justice

February 5, 2010 at 3:40 pm (dept. mental health, illegalities, justice, turners falls)
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Page Twelve, website outline

The problem with justice in my existence, is that I can rarely ever have any, either legal or moral. I can never have justice against the mentally disturbed landlady who illegally evicted me, or against the Department of Mental Health that sat back and let my life be destroyed (thereby taking very good care of my mental health), or against the underhanded, undercover, illegal protection that Matthew Lacoy told me I was in. Many people have told me I can’t sue the feds, and I believe them. I could sue the DMH, if I had the money. I don’t. And they knew that when they sat back and let my life be obliterated.

                                                                        

When everything you define as your life is illegally and immorally destroyed by other people, you want some justice. You want some of these people to be held accountable for their reprehensible conduct. At least I do. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d just walk away and say that’s the way it is. There certainly are many people who would react that way, who seem to possess no sense of outrage at being illegally and immorally bulldozed by others. Who seem to have no fire in them in any realm of life. But I’m not a fireless person. I had fires for my interests while I still had my life, and fires inside for my deeply loved animals, and fires for horrible things happening all over the world: love fires and activist fires. If I’d been physically healthy, and if I’d met similar people, I might well have become an out-front, practicing activist for some issue or other. So I’m not at all the sort of person to have vicious things done to me by other people and by huge agencies, and not want some justice. But in the true world of living below the poverty line, you don’t get justice. People will perhaps shout: legal aid! Not here, not in Massachusetts. Legal aid will only represent low-income people for certain issues and in certain circumstances. Anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow scope will not be touched by them with a ten-foot pole, because they would not be paid for the work.

Before 2007, there were other issues. To name just two: No justice against the mother who took a house away from me; no justice against a woman who had two of my birds in foster care and refused to give them back, even when her boss and a lawyer told her she must. And on and on it goes.

What kinds of thoughts would a lifetime of people getting away with illegal and immoral actions against you engender in you? In me this repeated and repeated lousy treatment has left me with convictions that I’m worthless in the eyes of other people: they can do any damned thing they please to me, without ever having to be held accountable or make amends. And the certain knowledge that because I’m poor, I’m powerless. I have hired lawyers from time to time, for a few hundred dollars, to do very short-term letter-writing and phone-calling. But to launch a suit against someone is beyond my means. Poor equals powerless to get justice, to defend oneself against vicious crap. Worthless, powerless, disposable.

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read…    Braon…   Spite and malice…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2010-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

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the department of mental health

January 30, 2010 at 2:11 pm (art, asperger's, books, dept. mental health)
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Page Two, website outline

In Massachusetts, the Department of Mental Health is a state-wide, state-run, state-botched, lumbering and uncaring bureaucracy. I wish I had known that in January of 2007.

It was to this (I now know) indolent and incompetent juggernaut that I appealed when I was being illegally evicted from my apartment.                                                                                                        

They had an entire year to find me a home where I could afford the rent and keep at least some of my 14 animals. They did almost nothing to that end. They did, however, do other things behind my back, some of which have taken a long time to find out. Some I will never find out. They, and their contract agency, Community Support Services, lied to me, told lies about me, and presided over the destruction of my life and a tremendous worsening of my depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. At 55, with these issues as well as physical health issues, they let me lose all of my animals, who were literally my reason for living, and be put onto the streets homeless. I remain without an apartment of my own nearly two years later. I do not maintain that this wretched failure of service was committed to stick it to me, to pay me back for reporting the DMH to Governor Patrick’s office and to their overseeing body, Health and Human Services. There may have been an element of revenge in it, but I still believe that the greatest reason for the downright unconscionable “service” I got from the DMH and CSS was laziness. These state employees are shockingly lazy, and to find a place with a low rent where some of my animals would be allowed was something they just didn’t want to bestir themselves to do because it would have taken some real effort. Their idea of helping someone find an apartment is to give you a phone number for a housing project. Projects do not allow more than one animal, so that was a solution that was not going to be right for me. These DMH cretins have lists of landlords in the community, and work with these landlords periodically. But to go through these lists making phone calls, explaining about the psychological meaning of my animals, and trying to find someone who would let me keep about half of them would have taken time and effort. The same time and effort they spent arranging for places for my animals to be hidden and later killed.

The conduct of the Department of Mental Health both shocked and appalled me, as I naively believed that because their purpose is to help, that they would help. I further naively expected that I wouldn’t be lied to by these people who were supposed to help me, nor that they would do things behind my back that they had no authorization from me to do.

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It’s now April 2010, and I’ve written in other places that on April 1 I moved into what can loosely be called a rental unit, but never an apartment. About the size of a ponystall, it is tantamount to living in a small cell that has a huge window and a bathroom to glorify it a bit. After two years and two weeks of living in a technical state of homelessness, when I had no rental unit of my own, thanks to the DMH and CSS,what I get is a cell with a few embellishments. And I’m claustrophobic.

I cannot say enough bad about this inhumane way of housing poor people, which I only applied for because it was the fastest way to get what is called a movable section 8, a rent subsidy which is not tied to the project you live in, but which you can use in any apartment where the landlord will accept it. You are not condemned to project living for the rest of your life.

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read…  Spite and malice…     Mental hell…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2010-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

 

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