End Times.
Is it really so implausible?
“There is only one ideological current, not left or right. It is DOMINION and CONTROL. Power. May every thing that exalts itself above God be crashed to the ground. Politicians, Kings, scientists, fame seekers who pretend to value humanity but are ambivalent to suffering.” - Jacqui Anderson, Patrick’s mom, from Patrick’s Story
**It is July 26th, 2024 and I am updating this investigative story I wrote, below, last August 2023. The latest from Gov. Gavin Newsom on the state of California’s homeless encampments, begging the story’s main question “where will people go?”plus a thorough investigative piece here on where the state has been sending the homeless, drug addicted to basically die. In my piece below, it talks about the early “Greyhound Therapy,” and how government officials bused people to Skid Row (when it was one block, “one row”) which is presently 50 blocks. Greyhound therapy became the desert’s further demise. You will learn a lot about the history of drug addiction here and you will learn that not one politician is really coming up with a tangible plan. I will never forget Los Angeles petitioning for the 2028 Olympics, several years ago. The fact that we won them made me furious. I could envision the buses, the hot seedy desert, the stench, the dying, the millions in tax-payer dollars (that’s rising) and the low estimate of 5.3 billion thrown into Olympic facilities and entertainment. Most of all I can see the pride of politicians. The photo ops. I have witnessed this pride in small events, covering Los Angeles politics. It’s theater. It’s nothing but theater and we must stop idolizing people who do nothing year after year for the sake of power. It’s time to get uncomfortable. It’s time to not cease praying.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
- Ephesians 6:12
Call me crazy. I have tried very hard to read more unbiased articles, in the last five years, since moving from San Bernardino County to L.A. County. Reading vs watching “the news.” A feat in itself. What is true and what is not true continually comes to mind.
I will admit I got swept up in a right vs left news tunnel and invariably found myself washed out on no man’s side laying face down in mud.
Felt, as I am, I actually find it hard to live in a neutral, “I am so blessed” bubble. So, on occasion, I allow myself to watch local news. “What’s up” in California and the western states?
The increasing depravity of mankind has finally made me question end times. Are we in them? and if so, what time period? because none of what I’m seeing looks good.
The level of brutality, drug addiction and mental illness on the streets of big cities and beyond, is something I don’t believe we have ever seen.
After seeing another innocent woman being dragged across gravel for her purse, severely injured, the perps gift to her a life full of terrible memories and pain, I asked myself, how did humans behave during The Great Depression?
I went on a mission to find out.
Were the poor and homeless fed drugs? in Hoovervilles? Were they killing each other? was one race more entitled than the other or did poverty have some kind of indistinguishable makeup? How poor could you be? How hungry and sick? How did a Northern California Dustbowl farming family, with 8 kids, compare to a struggling Black or Hispanic family living in Los Angeles in 1931? losing everything. Throw in a mentally handicapped relative or two and there seemed to be somewhere for them to go. No, not perfect, in fact often horrible, however there were state ran mental institutions, if at the least, because the government recognized that families could not handle their mentally handicapped loved ones without it destroying them entirely.
What happened? Shanty towns were built and at least one million were left in dire poverty. Food lines were set up and for the most part any law breakers, looters, thieves who refused to wait their turn suffered consequences.
Everyone I have ever talked to about the present and growing state of our mentally ill on the streets has continually had one thing to say, “it’s all Reagan’s fault.” I suppose he ordered them all to have their pot and needles too.
Well there you go. End of story. Or is it?
Was it Reagan’s fault? and why hasn’t one powerful government elected official come to the rescue since?
So I found a study. I figured it was from the prestigious “policy-oriented research center uniting UCLA scholars with civic leaders to solve environmental challenges confronting our community, nation, and world ...” as is stated in their bio. How dishonest could this be? would the study blame Reagan? or would these scholarly and civic leaders make some sense of it all?
UCLA study highlight:
“As part of deinstitutionalization, the California State Assembly passed the California Mental Health Act of 1967, also known as the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act, by a majority vote of 77 yes, 1 no and 2 abstentions. This act stated that authorities could only take individuals into custody for seventy-two-hour psychiatric holds or compel them to receive psychiatric treatment if they were deemed to be a danger to themselves or others or judged “gravely disabled” (those unable to meet basic needs for food, clothing, or shelter). The bill’s authors sought to end the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will or for indefinite periods. LPS hastened the movement of psychiatric patients into communities. While initially lauded, LPS did not work as well as imagined. After its passage, most state hospital patients were discharged to residential facilities or their families. These patients had to go through the lengthy process of applying for SSI benefits. Some never applied since they could not do so themselves. Due to fears of living near people with mental illness, cities and communities adopted more stringent licensing and zoning regulations for mental health facilities in residential areas. Individuals with chronic mental illness rotated in and out of hospitals, only able to access acute inpatient or emergency psychiatric care. As the Federal and California government rolled back welfare benefits during the 1980s, many who relied on the public mental health system—particularly the poor—found themselves with few supports and, consequently, became homeless or moved into substandard housing. LPS was also strongly critiqued for diverting many people with mental illness into the criminal justice system. Amidst a growing law-and-order movement in the U.S., many felt the government should focus on protecting public order, now made more difficult by the inability to institutionalize people involuntarily who “disturb[ed] the peace because they refuse treatment for their bizarre behavior.” Law enforcement became tasked with evaluating whether someone should be taken in on LPS criteria, a task for which they had not been trained. The fact that they could not always find a spot in treatment centers for individuals they picked up encouraged “mercy bookings.” The new mental health system did not provide aftercare and follow up services for discharged patients or inmates, and accessible outpatient services for this population remained scarce. This form of transinstitutionalization prejudicially impacted communities of color, who were subjected to increasing policing and surveillance as part of the war on drugs.
From 1973 to 1993, reductions in mental health funding were mirrored by significantly faster transitions into homelessness among the mentally ill. Many factors encouraged this group to reside in Skid Row, where there was a wide range of city homeless services. Other cities and states also bused unattached individuals with mental illness to Los Angeles—so-called “Greyhound Therapy”—and specifically to Skid Row. One DMH consultant estimated in 1984 that rates of serious mental illness among homeless in Skid Row were as high as 50% and close to 90% for single women. Experts did not think this group comprised only those who had been discharged from state hospitals. Some also felt homelessness resulting from unemployment or the breakdown of family structures could provoke acute mental illness.
While the DMH acknowledged the risk people with chronic mental illness faced in becoming homeless, they recognized that the public was unsympathetic to this group.”
Although “deinstitutionalization” continues to point to Governor Ronald Reagan, large and in charge at the time…
“the answer, supposedly lay in the burgeoning field of pharmaceutical science. In 1954, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication called chlorpromazine, sold under the brand name Thorazine. The new drug was the first antipsychotic, and it quickly became a favorite of hospital psychiatrists who, until its invention, could treat psychosis and schizophrenia only with dangerous, unreliable procedures such as electroshock and lobotomy.”
Deinstitutionalization had already begun.
“Ronald Reagan is often blamed for emptying the state’s hospitals onto the streets, but by the time he became California’s governor in 1967, the California mental health hospital population had already dropped to 22,000. It kept right on declining during his administration, driven by excitement over Thorazine and other new “tranquilizer” medications, with little thought to the social or personal consequences.”
“Many of the psychiatrists involved as practitioners and policy makers in the 1950's and 1960's said in the interviews that heavy responsibility lay on a sometimes neglected aspect of the problem: the over-reliance on drugs to do the work of society.”
So, I ask myself again, are we in end times or is it time to put an end to NOT a war on drugs, but a war on the people? Drug the people. Keep the drugs coming. Prop up the Cartels and let the drugs flow in.
Have you ever been on drugs? long-term addictive prescription? long-term higher-than-ever THC marijuana? Fentanyl? Oxycontin? Thorazine? With no support system? If left on the streets, at best the outcome is the loss of your God-given mind and dignity. At worse, death. With a support system, it’s hard enough.
For many, Governor Gavin Newsom’s “CARE Court” a $14 billion multi-year investment to provide “55,000” new housing units and treatment slots and nearly $10 billion annually in community behavioral health services, still begs to ask the question of personal autonomy? For the worst cases, as stated, “beginning with the schizophrenia spectrum,” how does the schizophrenic soul make this decision for themselves to get CARE?
As of January 2022, there were over 171,500 homeless souls in California. This week I read about 2,000 souls, living in a sewer tunnel in Las Vegas. What happened there stayed there. According to “The Mole People,” living in what many would describe as a surreal dystopian third world underground, the authorities often turn on the sewer jetters at full power, washing them out like garbage, until they wake up soaking wet, collect their few belongings and go back in.
“There is no excuse for the fact that people have been relegated to live out their lives like moles, burrowing deeper and deeper into despair.”(article: Invisible People - Feb. 2022 - getting worse)
During this upcoming election season, if you live in America, California, or an area that is operating much the same, I encourage you to look at the websites for transparent incomes in your states. “Transparent California” might begin to tell you the true story of historical revolutions and uprisings by the people and for the people. The people have the power to vote out those who seek power for profit and do absolutely nothing to improve or better our society, except to create more monetarily wasteful bureaucracy, systems and dogma.
“Let every thing that exalts itself above God be crashed to the ground.”
Deb, I missed this in my overcrowded inbox the other day, and wow, am I blessed to have found it now. I had no idea that people were living underground in sewers, what a sad and sorry state of affairs, how inhumane and degrading. This is an important subject and yeah, I can’t see it getting any better, either, with the current policies and methods.
This Is such a great piece of journalism. Thank you for always bringing the heart and the facts. Few people today think of Governor Reagan when we say Reagan.
The timeline helps me understand the chord that connected good intentions with the interests that became such a massive failure. End times are characterized by a loss of love for others; a coldness that sets itself apart in banal cruelty of indifference.