Homeless People in Boise Idaho are Treated as Non-Humans and Traumatized

Homelessness is a human rights issue that few people in the United States understand. Homelessness is about lack of basic human services and economics. The lack of services for some of the homeless may have occured when they were children being abused and no one helped them. Research shows that mental illness is much more about environment than genetics. It is about these issues for those who are mentally ill, those who are physically ill, those who are addicted, those who have a job but can't afford rent and those who can't find a job. But it is also about the Prison-Industrial Complex and the corrupt court systems. It is about laws passed to target the vulnerable such as people of particular races or the poor. It is about health care clinics with very low standards, no health care, poor nutrition, lack of sleep and traumatization in the homeless shelters of the Non-Profit-Industrial Complex.

The homeless are a commodity used to create jobs. What I have discovered as an intelligent person who is homeless is those who run these shelters believe the mythology that the homeless are lazy scum who deserve to be treated like animals. They believe this while saying they care and I think the reason is lack of knowledge and bad experiences in their own lives. The homeless in the United States are treated as non-humans and that is very much true of Boise Idaho.

I am tired of having the director of the Interfaith "Sanctuary" insinuate that I am lying when I tell him something. I DO NOT LIE, BUT HE DOES. I am also tired of him insinuating that I am lazy. He has no idea who I am and my life most certainly proves his thinking wrong. I am also tired of him threatening me with the other shelter when I confront him. I am at the Interfaith Sanctuary stubbornly documenting what goes on due to them stealing my civil cases from me that I brought from Alaska to work on for justice and to facilitate change. It was the only thing I was living for, I nearly died last winter, getting so ill after that. Obviously killing the homeless off is the main goal considering the abuse from the health care facilities in Boise Idaho and Alaska. I am also tired of Dan's mythology that there are apartments for rent everywhere if only a homeless person would just take the effort to rent one. It really is just that simple for them. Well I live in reality not la-la land, no there are not apartments everywhere especially for those of us with social disabilities. The places available for rent are either untenable or filled with people who cause massive problems. So renting puts one in a position of housing insecurity, you accumulate things and then have to leave, now you are homeless again. After this happens a few times a homeless person realizes it is useless to go to certain types of rentals, cigarette smoke (just like the shelter), meth labs, constant parties, drunk people, thefts, etc. Then there is the abuse from the landlords. Subsidized housing has been privatized and predatory corporations are in charge. I found that out the hard way. The USDA RD has no power over the abuse of the people who rent apartments in their programs, nope, they just give out money to corporations.

The landlords of Boise Idaho are very prejudiced, most of my social disabilities are not even true but I am falsely labeled by the powers that be in Alaska. Of course no one would believe me and that is what my civil cases the interfaith Sanctuary stole from me were about. I have tried for a long time to find a place to live so when Dan Ault says to me , "Don't you want your own apartment" like I'm some kind of a damn idiot who could get one if only I had the will, the urge to slap the snot out of his smug glib ass overcomes me. Or after abusing me around the chores when I tried to do extra he says I live there so why don't I help them out, why so you can traumatize me more? Nope I stopped trying

to help, more contact means more abuse. A bully system has constantly changing rules to prevent the success of the people in your shelter. And I don't LIVE there if I did I would be in charge of stopping the filth and trauma, there would be no cigarette smoke, gardens would be planted, quilts would be made, bead work would be done, books would be read and sock monkeys would be crocheted. We are only allowed to be there from around 6 PM until 7 AM and it's not living that is done, no it is DYING.

I am an activist and an ethical whistleblower. In the United States they consider someone like me to be a terrorist because our country is just that corrupt, so corrupt that telling the truth is considered dangerous. Being ethical is a huge threat, add being well educated and intelligent and the threat level skyrockets. I have been through hell for over a decade. Some of the things I wrote about in Alaska are now being at least looked at by the governor and other agencies including the Department of Justice. They claim to not know who I am while they read my blog posts, then the changes happen. People have gone to great lengths to try and shut me up. I'm still bitching and writing. So I am going to now be writing on this blog. Every effort on my part to give them a chance to stop the assholery has been met with dickholery.

Dan Ault told me he is tired of hearing about the suitcase they stole from me. There is a lawyer who joined in a conspiracy to have me wrongfully imprisoned which resulted in lots of bad things including my cat being starved and tortured by a psychopath they used to help them. She told me she was sick of hearing about my "frickin cat." That was in like 2007-8. I recently posted this on my other blog. Dan will be SOL.

Brooke Browning Alowa and John Earthman Are Applying to be Judges, Oh Hell No! Featuring a Picture of My "Frickin' Cat"

They have no idea who I am in Alaska. I have tons of these from along period of time.  

Then there are lots of these.

I am a radical but most people do not know what that means. What the United States needs is radicals right now to implement changes but considerable effort has been made to demonize us or lock us in administrative segregation in some privatized prison. The main reason for doing this is to prevent the truth from being told.

Tim Black interviewed Ajamu Baraka the vice presidential candidate of the Green Party who has been a human rights activist for a very long time. He explains what a radical really is. 

Ajamu Baraka describes what a radical is at 5:27.



I do go to the root, strive to understand the root cause, look beneath the surface, ask the critical questions and do seek truth. I'm as radical as hell and proud to be an ethical radical outspoken person. I am not proud of my country and other people who are conscious know why, unfortunately the major portion of our population is not conscious. I love my country the place, some of the history, some of the people, not the government and many people from many different political beliefs feel this way. We all love what we thought this country was but it was never that. Some of us have had experiences that educated us to understand we have been living in propaganda for decades. Wake up!

The root cause of homelessness is not laziness, drugs or alcohol. A huge number of homeless people have been traumatized so a person on drugs or alcohol is showing you a symptom, the root cause is trauma. Having to live in a homeless shelter that traumatizes them over and over with staff who say bullying, glib, patronizing things while treating them like a child does the opposite of empower that person to get out of homelessness. After so much trauma of having their property taken by the shelter, having their bed taken for unjust reasons, having to live in filth, having to live in vermin, never getting enough sleep, being bullied, not being able to have your property with you, having to leave your property in a dangerous situation, being forced to breathe second hand cigarette smoke, being treated like you are not welcome at businesses, being abused at some businesses by owners (laundromat), having police come into the laundromat to ask you if you are doing laundry, having staff at a store follow you into the bathroom because you have a backpack, having the sidewalks blocked so you have to walk in the street, having the dangerous drivers of Boise nearly kill you often, receiving little to no appropriate health care, having to eat an unhealthy diet, no ability for self care, perhaps having to sleep on the floor, being thrown out of the shelter into a dangerous situation at night, being falsely accused, never being able to have any peace, the filth, the unsanitary way things are done, the frequent viruses, the secondary bacterial infections, only ten minutes to shower and on and on, did I mention the damn filth enough? This all leads to dehumanizing of people and they give up, their souls broken. Add injustice from the courts, add social injustice, add loss of human contact, then the lies told by the government about the homeless. Then the very people in control of what happens with the homeless in political positions, the police, the mayor even those running the shelters perpetuate myths which make the pain and trauma so much worse.

There are Trauma-Aware ways of running programs that deal with traumatized people, but the choice is often made as it has been in Boise Idaho to go ahead and traumatize people more over and over and most certainly to trigger their PTSD or whatever their trauma illness is often so they never can heal. The main key to healing PTSD is to give people control of their lives. Homeless people have no control and have to live in systems that frankly are Charley-Foxtrots often filled with idiotic thinking, no common sense. Then when something is pointed out they accuse the homeless person of being a liar or lazy, this happens to me often and I am the exact opposite of these accusations. The shelters are generally run by those who lack empathy, but constantly say they care about the homeless. They do cruel things then blame the victim, even lie. I will discuss this further.

This all needs a radical change. I am a retired RN with PTSD and ME/cfs who has been treated like garbage after spending my life helping others while struggling with health problems. I went to bush Alaska where women were raped and the police would not arrest the perps, the Indian Health System hospital was unregulated and quite dangerous and workplace bullying was used secondary to my whistleblowing and attempts to report the problems. Recently tiny amounts of things were done about some of the problems. I will be damaged by the experience for the rest of my life and continue to fight for justice both from the courts and social justice.

Alaska After All These Years is Finally Counting and Testing the Stockpiled Rape Kits, You Know Like They Just Noticed Them, SOP

My First Night at the Interfaith Sanctuary, a Horror Story, Update

Over a long period of time I waited for the abuse and illogical management at the Interfaith Sanctuary, a homeless shelter to get better. Things changed some but the attitude, abuse, lack of supervision and other problems in Boise Idaho have not so it seems that I have no choice but to write publicly about what has gone on.

The first day I came to the Interfaith Sanctuary I had been at the day shelter, Corpus Christi all day with my suitcase and a plastic bin. The room I was renting was not safe for me, it was an insane situation with a con artist and children being abused. I became homeless to report the child abuse. I was upset already that day, traumatized already.

I think someone may have helped me carry the plastic bin, but I don’t remember as it has been about seven months ago and I was so traumatized by that evening I could not even write about it until now and I write all the time including about personal experiences. I don’t remember all the details now of course. I have complex PTSD, rather severe after a decade of trauma, layer upon layer. So just thinking about this traumatized me. Homeless shelters traumatize people intentionally. They take people who were already traumatized and put them in a system of trauma. They hurt people who can bear no more pain and then wonder why they are on drugs and alcohol or sleeping in a tent. The system damages the health of the homeless who die at half the age of the sheltered.

Many of the homeless people are mentally ill, disabled or elderly. Welcome to America. The solution is housing, but there is no affordable housing except for a rare individual getting really lucky and those with social disabilities are not rented to. Those social services agencies, the city and the state act as if there is housing and recently the director of the shelter told me there is housing all over. No there is not housing all over for low income people and the homeless, that is very false.  

I was told at the day shelter they would want to put my clothes in the drier and would ask me to put on some clothes they had and take a shower. I knew that was about bed bugs, no problem. What I did not know is they treated people horribly and had no respect at all for the personal property of the homeless. They did not even care about my health intentionally leaving me outside in the freezing cold for what I think was three hours.

They wanted my things brought to the laundry room so I brought them in and was yelled at for being in the laundry room. I was saying to him they told me to bring you this stuff, no one said I was not to go in the laundry room. I was trying to do what they said, but as I know very well now they are so inconsistent you can’t ever figure out the right thing to do. The place is run by two co-serial bullies, so this makes sense. 

I stood outside the door to the laundry room freezing for about an hour waiting to give the laundry room dude my stuff for the drier. Some guy came up to do the same thing, waited a while and got angry pounding on the door. The guy in the laundry room angrily swung the door open almost slamming me with it and thinking it was me banging, no it was not. I was hypothermic, stressed and due to ME/cfs which often has POTS, Postural Tachycardia Syndrome associated with it was very ill at this point from standing. People with ME/cfs have low blood volume, we are orthostatic, so dizzy and our hearts pound due to pooling of blood in an already volume depleted person from standing. I got so I could not even think between being hypothermic and with the POTS secondary to lack of blood flow to my brain. I was also having an ME/cfs flare with a fever. It was a horror story and they did this to people all the time. It made me very ill for a long time and recovery was not possible due to lack of sleep, the stress of staying there at night, the bullying and the exposure to massive pathogens so I had viruses all winter. I have no idea how I survived.   

They never gave me the clothes to change into, never had me change into their clothing to put the clothes I had on or my jacket in the drier because they don’t follow their own rules. Their rules are fluid, may only be stated, but not implemented and often only apply to some people and not others. I did not understand that then, but I do now. They wanted to put my backpack in the drier and by then I was so sick and hypothermic I could barely move and certainly was unable to form a thought. In ME/cfs it takes a large part of the brain than normal to form a thought, then we have mitochondrial dysfunction and blood flow issues so our brains end up starving and don’t function in the kind of situation I was in. I told them this and not one damn was given. 

They wanted me to put my things which included electronics in a clear garbage bag and just leave them on the ground, then go inside to do intake paperwork. After telling them this was crazy I refused while shivering from hypothermia. There was a severe lack of empathy and a mob of good old boys. All I got was bullying and right wing talking points to try and shame me or make me feel small. They especially love the blaming for things out of the homeless person’s control which is of course a part of the non-profit-industrial-complex neo-liberal thinking secondary to the gutting of the welfare system under the Clinton administration. I wasn’t grateful for being abused and having my property in danger, I know how odd of me, but it's one of their talking points. If only they had known me they could have saved their breath. I am very well educated and well read, along with having good self esteem because I spent my life in the service of others, have risked my life to try and change things for the better, am an activist, have been a whistleblower several times which comes with much personal cost. Bullshit does nothing but piss me off. 

Since I refused to leave my possessions on the ground in a clear garbage bag for people to steal, imagine that, they decided to give me my plastic bins. SOP is to leave one’s property lying on the ground while doing chores in the morning to be stolen, it sounds insane and it is but that is what they do. I already had one plastic bin with me so they gave me one of theirs to make two. Mine had yarn, pots and pans, along with other things in it. The suitcase had personal property, some clothing and the files for three civil cases I desperately needed to get filed. I had left Alaska due to harassment so the work could get done, lawsuits and other civil cases could be filed, my book could get written and I could get back to gardening, making quilts, cooking, writing, activism, my art and being able to manage my ME/cfs was put in what they called long term storage then. It was a block building with doors in front of four sections, the long term storage for “guests” was the last one. I thought that was safer than the plastic bins, but that was very wrong. These people were not to be trusted as they have absolutely no respect for their homeless clients. More on that story later. 

Those storage bins are filthy and so are the storage areas they keep them in. My name was supposed to be put on them but I did not know this, it was supposed to be on my suitcase too but it was not. I had no way of knowing their procedures at all and was very ill that night before I got there. It was all I could do to even stay conscious. Then they tortured me with psychological abuse and the freezing cold. A few days later when finding out my bins should be labeled with my name I asked to have this done and the guy was abusive. I asked about the suitcase and was growled at. I thought oh well at least it is locked up, it is safe. It was not. 

The intake interviewer was a very abusive man, he is still there and still a serial bully. I did not write about what happened or what was said that night as I was so traumatized and shocked that people would treat the homeless this way even after having been in a very abusive shelter in Alaska. I now know from extensive research this is common practice in many states. What a country. 

Finally I got to take a shower which helped the hypothermia but was not good for POTS. I did not get a bunk that night, but instead got one of three spots on the floor for women. They do not have shelter mats for the floors, but instead use those interlocking mats people put down to protect their floors. When asked about mats claims of lack of resources are made. I never believe a word. They are not very wide so the blankets are on the floor and there is not enough room to keep your body from touching the floor. Those with arthritis etc. are miserable because the mats are on a cement floor. 

ME/cfs is many things, very complex, one problem is immune system dysfunction. There are many people with immune system problems in the shelters at high risk of infections and being on the floor is high risk. There are only three spots for women and one of them was right at the front of the desk where people walked by kicking the woman there, walking on their bedding and spilling coffee on them. That is how they treat people. More on only three floor spots for women later.  

That night and many other nights I slept on the floor shivering from the hypothermia from earlier in the evening.  

Update: I forgot the part where while I was outside hypothermic and getting colder a woman, I do not remember who, but it had to be another homeless person because there was not one female on staff then told me to go put my hands in the exhaust from the driers. I did because I could not move my hands and barely could feel them at that point. The current shelter director was the operations manager at that time and the bullying was off the scales. He had a co-bully then on staff who just could not understand why I was angry and upset that night.