Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. Study a small lake or pond and you are likely to find many intertwined lifeforms, including host and parasite species, some reproducing quickly, other slowly, all changing at different speeds as they interact with one another in a kind of ecological ballet. Inside of every business, too—and every hospital, school, government agency or city hall—there is what might be called an “ecology of time,” with different subunits and processes all interacting and running at different speeds. Though truly perfect synchronization is never attainable, under ordinary conditions the lack of synchrony may be maintained at a tolerable degree. However, conditions today are far from ordinary. The gurus’ advice was unrealistic, but the acceleration they sought to address was—and is—very real. Never have the pressures been greater for companies—and other organizations as well—to speed up their operations. Cascading technology innovations and consumer or client demands for instant gratification, added to the competition, all conspire to drive up the pace of change. If one department or division falls behind, multiplier effects ricochet throughout the entire organization. One often-overlooked cost reflects the diversion of energy and attention from other needed tasks as time becomes increasingly politicized. Often, organization leaders find themselves clashing bitterly over conflicting schedules and time horizons, and I.T. departments become battle zones. The time needed for software development or for a major system overhaul is notoriously difficult to estimate. It can even be hard to estimate how long it will take to make the estimate. However, that is what I.T. executives are often compelled to do. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Software managers who insist they need a long time to complete a project catch flak from bosses and from department chieftains whose work might be slowed or disrupted. On the other hand, I.T. managers who promise quick results are frequently fired when subsequent glitches impede progress. As various business units are de-synchronized and schedules need revision, budgets, power and egos come into play and a lot of emotional artillery is called up. Time itself, in the form of deliberate delays or imposed deadlines, may be used as an internecine weapon. Battles over timing are even more common in connection with research and development. Pressed by investors demanding faster returns, CEOs often feel compelled to slash spending on R&D. Or they shift funding away from research to development and reallocate whatever is left from basic to applied research. The result slows major innovation when it is most needed. Time battles inside a fast-changing firm take many other forms as well. They can kill important deals and, ironically, can actually waste so much management attention and energy that they slow down the firm’s overall capacity to adapt to change. Things become even more complicated when they involve two or more companies, each with its own internal ecology of time. Fights over synchronization greatly complicate partnerships, joint ventures and other alliances and are particularly stressful before and after mergers. If your company is undergoing a merger or acquisition, you are likely to feel anxious. Roughly 30 percent of employees are deemed redundant when firms in the industry merge. For individual managers and employees, this corporate strategy may be disruptive and traumatic. Postmerger integration is typically a period of tension, uncertainty, and chaos. Workloads ramp up, as to pressure and stress. Even when the main hurdles are overcome, trying to sync up the internal rhythms of two firms after their marriage takes time, costs money, sucks attention from other matters and upsets already upset people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Though little is written about it, many partnerships and mergers founder precisely because synchronization turns out to be so painful. In such situations, most people tend to fixate on what they cannot control: decisions about who is let go, promoted, reassigned, or relocated. However, researchers indicate that individuals faced with organizational upheaval have much more power over what happens to them than they realize. If your company is involved in in one of the tens of thousands of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals struck annually around the World, you can respond in a few ways. The first option is to remain humble, focus on the tasks at hand, and hope that every thing turns out well. A second takes is to polish your resume, reconnect to your outside peer network, and start looking for alternative employment. One can also embrace the dynamic, intense integration process and use it as an opportunity for introspect and growth. It is estimated that nearly 50,000 mergers took place in 2019, ranging from huge multinational arrangements to smaller regional deals. Some of these companies were Verizon and Vodafone, Heinz and Kraft, Pfizer and Warner-Lamber, AT&T and Time Warner, and many others. AT&T spent $85 billion on Time Warner, and it wants the money back because AT&T is primarily focused on its phone services, and Timer Warner is primarily in to making films and TV shows, but competing with Netflix is really difficult because they are the biggest player in digital streaming. Netflix is going to spend $17 billion this year on programing, and Disney is not far behind. The technological issues are not necessarily the most difficult. Within any firm, de-synchronization can occur among divisions, functions, hierarchical levels, regional offices and in other dimensions as well. Often it is culture that is the breaking point. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
When a new CEO took over Siemens Nixdorf some years back, he seemed, according to the Financial Times, “more worried about units of time” than dollars. Siemens, the German electronics giant, had acquired Nixdorf, a PC firm, to supplement its mainframe-computer business. The CEO knew that part of the firm needed to “have a major technical feature change every six months.” The parent firm, however, was older, more hierarchical and slower to react. Changing a product is one thing. However, as he complained at a press conference, “changing a corporation’s mentality usually takes three to five years, and we don’t have it.” The CEO is no longer at Siemens—and neither is Nixdorf. Scaling up from companies, we find even bigger examples of costly desynchronization at the level of whole industries. Some, indeed, are infamous for being out of sync. Ask any American who has ever hired a contractor to build or remodel a house. Chances are the estimated completion date is a fairy tale. Delays may run to months. Needed parts—everything from flush toilets and bidets and drawer pulls and windows—rarely seem to arrive on schedule. They only experience even more frustrating is dealing with the municipal zoning and building bureaucrats who must issue various permits or variances along the way. We asked a prominent California developer to look closely at the issues of construction delays in his project to build hundreds of homes in a high-tech center. “I was shocked,” the not-easily-shockable contractor told us on the promise of anonymity. Including land, our houses cost between $358,000 to $600,000 to build. They should take 120 days to complete. However, we have had houses take as much as 180 days. That means 60 days of extra interest on a $150,000 to $300,000 loan. So that is going to be an extra $1,190 to $2,381 per house—more, of course, if interest rates go up. And that is just in actual construction—it does not begin to include costs of delays in permitting, environmental approvals, failure of the utilities to install the electrical, gas and water lines on schedule. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Subcontractors do not show up on time. Sinks arrive that are defective—they have to go back and we wait for replacements. If the subs are delayed, they want more money on the next contract to build in protection against lost time. Add up all the other expenses. How about property taxes? How about management fees? I pay a management firm to oversee the project. Their bill runs up. What if buyers cancel because of the delays? I had my accountant quantify the known cost of construction time glitches. I run an extremely tight ship. And yet, at least on this project, they add up to almost 4 percent of the cost of a house. Bigger firms might be able to cut that somewhat. But if I were just a private person, building one house, for myself, delays are even more expensive percentagewise. All that lost time adds up to a penalty—a kind of time tax on every project. From 2019 to 2022, despite the impact of COVID-19, new residential construction in the United States of America is expected to have increased by 33 percent, which is equivalent to 182 billion U.S. dollars. This increase mostly stems from single-family housing, as well as home improvements—additions, alternations and major replacements. Single-family houses being built also increased, but not as much. The value of new residential construction in the United States of American is expected to increase to $729.89 billion in 2023, $757.83 billion in 2024, and $798.14 billion in 2025, a 3 to 5 percent “time tax”—the overall cost of wasteful, never-on-time, de-synchronized operations—would run into the $23-$38 billion range annually. At say, $216,000 a unit, that is roughly what it might cost to provide more than 1.4 million homes or apartments for low-income Americans every decade. That could make a dent in the problem of homelessness. However, a more cost-effective system would be a federal voucher program which allows them to rent and buy in the private market, would reduce the amount of money spent to maintain and staff these properties. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
However, that is only the amount for the residential end of the housing industry. Its erratic, costly performance in turn reflects (or causes) desynchronization among its supplier industries and labour pool as well. Shortages of drywall, insulation, skilled carpenters and the like are common. Track this all the way down the chain, and the cost must swell significantly. If housing is a skinhole of unsynchronized operations, what needs to be said about a very different example—America’s giant defense industry? Here are major firms making everything from the highest of high-tech communications gear, satellites and weapons systems to relatively simple products like shirts and boots. It is an industry perennially attacked by Congress for cost overruns, waste and inefficiency. Its seven-hundred-dollar hammer or toilet seat—whether apocryphal or not—has become a national symbol of scandalous waste. However, it is worth noticing that de-synchronization in an industry may sometimes be partially imposed on it from outside. And that is the case here. Thus, to prevent corruption and maximize efficiency, the U.S. Defense Department’s procurement processes, many of them mandated by Congress, are so byzantine, so complex, and aggravating, that many sensible firms refuse even to bid for a Pentagon contract. Worse yet, those firms that do undertake defense work often find themselves caught in a steel cage largely constructed by Congress itself. An editor of Armed Forces Journal International once summed it up in a single, hard-to-forget sentence: “Faced with a twenty-year threat,” he wrote, “government responds with a fifteen-year program in a five-year defense plan, managed by three-year personnel funded with single-year appropriations.” We have seen the de-synchronization effect within individual firms, groups of firms and whole industries. However, de-synchronization occurs on an even larger scale when two related industries develop at different speeds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The rise of the personal computer (PC) from the 1970s on was marked by a kind of technological pas de deux as Microsoft launched bigger and more powerful versions of its Windows software for PC, and Intel successively developed the faster and more powerful chips needed to support them. For years, the two symbiotic companies were referred to in the media as though they were a single firm called “Wintel.” The synchronization, imperfect as it was at times, powered the phenomenal spread of the PC Worldwide. In sharp contrast, however, the closely linked computer and communications industries have more then once found themselves without a dance partner. No ballet here. In the United States of America, the rise of the computer industry throughout the last half century has been wild, wooly, and unregulated. Computer makers were frequently frustrated by far slower rates of change in the tightly and confusingly overregulated telecom industry. As the basic technologies of these two industries converged, their rates of change diverged. According to many analysts, advances in chips, computers, and related fields could have come even faster but for this discrepancy. Similarly—and more interestingly—in recent years the development of networks trailed far behind increases in the speed of computer chips. By 2005, however, this de-synchronization went into reverse. We simply do not know the aggregate costs of the de-synchronization effect at the level of firms and industries, but we can only imagine how much greater the effects are when we look at de-synchronization in whole sectors of an economy in the age of revolutionary wealth. Now, when Minoru Naito, a small-business owner, decided to celebrate his daughter’s birthday at a posh sushi restaurant in Tokyo, it was on a Saturday. He went to a nearby Automated Teller Machines (ATM and also still called the “Versatell” by some) to withdraw some cash. However, it was 6.00 p.m. and the machine had shutdown at 5.00. Hence, no sushi that evening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The fact that banks used to close their ATMs so early was, in the words of Nihon Keizai Shimbu, Japan’s Wall Street Journal, “particularly striking because more retail stores in Japan are operating around the clock.” In short, the banking sector was out of sync with developments in the retail sector of Japan’s economy. Faced with competition from foreign banks and securities firms that did offer twenty-four-hour services, the relatively small Tokyo Sowa Bank eventually opened the first “twenty-four-hour” ATMs at a Japanese bank (never mind that they initially closed down at 10.00 p.m.). It was not until 2003 that one of Japan’s major banks, UFJ, followed suit. Closing the gap between shopping hours and banking hours requires new I.T. systems. That normally means ditching or upgrading older, so-called legacy I.T., piece by piece, program by program. And that cannot be done without altering the timing of data flows, accounting procedures, work schedules, reports and other matters, spending some work units up but necessarily leaving others to lag temporarily. Every new computer, software operating system, application or change in a network inescapably changes the tempo, rhythms and synchronization levels in the organization. In Japan, too, one man’s synchronization is another’s de-synchronization. Moreover, it can legitimately be argued that disparities in rates of change open countless opportunities for entrepreneurial synchronizers who, by synchronizing some functions or organizations, create new disparities elsewhere. The problems of synchrony are becoming more, not less, difficult because, as during the industrial revolution, we are once more transforming the way humans work, play and think in the time dimension. We are profoundly altering the way we deal with the deep fundamental of time. Until we understand time’s relationships to wealth creation, we will never free ourselves of today’s crushing time pressures—or huge unneeded costs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Let us next talk about marriage and so-called “animal” functions of the social animal. Everyone agrees that an important condition for the troubles of growing up is the troubles between the parents at home, brutal quarrels and drunkenness, coldness, one or the other or both parents getting away as often as possible and being withdrawn while present, and marriages breaking up. The most common popular, and mayoral, prescription for delinquency is “more parental supervision.” In the usual circumstances this would likely increase the tension and the trouble, but be that as it may: the question remains, how? how to have reasonable supervision when the marriages do not have the problem children. (The frequent recommendation to fine or jail the parents is a lulu.) I do not think the public spokesmen are serious. For powerful and well-known modern reasons, some of them inevitable, the institution of marriage itself, as we have known it for several hundred years, cannot work simply any longer, and is very often the direct cause of intense suffering. Urbanism, the economic independence of women, contraception, relaxing the inhibitions against unmarried and extramarital sexuality, these are inevitable. A dispassionate observer of modern marriage might sensibly propose. Forget it; think up some other form of mating and child care. The pastor of a large church in an ordinary Midwestern town told me that, in his observation, not one marriage in twenty was worthwhile; many were positively damaging to the children. If very many marriages could simply let themselves dissolve after a few years, the partners would suddenly become brighter, rosier, and younger. However, of course, in this field there are no dispassionate observers. We are all in the toils of jealousy of our own complexes, and few f us can tolerate loneliness and the feeling of being abandoned. Nor do we have any other formula for a secure intimacy, companionship, and brining up children. This is not a newsy story. It is kept in mind by the Mayor of New York whose canned voice says every night on the radio that parents who are not affectionately supervising the children are failing in responsibility? #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Has the Mayor not seen an harassed mother hysterically and unmercifully whacking a three-year-old in the sand pile? Does he think it is some different parent he is now appealing to? (I heard one mother scream, “I ask you only one simple thing, to obey me!”) “Most of the children we see [in King’s County Domestic Relations Court] have been so seriously damaged by their environment that they need 24-hour-a-day corrective treatment. I will say unequivocally that most of the children we see should be separated from their parents for their own health and welfare.” (Dr. J.M. Fries.) Outraged women demand chaste men to lessen the double standard. Legions of Victorian men accepted and honored the code of premarital celibacy, but many spoiled and randy young blades saw no need to repress their intimate longings. When women of their own class refused to succumb, they found a vulnerable and cooperative woman elsewhere. She was, perhaps, a domestic servant that a higher-ranked young man could force himself on, or the shop girl he paid or flattered for a few minutes of extracurricular pleasure. At one time or another in his life, she was likely the “public stew,” the lady of the evening whom that compromised servant or shop girl might eventually be forced to become. To desperate, reckless, or ruined women, the calling of the streets was irresistible. It supplemented that pittance they earned elsewhere at their day jobs. Henry Mayhew, an investigative journalist and author whose expose of London’s seething, suffering labouring class in the mid-nineteenth century continues to shock, discovered, for instance, that a seamstress who stitched together moleskin trouser could earn five shillings and sixpence a week, scarcely enough to survive, if she worked sixteen hours daily. When work was slack, she could either starve or “go a bad way” and sell her most valuable possession. Because so many women were struggling to survive by needlework, lacemaking, and other trades, with occasional forays into become women of the evening, the competition was ferocious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
As a result, incomes remained law, arrests and imprisonment common, and their unhealthy bodies were susceptible to illnesses. Some managed to support themselves through pleasures of the flesh alone, and a few lucky and clever ones did better—they parlayed their amorous skills into marriage. “Why shouldn’t we?” inquired one confident woman of the evening. “We are pretty, dress well, we can talk and insinuate ourselves into the hearts of men by appealing to their passions and their senses.” However, in the last half of the nineteenth century, illnesses double standard became the concern of reformers of every ilk. In earlier centuries, and despite alarm, only inconsequential numbers of deaths were attributed to the so-called French pox, as syphilis was called in England. In London, according to the Bills of Mortality, it struck down eleven victims in 1813, eighty-six in 1817, and only nineteen and fourteen in 1818 and 1819. Women of the evening and their clients, and those secondarily infected, endured nasty and debilitating symptoms, but doctors could provide effective treatment and restore most patients to health. For centuries, illnesses related to pleasures of the flesh were seen as a disturbing problem rather than a critical one. In 1864, a drastic change occurred, after horrified medical officers reported that some of these illnesses affected up to 30 percent of the troops in British garrison towns, including many ports. The military capacity of the nation was called into question. In panicky attempts to stamp out or at least control these illnesses among soldiers and sailors, Parliament passes a serious of Contagious Diseases Acts between 1864 and 1869. These Acts authorized police in towns with substantial military installations to seize any suspected women of the evening and force them to submit to a gynecological exam every two weeks. Infected women (but not men) could be confined to a hospital for up to nine months. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The object was to diminish infections related to pleasures of the flesh by controlling women of the evening, but the real effect was a witch hunt, to persecute thousands of women, active in pleasures of the flesh or not. Any woman out alone in public without a reasonable excuse was a target. Girls without homes were routinely hauled off and painfully examined, and one widow afterward committed suicide. Women plucky enough to resist were charged in police court, where it was their word against that of a plainclothes government spy. Furthermore, women of the evening not their clients were charged in criminal court. “What think you of sending a wench to Bridewell [prison], and doing nothing to the fellow that debauched her, tho’ sometimes the first is single, and the other married?” demanded one opponent of the double standard. Until the passage of the Contagious Diseases Act, being a woman of the evening and its underlying moral duplicity had had mainly muted challengers. The Acts, embodying the worst features of the double standard, provoked sustained and widespread protest. One group of critics proposed a novel solution, that men stop being unchaste. Chastity in men? How preposterous, given their naturally lecherous natures and irrepressible intimate impulses! (This would have a surprised the ancient Aztecs, Chinese, Greeks, and a few million other people who “knew” that women were the culprits when it came to intimate desires.) And yet, if men couple only get a grip on themselves (but absolutely not with int masturbator handshake tht so distressed the Male Purity contingent) and just tell themselves, “No!” This at least was the thinking of the Church of England Purity Society, as well as thousands of feminist activities in late-Victorian England. The Purity Society was formed at the instigation of Jane Ellice Hopkins, a lifelong celibate dedicated to ending the degradation of women through being a woman of the evening by the novel expedient of reforming men’s bad behaviour. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Hopkins also worked with young women at risk for becoming women of the evening, providing counseling, clothes, lodging, and a job registry with real jobs rather than fake come-on ads that duped gullible, desperate, and unemployed girls into servitude as harlots. Men’s chastity leagues, Hopkins declared, should be developed to deal with the “real cause” of rampant solicitation and moral decay—that pesky double standard. “What I crave,” she wrote, is to instill in wayward men “a good, strong passionate sense of the pitifulness of degrading women, inflicting a curse which they do not share with so much as their little finger.” These men indulge, then return to their “jolly” lives and friends, their “pleasant” homes and their careers, their “power of marrying” intact. Behind them, in the debris of the flings in intimate passions, are their female victims, destined to lives as social outcasts, barred forever from the safety and comforts of marriage and motherhood. The women might be infected with a “hideous” disease and could expect only “a degraded life and [then to] die a Godless, Christless, hopeless death.” After Hopkins exposed the Anglican Church’s complacency and tacit complicity in upholding the double standard, the Church was shamed into creating its Purity Society. Its pledge cards, signed by hundreds of men and strikingly reminiscent of today’s Promise Keepers, listed five obligations: to respect all women and defend them from wrong; to reject indecent language and jokes; to maintain purity and chastity equally for men and women; to proselytize these principles; and to maintain personal purity. Hopkins hated solicitation and blamed men for driving women, consumed by “disease, degradation, curses, drink, despair,” into it. “Ay, I know that it is often the woman who tempts; these poor creatures must tempt or starve. However that does not touch the broad issues, that it is men who endow the degradation of women; it is men, who make the demand, create the supply.” And thunderingly, “Is it fair for you men, who can compel a fair wage for your work, to sit in judgment on her, and say it is her fault?” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Hopkins’s dream for starving out (rather than institutionalizing) solicitation consisted of three kinds of coexisting municipal societies: male purity leagues to inspire men to learn self-control; vigilante committees to see that they did and to prosecute those who failed; and women’s associations to work directly with at-risk girls. Hopkins’s was as radical a proposal as others. Each individual man provoked into feeling his guilt could be induced to take responsibility for his actions and stop sinning. Another group to which Hopkins belonged, the Moral Reform Union, founded in 1881, rejected the double standard and accepted as a principle that men and would should abide by the same morality. They were convinced that both could be chaste and denounced as a blasphemous fiction the age-old endorsement premise that solicitation was essential for a few to ensure moral purity in the majority. What the Union members wanted was quite simply virtue and rectitude in men. The Contagious Diseases Acts were, the Union said, inequitable laws based on the double standard and its outrageous hypothesis that a group of bought women was necessary to the smooth functioning of a society. Decades of sustained outrage against this monstrous assumption and their Acts themselves produced their suspension in 1883 and their repeal three years later. Feminist purists rejoiced, but their rapture was modified by the reality that solicitation continued to thrive as a nightmarish degradation of womanhood. If she was with child, the seduced maid was still kicked out onto the street. The women of the evening caught solicitating was still locked up in jail. The battle against The Contagious Disease Acts had been won, but not the greater ward against solicitation and the double standard. The moral purists attacked the issue from several angles. One was to stamp out the notion that men’s intimate desires were too urgent to curb. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For centuries, ever since women crazed with intentions of pleasures of the flesh had been erased from the moral lexicon and replaced by men crazed with intentions of pleasures of the flesh, this unstoppable male urge had justified women of the evening and other intimate abuses. If it could be exposed for what it was—an unscientific fabrication—then self-control would take on new possibilities as men (and women) learned to regard male intimate passions as a normal physical trait, akin to any other hunger. A man who overpowered a vulnerable woman by subterfuge or muscles would be judged as reprobate as one who stuffed food into his mouth before the grace or snatched cutlets from other people’s plates. As one suffragette put it, “The man or woman who is incapable of self-control (in pleasures of the flesh) should be walking about on four legs, and not on two, because lack of self-control is incompatible with human nature.” The other myth to be combated was that celibacy weakened the male physiology, for ironically, while millions of men worried about the loss of even one drop of vital force, others anxiously observed their caste private area for signs of atrophy. The medical establishment was also coming around, and some physicians admitted publicly that modern scientific thought ran counter to a persistent superstition that chastity was physical harmful to men. (Even today the old heresy limps on, as some men and some women weight celibacy against the mantra, “If you do not use it, you will lose it.”) The moral purity movement holds for its members that chastity in vulnerable young women was a right that self-indulgent men imperiled. Chastity in men, on the other hand, was a proud, moral measures of self-control and constituted the best possible protection against male sexual abuse against women. Conscious of danger in its depth around the World, truth is accompanied by great power. It cannot be separated from its sayer. The truth is like electricity, which is so useful a servant of man but so dangerous when not rightly treated, which may save life or destroy it altogether. When humans become insensitive to the sacredness within oneself, one is lost. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
It is a sin to deny the Power from which one’s body draws its life, one’s mind its consciousness and intelligence, one’s soul its very existence. It invites punishment, which comes through being left alone with the opposing force in Nature, with its physical, intellectual, psychical and subtle forces, unguided by the intuitive and unprotected by the divine. Humans then try to live by their own light alone. One fails, stumbles, falls, and suffers. This is one’s position today and that is why there is a World-crisis of stupendous proportions. This is one’s hour of real need. This is when one must turn, as in Christian Biblical history, to one’s true Deliverer. Every other way out except this one is closing for one. There is no doubt that effective community programs can help people with schizophrenia recover. However, fewer than half of all the people who need them receive appropriate community mental health services. What are the consequences of inadequate community treatment? What happens to person with schizophrenia whose communities do not provide the services they need and whose families cannot afford private treatment at all; many other spend short time in a state hospital or semihospital and then are discharged prematurely, often without adequate follow up treatment. Many of the people with schizophrenia return to their family and receive medication and perhaps emotion and financial support, but little else in this way of treatment. Around 8 percent enter an alternative institution such as a nursing home or rest home, where they receive only custodial care and medication. As many as 18 percent are placed in privately run residences where supervision is provided by untrained individuals—foster homes (small or large), boardinghouses, congregate care homes, and similar facilities. These residences vary greatly in quality. Some of them are legitimate “bed care” facilities, providing three meals a day, medication reminders, and at least a small degree of staff supervision. However, many fail to offer these minimal services. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Another 31 percent of people with schizophrenia live in totally unsupervised settings. Some of these individuals are equal to the challenge of living alone, support themselves effectively, and maintain nicely furnished apartments. However, many cannot really function independently and wind up in a rundown single-room occupancy hotel (SROs) or rooming houses, often located in inner-city neighbourhoods. They may live in conditions that are substandard and unsafe. The following newspaper account from the mid-1980s describes the kinds of conditions that continue in many locations today: Hundreds of mentally ill patients throughout Sacramento County are being packed into aging hotels and homes that are little better than slums, according to health officials, who say that appalling living conditions virtually ensure patients will skin deeper into insanity. Many of the buildings contain the stuff of nightmares. Piles of trash and cockroaches, feces, urine and vomit litter the floors. Half-naked men wander purposelessly through hallways, and doors swing open into hot and fetid rooms where other, gazing vacantly at the ceiling, lie neglected on dirt cots. Men and women gamble, drink, use drugs, play amplified music daily and make the community members feel sacred and threatened. In one instance, [the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services] released patients to a building run by a landlord who three years earlier lost his state license to operate public housing because of its life-threatening conditions. The landlord did not apply for a license for his latest building. He bought a home and used plywood sheets to divine the coral rock house into 12-foot by 14-foot boxes and then told HRS worker he would take in the mentally ill. Each of the boxes, strung along trash-strewn passagesways in the two-story house, contains a narrow bed, a fan and a chest of drawers. Hot meal containers and plastic forks fill waste bins. Most of the boxes also contained people whose bed sores attest to hours spend in bed, staring at a paint-chipped wall a foot from his pillow. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Most of the residents in poorly supervised or unsupervised settings survive on government disability payments, and many spend their days wandering through neighbourhood streets. Thus it is sometimes said that people with schizophrenia are now “dumped” in the community, just as they were once “warehoused” in institutions. Finally, a great number of people with schizophrenia have become homeless. There are nearly 600,000 homeless people in the United States of America, and approximately 33 percent have a severe mental disorder, commonly schizophrenia. Many such persons have been released from hospitals. Others are young adults who were never hospitalized in the first place. Another 235,000 or more people with severe mental disorders end up in prisons because their disorders have led them to break the law. Certainly deinstitutionalization and the community mental health movement have failed these individuals. And if they are able to return to hospital life, many report actually feeling relieved. Let us pray for everyone in our community and Worldwide that they will feel the love of God and be freed from all affliction and suffering and be welcomed into a loving home where they feel safe and loved and can experience a life of abundance and gain promotion on the job. To pray is to try to experience the reality of God, to feel the purity and exaltation that comes from being near Him, and to give to our souls that serenity and peace which neither Worldly success nor Worldly failure, which neither the love of life, nor the fear of death, can disturb. O Lord, I have set Thee always before me, indeed Thou art at my right hand; I shall not stumble. Thou art my Lord, I have no good but in Thee. Thou makest me to know the path of life; in Thy presence is fullness of joy. Whom have I in Heaven but Thee? And on Earth I desire none else. When my heart and my flesh fail, Thou art my strength and my portion forever. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—birth, growth, fading, death—the cycles of life turn, and we turn with them. Ideas are born, projects are consummated, plans prove impractical and pass away. We fall in love, we suffer loss; we give birth, we grow old. We are renewed, we are reborn, even as we decay and die. Our psychic energies are renewed in their deepest sources by this participation in the cycles of change within the natural World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Our Meadows Residence 1 home has an outdoor space that’s equal to our indoor space! Entertaining is effortless, and our guests never fail to be impressed.
We’re so glad we chose the #PlumasRanch community!
Randolph Harris II International Institute 