The Powerful Experience of the Left Out Tour

By Pat LaMarche
Green Party vice-presidential candidate

One of my dear friends is a high ranking elected Republican. While we have disagreed many times on method, neither of us has ever doubted the other’s desire to help our state and its people. One night when I was running for Governor of Maine in 1998, I received a call from my Republican friend, literally in the middle of the night. He blurted out: “If you want to drive home to the people of Maine that the Green Party is more than environmental, that you know and understand the issues of commerce and business in our state, then go to work in them. Go to work in as many of them as you can.”

Click. The phone went dead. And a brilliant idea was born.

During the gubernatorial campaign, I worked in 20 businesses across the state in 20 consecutive days. Among other things, I picked potatoes. I canned fish. I worked in a small hardware store that was being slaughtered by a Home Depot. I learned more in 20 days from the owners of these small businesses than I had in 20 years of working.

Owners showed me their books, explained the regulations that came to bear on them in the course of doing business, and I realized that they had answers for virtually all of their problems. I found that the people affected the most held the solutions.

It was that experience that prompted me to tour homeless shelters across the United States during my run for Vice President of the United States in 2004. I did it to raise the issue of poverty in the campaign, to show people what the Green Party is about, and to bring supplies to the shelters. But mostly, I did it to learn what I could from the people who live the experience of homelessness every day. Here is what I learned.

The Left Out Tour: 14 homeless shelters in 14 days

On Sept. 21, I moved into the Bread of Life shelter in Augusta, Maine. On that particular night, the shelter was filled with women and children. Maine is a fortunate place to be “left out” if only because Maine does not take children away from homeless parents. That’s right; there are state governments that believe that being without your mom or dad is better than being without a roof.

From Maine I moved down through Massachusetts and Rhode Island. By that third night, I had met several hundred of our nation’s several million “houseless” inhabitants. I met only a handful who were intoxicated or drug using or mentally ill. The vast majority were simply poor. So died the greatest myth of homelessness.

When I got to New York City, I did something I hate to do. I lied. I lied about who I was and why I was there. I lied to gain access to a homeless shelter because the press and politicians are not welcome at the shelters in New York City. I learned why. I survived a night in that shelter by promising myself that if I made it through one more minute, I could leave. When that minute went by, I cajoled myself through another one.

I moved on to Washington D.C., where I slept on the ground across the street from Dick Cheney’s house—our house, actually; our house for the Vice President of the United States. He is building a bomb shelter. Rather we are. Eight stories deep. How much affordable housing would that buy? More people have died of malnutrition in the United States since Bush/Cheney took over than died in the World Trade Center bombing. Poverty is killing our citizens, Mr. Cheney, at a far greater rate than terrorists.

Knoxville, Tennessee has a women’s transitional housing facility that is really doing it right. Unfortunately they turn away more people than they can help.

In Fayetteville, Arkansas we got word from our shelter that their food pantry was empty, not so much as a box of Cheerios left. We had made the commitment early in the planning of the Left Out Tour that we would leave the shelters better than we found them, so each time I arrived, the local Greens brought nonperishables for that location. In Fayetteville we stepped it up a week and a half early. We put the word out on every local radio station that would carry us and to every Green list we had in the area. We issued press releases and rallied the troops. By the time we got there, the shelves were full of food. One shelter worker said to me, “Who are you Greens anyway?”

At this point the tour was half over. I had to abandon the buses and trains for airplanes because the distances I traveled became too great. I would walk through first-class seating to collapse in my seat on the back of the plane. I was so exhausted from staying up all night listening to people who felt that they had never been heard before, and I couldn’t tell them otherwise. I had seen more sadness and misery and anger than I had ever known. And all of it was unnecessary. I would doze off and when I woke up my chest would ache. The pain of the knowledge manifested itself as physical pain. As I write this, I feel it coming back.

The tour wound on, through Denver and into Sonoma Valley. I learned more about my own ignorance. I rued not knowing even a few words of Spanish and vowed to change that this year. I saw something in the illegal farm workers that I hadn’t seen in the other homeless communities thus far. While I had met many families, and many of the homeless struggling to help each other, I also saw many fights. But with the migrants I saw no anger between them, no competitiveness. They had a common goal: the survival of the whole. I saw unconditional love.

I moved on, into Los Angeles and up through Portland, Oregon. Here were two villages built by the Left Out. In Portland I saw rats the size of cats and I learned the term “sturdy beggar.” I learned that the sturdy beggars pledged to protect the deserving poor.

I stayed with a homeless woman in LA whom I thought had two children and I brought them little gifts. When I got there I discovered she actually had eight children; my heart sank, I had nothing to offer any of the other kids. I realized that while I was learning and experiencing so much from these people I was meeting, I basically had nothing to offer any of them.

On the south side of Chicago I saw an unapologetic cynicism. No distrust was without its weak point. The beauty of staying for the whole night, and not just visiting and moving on, was that I had the opportunity to hold other women’s children. I read books to their kids and listened to stories of their nightmare jobs, husbands, lives. Time allowed me to show many of these folks the sincerity of our objective. With time invested, we could show that the Green Party has a genuine desire to learn about their lives and expose their grim truths. Some remained cynical, others grew warm and embracing.

Detroit has a model that every state can and should use: COTS. Are there no more homeless in Detroit as a result? No, there are still many homeless. There aren’t enough facilities to meet the problem. Funding funding funding. Maybe we should have asked the other vice-presidential candidates if they felt a COTS-type program should be duplicated and fully funded in every state. After all, the next stop on the Left Out Tour was Cleveland, on the date and at the site of the vice-presidential debate.

But on this last night, we were the ones left out.