–I am writing this just north of Sydney on a property surrounded by tall gum trees filled with brightly coloured parrots and laughing Kookaburras. Coming home into the arms of family and friends for a few weeks at Christmas is always uplifting.
However, getting to Australia in the “living with Covid” world is tougher than before the pandemic. Firstly there are far fewer flights and all of them are outrageously expensive as the airlines rip us off to recover lost income.
So to sit around an Australian Christmas dinner table I needed some creativity to make this trip happen. We flew across the Atlantic, via my favourite American city, San Francisco. My romance with the magnificent City on the Bay began in the 1980s when I had the privilege of playing club rugby there.
While the Golden Gate Bridge and the beauty of the bay remain eternal, what I had not anticipated was the chaos of the thousands of homeless people existing in squalid conditions on the sidewalks of San Francisco’s downtown precincts.
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I was more than shocked at witnessing people camped on the pavement, cooking up drugs and sharing needles as they injected themselves, in conditions that I can only describe as deep filth.
A few blocks walk down the road we witnessed a group of homeless men engaged in a violent street fight before a handful broke away and attacked a chemist shop in a mass robbery of small food items. The single female security guard rightly stood aside as what the salesperson described in a humdrum voice was a twice daily occurrence of ragged men robbing the store.
Draped only in ripped and filthy clothes against the bitter cold and using any public space as a toilet, scores of mainly men were aimlessly wandering San Francisco’s streets, screaming at invisible demons that appeared only to them. The picture I had held in my mind of the San Francisco of the past was drastically different from today’s reality.
There was a small but visible group of dedicated volunteers who were walking the streets, attempting to bring an impossible reservoir of calm into the tsunami of chaos. They were vainly trying to ease the pain of those who appeared to be in the vice-like jaws of brain-altering addiction, mental illness or a combination of both.
San Franciscans are deeply divided on how their politicians should handle the homelessness problem. Split along the culture war factions, with a divide more unstable than the San Andreas Fault line, as an outside observer it appears to me that no side is getting what they want.
The homeless are obviously not cared for. There are simply not enough facilities for the vast numbers on the streets. Violence lurks around every street corner with human bodily waste and needles littering the gutters of a once beautiful city street.
Early on a freezing Sunday December morning a young man, dressed only in his threadbare underpants, stood on the corner of Bush and Hyde streets. His emaciated physical appearance made him look like an inmate from a second World War prisoner of war camp.
His spaghetti-thin arms were holding what appeared to be a crack pipe to his mouth, as he deeply inhaled his daily mission into his lungs. He then proceeded to deliver Nazi salutes along with yelling ‘Heil Hitler’ to anyone passing by.
The tragedy, sadness, humour and irony of his actions were all reflected in the responses of those he spoke to. His freedom to act was in fact creating his own prison.
The iron bars of self-administered addiction, leading to mental oblivion, were evident on almost every street of San Francisco. Whether self-induced or driven by society, large parts of San Francisco are overwhelmed by a calamity of human choices.
Later that cold Sunday I sat in one of the city’s great sports bars to watch my NFL team, the San Francisco 49ers play. Their supporters’ colours were about the city in huge numbers as the momentum behind the team is building for a successful shot at the playoffs.
If sport is the 21st century’s opiate of the masses it is working well on the San Franciscans. Their fanatical concern was not on the army of homeless but the ankle injury to their movie-star handsome quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo.
Jimmy’s ankle was San Francisco’s obsession.
Or more accurately, what was going to happen when his young unproven replacement, Brock Purdy took his place on the gridiron against the “GOAT” Tom Brady, and his Tampa Bay Buccaneers?
Their fear turned into a fairytale of joy as the 49ers faithful watched in growing fascination as Purdy, on his first start as the 49ers quarterback, expertly guided his team to defeat Brady and his Buccs.
As their 49ers team played out a great win, I had no answers on how to solve the desperate situation of the thousands living on San Francisco’s streets – only the observation that the compassion that is being handed out to those living rough with addiction and mental illness is simply not working.
Be it the 49ers against Tampa Bay or Munster against Leinster on St Stephen’s Day, it’s all only a game. Grown adults chasing around an inflated piece of plastic. Lionel Messi’s triumph will not change the lives of those living in the open air of Union Square.
The experience reminded me that as we prepare to gather around tables laden with good food and wine, there must be a time over the Christmas period to give thanks to whoever we believe is running this mess of a world, that we have been spared living the human tragedy of San Francisco’s homeless.
In a land of overwhelming abundance, where Elton Musk’s takeover of Twitter is regarded as far more important than these tens of thousands of addicted and truly despairing homeless people, it is hard not to believe that significant sections of American society, on both sides of the political divide, have deeply lost their way in a descending maze of their own construction.
As St Stephen’s Day delivers Leinster taking on the old enemy dressed in red (and that’s not Santa Clause), no matter what colour the jersey is that we support, all of it is only a joyous distraction.
Our collective opiate that stops us from contemplating how cruel life is for so many of our brothers and sisters living on the streets.
