I’m stopped at a red light next to I-35 in central Austin, waiting to cross under the highway on my drive home from work, when I see a young woman sitting on the median, holding a cardboard sign. A familiar dread floods my body, and I can almost hear my pulse racing in my ears. Could it be my sister? Then I notice that the woman’s long wavy hair is brown, not red. A pit bull sleeps curled at her feet. Sara (not my sister’s real name) loves animals, but she’s more of a cat person. I exhale and loosen my grip on the steering wheel, relieved. Then I think: This woman is somebody’s sister, somebody’s friend, somebody’s daughter. The light turns green, and I drive on.
Moments like these are a near-daily occurrence for me, but they don’t get any easier. Some days I still have trouble believing that my sister, who has struggled with schizophrenia for more than a decade, is homeless. Our family tried everything to get her help over the years, from dragging her to therapy to hiring a professional mental health interventionist to an involuntary commitment, and none of it worked. The illness makes her fearful and paranoid, convinced we’re trying to hurt rather than help her. But one thing she would never do is hurt anyone else.
I wish I could tell Governor Greg Abbott about my sister. Last week, in the latest missive in his cruel campaign against our city’s homeless, he tweeted a link to a news story about a stabbing in South Austin. The suspect hadn’t yet been identified, but still the governor speculated, “When all facts are revealed I bet you’ll learn that the killer was a homeless man with prior arrests.” It later turned out that the man was in fact homeless, but it shouldn’t have mattered. As Austin Mayor Steve Adler said, “It’s misleading and it’s harmful to equate people experiencing homelessness with being criminals … There’s a real damage to society when we demonize people in ways that are simply not true.”
