It wasn't about the weather. They say your life's not worth living, kill yourself," said the student who asked not to be named. "The voices told me to kill a friend once. I told him. It made him nervous."

Unable to function in society, the mentally ill are left to their own devices. This next segment brought tears to my eyes. A man who is so hounded by inner demons that he clings to a stuffed animal for support.

The first visit of the night was with a regular who frequents places near the airport, including a bank where he has parked five grocery carts of trash and trinkets. Wheelchair-bound because of a leg infection, he tried to outrun the patrol car when he spotted the officers, until Officer Beauchamp got out. The officer had tried several times to get the man into a shelter, but he refuses because he doesn't want to give up the grocery carts and one of his prized possessions, a 20-year-old stuffed animal.

I was going to go on with a few more examples, but why? What is wrong with our society that we cave in to every aggrieved, hypersensitive special interest group, spending billions and billions of dollars, but we can't open our hearts to sick guys in wheelchairs living on the streets, seeking comfort from raggedy stuffed animals?

I would bet that one could run a very successful presidential campaign on this platform: Before we tackle lesbian marriage, let's take care of our helpless sick first.

Next time you hear someone go on and on about how their special interest group is oppressed or needs buckets more cash, tell them to shut up and go donate their time at a shelter and lobby for modern, efficient mental health care.