There is a dark side of life that gets lost in the shadows and pushed to the side and swept under the rug. Every town and city has its homeless people. People with histories of mental problems or drug and alcohol addiction. Or those that just plain can’t deal with the complexity of life.

I still hold the opinion, having spent a lot of time on the streets of the Bay Area as a teen back in the 70’s, that all over this country, cops and judges tell these social outcasts to just head to the Bay Area because there they have free clinics and missions and soup kitchens and a whole network of social services aimed at helping them. And all that is true, only now the network has been stretched to the point of tearing and the safety net has a huge hole in it.

This is the little storefront mission in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco where Mollie and her church youth group spent a week helping and feeding the homeless. As my mom said to me when she heard where Mollie was staying, “That was a bad neighborhood back in the 1940’s.”

Remember that I only dropped off the kids and the luggage. I didn’t stay with them. I spent the week at my mom’s house in the hill across the bay. I knew I couldn’t stay with Mollie. I knew something would happen. And it did. An African-American drunk, homeless guy got right in my thirteen year old’s face and shouted and swore at her. One of the youth leaders had to shove Mollie away and get between them. I owe this person a huge debt. Not only because she saved Mollie, but she most likely saved me a trip to jail, because Mollie is not the person I would have shoved. And it would have been some world-class shoving also.

As I pulled up on the last day to pick them all up, after my early morning drive to take the pictures from Treasure Island and the bay front, a cop pulled up behind me and had a confrontation with another drunk homeless person…

I spent a lot of time as a street rat when I was young. I didn’t see anything that surprised me in the hour I was on that street outside the mission, but I saw everything I expected to see…

You have to admire the hundreds of kids who volunteer to spend a week here during each year… (well, maybe not so much the judgemental, ‘you are gay so you are going to fry in hell’ zealots)… even if you are as religion-free as I am. It takes guts to do something like this…

I just wish that these kids were enough to shift the balance… that the problems could be dealt with in a way that offered some hope in the long-term. But still, every victory counts for something.