mango4ever and fringe ministry

     I suck!  I mean I am really an asshole!  But I have a lot of reasons why I am the way I am.  Other than the fact that I was very outgoing and tried to please people before Cameron James Harris held me hostage one morning and forced me out of a moving vehicle, I have seen more people die than some guys who have been to war.  Most of those deaths too, were people that did not have to die.  Just the people I have known in Salt Lake City who have frozen to death is more than I can count.  Overdoses and suicides are high up on the list too.  That is due to the terrible system that we have in Salt Lake City to deal with the homeless issue.  Yes, we can look at our lower rates of homeless people when compared to the national average, but when you look at the fact that the mortality rate among the homeless we do have is three times the national average then you can see that we have a problem. Why are people who are struggling with homelessness in Utah dying a triple the rate of unhoused people in other cities?

     One of the problems is we have way too many self-serving local politicians who are patting themselves on the back for a job well done keeping the streets free of homeless people while they manipulate numbers to look like they have done something right and pocketing large sums of money collected through fundraising campaigns that only exploit the suffering of others.  As someone who has seen the results of this firsthand, I can tell you what they are doing is not right.  In fact, it should be criminal what they are doing because people are dying because of it.

     In this town there is actually very little that we do to help people overcome the barriers that lead to homelessness, and we are even less likely to help them once they become homeless.  Yeah, they can get help from programs that don’t work unless they really want recovery or they could join one of the many religious cults masquerading as nonprofits, but that only works for very few people, and it does more harm than good in a lot of cases.

     I want to help people where they are, not where people think they should be.  That is the first step to giving opportunities to the disenfranchised to overcome obstacles to independence.  For me, the best weapon that we have against recidivism is opportunity.  Because someone who is successful is way less likely to commit crime, it is just a fact.

     But what makes someone successful?  Is it lying to themselves daily trying to become something they are not.  I don’t think so.  Success to me is waking up every day and liking the person you are, and pride in the impact you have on the people around you.  That can’t happen when someone is forced into being something they are not.  I do think that getting people off drugs is a good goal for any organization to have.  But forcing people into religion as a means for controlling their behavior is a cruel exploitation of faith.  That kind of ministry can only be described as predatory.