You Can Make a Difference

Millions of Americans go to sleep every night in the comfort of their own bed, wrapped in a nice blanket, with a roof shielding them from the elements of nature. When the sun rises, they start their day off with a warm shower, some fruit, eggs or coffee, or if they’re like me, they lay in bed desperately scrolling through Twitter for an early-morning hit of dopamine. For over half a million Americans, however, a much harsher reality is faced.

Imagine going to sleep night after night on a cold, rigid slab of concrete. Above you an interstate highway endlessly roars. Nearly every hour, you’re jolted from your rest by a blaring siren as an emergency vehicle jets past you. During the latest hours of the night, you find some decent rest, only to wake up the next morning missing the pair of shoes which were given to you last week because they were stolen in the night.

My name is Austin Graham. I’m a 21 year old college dropout living in an intentional community in the so called live music capital of the world, Austin, Texas. I do not have a job. I subsist on as little money as necessary in order to meet my basic needs. Every week I venture through the many camps of people experiencing houselessness throughout my city, delivering around 100 warm, home cooked meals from multiple organizations I work with. Our city has some of the most humane laws in regard to houselessness, allowing for people to legally camp throughout the city without imminent threats of police violence solely for existing. I help deliver tents to those who need them, as well as sleeping bags and tarps to combat the erratic weather of central Texas. Through this past winter (yes, winter in Texas begins to end in January), I helped deliver hundreds of long socks, beanies, jackets, blankets and other warm clothing items. I believe everyone deserves warmth, especially those living in a world that is sometimes very, very cold to them.

Every once in a while, I get to do good deeds for specific people whose paths intersect with mine one way or another. The first person I got to really help out was an older gentleman who goes by the name Cowboy. Cowboy lives in his truck, in the parking lot behind an Autozone next to a Wendy’s and Taco Cabana, just a block or two away from my home. I met him one day when I was driving back from my job at the time. I decided to treat myself with a bean taco after a long day of going door to door in the Texas heat. I was passing out political literature for Donna Imam who ran for congress here in Texas. Donna unfortunately lost to the incumbent, John Carter, a terrible man who fathered the legislation for Trump’s muslim ban and family separation policies. He sucks. But I digress.

I pulled into the Taco Cabana drive thru and saw Cowboy finding some shade on that hot summer day beneath a tree in the parking lot. I rolled down my window and shouted to him “Hey man, you want some tacos?” He sat up and said “Sure!” He told me he would like a chicken taco. I asked if he wanted some beans on the side, to which he replied “No, I’m sick of beans. I’ve had far too many beans in my lifetime.” So I got him a side of rice instead.

I continued my relationship with him, getting him food when I could and saving him a meal from when I cooked and delivered to the downtown camps. I have gotten to know him better over the past few months. Cowboy is a country boy. He grew up in West Texas on a farm where he and his cousins were worked like dogs by his father. His grandmother would cook amazing breakfasts, bacon with fried eggs which she cooked in the bacon grease. He claims that she made the best eggs in the world. I’m a bit of a chef myself and would like to imagine mine would compare, but I doubt I have reached the level of Grandma mastery.

In addition to being a Texas grown country boy, Cowboy is also a veteran. He served throughout the world for 14 years, in South America, Africa and Asia. His country has repaid him for the many times he risked his life by leaving him out on the street, as is the story with many people who have been chewed up and spit out by our country's military. He has bad stomach ulcers, which can very likely be attributed to when he was stationed on the North Carolina military base Camp Lejeune. The water on this base poisoned thousands of service members, their partners and in some cases, their children. The contaminated water of Camp Lejeune left many of them with a multitude of side effects which are listed on the Veteran Affairs website as adult leukemia, aplastic anemia, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, multiple myeloma, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and parkinson’s disease.

Camp Lejeune is far from the only military base with this kind of story.

Cowboy’s goal is to get out of the city of Austin and head back to West Texas to get some land. He wants to breed dogs, have some horses, cattle and make sausage. However, his truck isn’t functional. He had mentioned to me that he needed some tools to fix it. So one day after delivering food, I brought him back a meal. I asked him which tools he needed to fix his truck, and told him I would go buy them. He thanked me, told me what to look for and sent me to a good hardware store with cheap prices. I brought them back to him, and he was incredibly grateful. He was able to fix some of the parts of his truck, but unfortunately, his car battery got stolen by a friend who he’d known for a few months. His friend claimed that he would charge the battery for him, but never came back with the battery. This only worsened Cowboy’s trust issues he’s had from a few years living on the streets.

I hope that someday soon I can collect money from my comrades in the city to buy Cowboy a new battery. I’m able to do much of what I do only with the support of other Austinites who’ve joined the struggle to help those living on the street. I also get the tents as well as occasional funding from the wider Austin community who donate money to Austin Mutual Aid. AMA is a group which formed at the beginning of the pandemic to help those in need as our government left them to suffer during the worst economic and health crisis in a hundred years. We operate on one of the sole principles of mutual aid, “Solidarity, not charity!” by redirecting resources to help the houseless while also building community connections through neighborhood mutual aid kiosks. The kiosks are wooden stations where people can leave supplies for their neighbors such as clothes, diapers, non-perishable food items, books, ect. Other neighbors are free to take what they need.

A few months later on a cold December night, my friend Andrew called me asking if I could give a woman a ride to Academy to pick up a tent she had ordered. Andrew lives beneath the interstate across from the Austin police department headquarters, which is where I met him through the many Black Lives Matter protests we attended. The woman was one of his neighbors, Denise. I took him and Denise to Academy. Everything went well, but it was the ride home that really stuck with me.

Doing this kind of work requires a lot, but the hardest part of it for me is the emotional aspect of it. I have seen things, heard stories and had experiences I will never forget, experiences which have changed me as a human being. As we were driving back from Academy, we were stopped at an intersection. An unhoused man was standing on the street corner. Denise talked to him, letting him know she was also homeless. She said she couldn’t help out with much, but asked him if he smoked. He said yes, so she pulled four Newport cigarettes out of her fresh pack and handed them to him. A few minutes passed as we drove down the highway. Denise had been really quiet. I looked over, and saw her holding back tears. She began to break down, crying hard and yelling “I don’t matter! I don’t matter!” over and over.

Andrew and I attempted to console her, but she continued crying, saying “I want to help so many people but I can’t. I can’t do anything for anyone. I want to help. But I don’t matter.” Denise has lived in many states and been unhoused for quite some time. Her and her husband are trying to make it to Oklahoma. She told me “Never in my life have I ever seen so many homeless people,” her voice breaking at the end of the sentence with more tears falling to her legs.

Here I was, in an affluent city with thousands of people making six figure salaries, the west side of town filled with mansions in the hills; safe from the city smog, the constant sirens, and a never ending stream of cars on the highway. Austin, Texas: the home of the now richest man in the world, Elon Musk. And here was Denise, a woman living in a tent under a bridge crying her eyes out because she felt like she wasn’t doing enough for the many other unhoused people suffering around her. I am still filled with righteous anger because of this thought.

Later that night, Andrew called me asking if I could take Denise and her husband Charles to a motel for the night, which someone had graciously covered the cost of. Even though I was tired, desperate to relax and wanting to hang out with my roommates, I couldn’t help but think about the resources I have to sleep in a bed every night, to take a shower when I need to, and to know I’m safe and secure in my space. I thought about how if I didn’t have those things, it would be so nice to have them, even just for one night. I drove back to the bridge and took them to the Royal Blue motel in the North side of town. I’ve continued my relationship with them, helping them get some tarps, a generator which I pick up every few weeks to recharge, and actually just helped them get a ride to the same motel tonight. One of my comrades paid for them to get an uber. I couldn’t help them with the ride myself because as I write this, I’m sitting in a hospital room with a woman we call Mama Red.

Mama Red is near sixty years old. She lives on the East side of town called Riverside. She fills the role of being the mom of the camp, making sure everyone gets something to eat, is kept warm at night, has clean clothes and things of the sort. This is something which organically happens at a lot of the camps. At the camp near my house, a beautiful trans woman named Candy fills this role, Leslie does it at the Cesar Chavez camp and Andrew does it at his camp by the police station.

I came to Riverside this morning because the camp was going to be swept. A “sweep,” as we call it, is a practice done by a private company contracted by the city of Austin. A group of workers are sent out to the camps to pick up trash, but in reality, it is a larger project, the goal of which I see as something more sinister than just picking up trash. The workers force the unhoused to pile all of their belongings inside of their tents, and anything which is not put into a tent is taken, put in a dumpster, then thrown away. I have seen them take perfectly good pieces of plywood out from beneath people’s tents, carry them to their trailer and throw them away. People keep the sheets of wood beneath their tents for when it rains, so their belongings don’t get soaked. There is no logical reason for taking these. I have seen them take tents, tools, wheelchairs, beds, guitars, clothes and a list of things that could go on forever. To me, I see all of it as an act of violence. They steal from these people any shred of comfort they may find as they struggle to make it through their harsh realities. But anyways, back to Mama Red and being in the hospital.

When I got to the camp, I found Mama cleaning up her area, rushing to get all of her belongings into her tents. I’ll admit that she is a bit of a hoarder. She has way too many things, but come on, who doesn’t know an old lady who holds onto random junk “just in case.” I noticed her finger was hurt. It was extremely swollen and had a giant bubble of puss festering on it. Here she was, a 59 year old woman, desperately moving her many belongings into her tent while her finger throbbed in immense pain. I sent pictures of her injury to some street medics we work with, they told me it required immediate attention. I drove her to a wellness center, but they were full for the night, so we went to the ER.

It’s now close to three in the morning. I’m sitting next to her bed as she sleeps. Occasionally she wakes up in a fit of pain, complains about her finger, then falls back asleep. She is deathly afraid of hospitals, reiterating to me that she wouldn’t be here without me. The hospital has a policy of not letting visitors stay past 8, but has made a special exception for me as I demanded to stay, stating that I would not leave her alone here.

I could go on with other stories, but this is getting too long. I want to emphasize that I don’t do this work to be a “good” person. I don’t do all of this because I believe in God and think it will give me special favor in heaven. I don’t do this so people will praise me or look at me highly.

I do this because I passionately believe that nobody deserves to be unhoused, regardless of their actions. It is morally reprehensible that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, a country which spends $721 billion dollars to maintain its 800 foreign military bases and imperialist wars, which has trillions to throw into the imaginary stocks of wall street as its people go hungry, which can spend millions militarizing its city police forces, that 500,000 people are forced to survive on the streets. Especially when there are millions of empty homes, apartments and hotel rooms.

Capitalism intentionally maintains the state of homelessness. It is used as a psychological weapon to terrorize people working for $8 an hour, keeping them in their societal position. Homelessness continues so that when people see another person holding a cardboard sign at an intersection, a subconscious fear arises within them that that could be them. While many Americans dehumanize the unhoused, they worship multimillionaire celebrities and the billionaires of the world, endlessly coming to their defense in Facebook comment battles, telling other poor people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You know who I’m talking about, the eight men who own more than 3.6 billion people combined, Musk, Bezos, Gates, Buffet and the rest. These people defend them while not realizing they are far closer to being the person on the street corner than the person on the cover of Time magazine.

I call on everyone who reads this to love the people you see on the street as though they were your family. Put yourself in their shoes. Humanize them, care for them in the way you would want someone to do for you if you were in their position. Remember the “Golden Rule” we were all taught: “treat others as you want to be treated.”

Next time you lay your head to rest, take a moment to be grateful for whatever it is you have. Appreciate your toilet water. Say thank you to the roof above you. Have gratitude for your fridge, your pantry, your closets and living room. And when you see someone on the street in need, do not walk past them. Don’t ignore them. Do not disregard their existence. Even if you have nothing material to give them, give them a bit of your time. Talk to them. Sometimes just having someone who's willing to listen could mean more than you could ever imagine.

You can make a difference.