In the Dumps with Human Discards : Skid Row: The wave of technology and economic change has left stragglers who will never catch up. It’s like expecting a non-swimmer to learn to surf.

It looks like a war zone, with sleeping bags and bedrolls strewn in disarray and bodies asleep where they have fallen, dead to the world. The pavement is littered with spent butane lighters, mute testimony to the colony’s drug of choice, crack cocaine.

Even though the sun has been up in the rest of the city for two hours, here on Crocker Street, the two-story concrete wall of the Pacific American Fish Co. shuts the cement canyon of this Skid Row encampment into a day-long twilight.

There is a bizarre, foreign-looking quality to these 200-or-so feet of sidewalk crammed with filthy humanity. Surely this must be another Calcutta, where people live a vermin-like existence in public places, a full half-world away from the broad avenues and boulevards of American enterprise and opportunity.

Like the Good Humor man driving into Dante’s Inferno, the old Catholic Worker Chevy van rolls into these badlands a couple of mornings a week to serve coffee and raisin bread to the early risers. Of the various nomadic activities that we are experimenting with while our new soup kitchen is being built, this is the most challenging and the least favorite. The people are aggressive and rude, and we have to keep our “street smarts” on constant alert, like the half-cocked hammer of an imaginary pistol.

Crocker Street is a morass of problems of such depth and gravity that our meager gifts of bread and coffee seem about as helpful as a Popsicle in hell.

The ancient Hebrew name for hell is Gehenna--literally, garbage dump. In the daytime it was just that. In the dark of night, however, it came alive, swarming with the outcasts of the community, the lepers.

The Hebrews did not know that leprosy is a physical disease. They believed that it was precipitated by the sinfulness of the individual. Physically and spiritually corrupt and incurable, the leper was thus consigned to Gehenna, to live forever out of sight of the elect.

Today, the city of Los Angeles is proving itself adept at administering just this type of garbage-dump therapy to the homeless addicts of Skid Row. The therapeutic equipment consists of two 5-ton yellow dump trucks, a skip loader, a pickup truck and a squad car, all operating together as a kind of rapid deployment task force. Twice a week, the equipment parades in military-type caravan from one Skid Row encampment to the other, cleaning up the downtown drug problem--or at least moving the human evidence out of sight of business people and commuters for a day or so.

If this strikes you as a ludicrous way of dealing with the serious drug problem in our city, you are correct. You are equally correct in assuming that more serious responses are being offered. But you are wrong if you think that their level of success or humaneness is a great deal higher than the garbage-dump approach.

Both the liberal social-service programs and the Christian fundamentalist missions that earn their keep--some rather nicely, by the way--by salvaging the shipwrecked lives caught on the shoals of Skid Row share the same Calvinist theology that undergirds our larger social system, placing the burden of economic and spiritual sinfulness directly on the shoulders of the individual. Repent and be saved, repent and be employed--it is the same message. As long as we can convince ourselves that the situation is the result of the individual person’s sinfulness, or pride, or laziness, then the larger community

is comfortably absolved of responsibility.

We at the Catholic Worker believe that the drug addicts of Crocker Street are in the same situation as the lepers of ancient Palestine: cast out of the community for a sin they did not commit.

The poor are the ones most affected by the rapid changes in technology, culture and the economy. It is among the poor that we are able to observe the seamy underside of our most precious cultural idols: technological and economic progress. The glowing effusiveness of futurologists like Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt who see America’s technological and economic growth as a series of waves, and our critical survival skills as the

ability to surf the wave of the future, is as naive as the determinism of 19th-Century scientists and industrialists whose utopian projects failed to anticipate the disastrous environmental consequences that we suffer now.

We are deluding ourselves if we think that it is possible to teach the poor how to surf when they have never learned to swim. It is on places like Crocker Street that the wave has already crashed, leaving them bereft not only of jobs but also of dignity, self-worth, family, community and sense of purpose. Of course, the drowning take drugs.

Over the last 2 1/2 decades, under the pressure of revolutionary changes in the fields of transportation, communication and information processing, we have shifted from a national economy to a world economy. In this situation, the “surfers,” who engage in what Harvard economist Robert Reich calls “symbolic-analytic work”--lawyers, bankers, executives, consultants, scientists, writers--have increased their share of the GNP to 40%, while representing only 20% of the job force. The “swimmers”--those engaged in “routine production work”--have had their share of the GNP reduced from 30% to 20%. These manufacturing-type jobs once represented a full 50% of the American work force; today, they are only 25%.

The people on Crocker Street know intuitively that this “wave of the future” will not reverse itself. It will only gather momentum and the “surfers” will go faster and farther while the “swimmers” will sink in a sea of despair and drugs. They also realize that neither the liberal social worker nor the conservative preacher, nor for that matter any Democratic presidential candidate, offers salvation.

“In God We Trust” is an American blasphemy; this country has put its faith in the gods of power: unrestrained technological and economic growth, which progressively relegates to the dung heap the masses of simple folk who will never be eligible for the priesthood of abstract-symbolic functions.

Thus, when we go to Crocker Street, we offer the “lepers” neither the cheap grace (as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it) of mission salvation nor the tawdry hope of phony job-training programs. We offer only bread and coffee, and a few brief moments of an authentic human contact that neither judges nor condemns, but recognizes the connectedness of human brokenness.