"He had seen a great deal in his life. The
kindest way to describe his upbringing is improvisational: His mother on
her frenzied journey as a searcher spent years falling by the wayside,
hoping for answers to life’s questions. She fled with the infant Garrett
from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, where her
marriage ended; she was just in time to hop aboard any vehicle—real or
imaginary, or dabble in substances, legal or illegal, to help her in her
quest. What her quest was, in Garrett’s telling, and in the pages of
his 2016 memoir, Hound of the Sea, was never quite
clear, but it seemed random and risky, her following one kook after
another, settling for periods of time in communes and cults. Her
searching extended as far as Central America, where, his mother later
told him, 5-year-old Garrett witnessed his mother being kicked in the
head by her enraged partner until she was bloody and unconscious. Her
abuser was Luis, whom Garrett’s mother met on a road trip to Honduras.
Every so often his mother abandoned Garrett, leaving him with strangers.
In Guatemala a peasant farmer, recognizing the neglect, begged to adopt
him. Garrett was willing and might have grown up tending a maize field,
raising chickens and living on tamales. But his mother brought him back
on the road.
After that, another fit of inspiration, another piquant memory. “My
mother found God,” Garrett says. “That is, she joined a strange
Christian cult, the Christ Family. They were dominated by a guy who
called himself ‘Jesus Christ Lightning Amen’ and they were committed to
getting rid of all material things—no killing, no money, no possessions,
no meat.”
Garrett’s mother made a bonfire, in one sudden auto-da-fé in
Berkeley, and tossed in all the combustible money they had, and all
their clothes, their shoes, their beat-up appliances, until they were
left with—what? Some bedsheets. And these bedsheets became their
“robes”—one sheet wrapped like a toga, the other in a bundle over the
shoulder.
“And there we were, my mother and my brother, Liam, and me, walking
up Emerson Street in Berkeley, wearing these white robes—a rope for a
belt—and we were barefoot. I ducked into the alleys so that none of my
school friends would see me. I tried to hide. But they saw me in my
robes. One of the worst humiliations of my life.”
He was 7. They slept rough and begged for food. “We ate out of
trash cans and dumpsters from Mount Shasta to Berkeley, for six months
or more.”
He is now a world-record-holding athlete. The rest of the story is at
Smithsonian.
"...He is now a world-record-holding athlete...." Many other children -- conceivably, each, save just this one -- who could tell closely similar stories are now dead or damaged beyond function.
ReplyDeleteWhat would we trade to be able to prevent things like this? Hunch: we would have to trade quite a lot.
When we tweak the slider of indulgence towards mentally-ill individuals, we are reciprocally tweaking the slider of the well-being of the general population.
Forty years' greater indulgence towards the mentally ill has imposed commensurate collateral damage on everyone else. It is more diffuse and harder to measure.
I say "indulgence" rather than "respect" -- it isn't either, but indulgence comes nearer describing the subjective effect. The policy shifts of forty years ago were not motivated by any calculation of benefit or harm to the menatlly ill or to the general population. They were motivated by the budgets of local governments.