homeless – Pain In The Bud

Fabrice Dube lives in a tent in a wooded area bordering I-95 in Connecticut.

He’s got a propane heater which he describes as “miraculous,” some baby wipes and a creek nearby where he washes his clothes. Even though it’s bitterly cold outside — it’s 34 degrees out as I type this, we just had our first snowfall of the winter and Dube lives only 12 miles or so from Casa de Buddy — Dube won’t stay in a shelter for one reason that means all the world to him.

That’s Cali, the four-year-old orange tabby who sleeps in his arms every night, has been with him since he lost his job and home, and is the only individual in the world who provides Dube with the unconditional love and companionship every person needs.

Dube’s situation, his love for Cali and a Connecticut lawmaker’s campaign to help him are detailed in a compassionate story by Angela Carella in CT Examiner. I recommend reading the whole thing, which explains why people with animals aren’t welcome in homeless shelters and ongoing efforts to change that by those who realize asking a person without a home to give up their companion is not only cruel, it’s a significant barrier to helping them get on their feet.

Homeless man and dog — A homeless man with his dog. Credit: GlobalGiving

David Michel, the aforementioned Connecticut state representative, experienced homelessness firsthand when he was a young man and lived on the streets of New York City one winter.

“What a lot of people don’t get is that, once you are homeless, your life is completely different. You have to stay awake at night to protect yourself,” Michel told Carella. “Without sleep, I couldn’t function in the day anymore. People can’t understand why homeless people can’t get out of it. But once you pass that threshold, the infrastructure of your life collapses, and getting back on your feet requires major help.”

If a condition of accepting help is giving up a beloved pet, many people, like Dube, will opt to tough it out in brutal conditions rather than trade their animal companion for warmth. Their struggles are compounded by the ignorance of some people who call them selfish for keeping pets while homeless, not understanding that those men and women will often go hungry if the choice is between feeding their cat or dog and themselves.

Think about all the times you’ve had a bad day or teetered on the edge of depression, and the non-judgmental love of your furry friend helped you get through it. Or the days when you didn’t want to get out of bed, but your responsibility to an innocent animal helped rouse you. Little Bud has done all that and more for me, and I can’t imagine asking a person without a home to give up one of the few sources of joy in their lives.

COVID, inflation and a bad economy have created the conditions for record homelessness in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available. Many people think the homeless are almost always drug or alcohol addicts, but that’s increasingly not the case. More often they’re people who, like tens of millions of Americans, live paycheck to paycheck and suffer a setback that pushes them across the threshold Michel mentioned.

“As with housed persons, the companionship, support and unconditional love provided by that pet is invaluable,” the ASPCA notes. “Studies have shown that people experiencing homelessness report that their pets provide a sense of responsibility and are a reason to live, reduce substance use, and motivated them to seek healthcare. Moreover, pets are viewed as a stable source of social support, companionship and security.”

The George Santos story just keeps getting worse.

My first reaction to the initial New York Times story outing newly-elected New York congressman George Santos as a serial fabulist was surprise, then sadness because I knew his election was in large part made possible by the death of local news. If there’d been competent local media still operating in the area, Santos’ campaign would have ended as suddenly as it started in a flurry of revelatory news coverage, and Santos himself would have been a footnote, a political oddity and embarrassment to the local GOP.

Then for one glorious moment I thought maybe Santos was a performance artist, that we’d find out George Santos is the alias of some comedian or media provocateur whose congressional run was designed from the start to show that politics has become so polarized, so divorced from issues and hitched to ideological loyalties that even a widely disliked grifter — with no roots in the community and a completely fabricated resume — could win simply because he said the right things, pushed the right buttons and kissed the right behinds.

Alas, no Dax Herrera or Ari Shaffir came forward to claim credit for inventing the George Santos persona.

And it just kept getting worse. There were the stories about pending criminal charges for using stolen checks in Santos’ native (?) Brazil, former roommates who saw Santos on TV wearing expensive clothes he’d allegedly stolen from them, and Santos working as the director of a company under investigation for running an alleged Ponzi scheme.

osthoffsapphire1 — Sapphire, veteran Rich Osthoff’s service dog.

The latest story might be the most infuriating: Santos is accused of stealing $3,000 from a homeless, PTSD-suffering veteran whose beloved service dog needed life-saving surgery.

Rich Osthoff, who was living on the streets at the time, needed money to pay for veterinary surgery to remove a large and life-threatening tumor from his service dog, Sapphire. Osthoff says Sapphire was his lifeline during difficult times and he was desperate to get her the surgery she needed.

In 2016 a well-meaning vet tech and another veteran connected Osthoff with Santos, who claimed he ran a charity called Friends of Pets United and could help. At the time, Santos was going by the name Anthony Devolder.

Santos set up a GoFundMe drive for Osthoff and Sapphire, raised $3,000 with a tear-jerker of a plea, then basically ghosted Osthoff and his veteran friend Michael Boll, founder of New Jersey Veterans Network. After fobbing them off with a series of excuses, he stopped responding to their calls and vanished with the proceeds.

“It diminished my faith in humanity,” Osthoff said of the experience.

Santos denied the accusation.

“Fake,” Santos texted news startup Semafor on Wednesday. “No clue who this is.”

osthoffsapphire — Osthoff with Sapphire.

But dozens of other people besides Osthoff, Boll and the vet tech were involved and confirmed Santos’ role in the fundraiser, there are publicly visible tweets from 2016 linking to it — and crediting “Anthony Devolder” for running it — and GoFundMe acknowledged the existence of the drive.

In addition, news reports have confirmed Friends of Pets United, Santos’ “charity,” was never registered as a non-profit. Santos also defrauded an animal rescue group in New Jersey when he pocketed the proceeds from a 2017 fundraiser he ran on behalf of the organization, according to dozens of media reports. Santos was terse in his response to the accusations from Osthoff and Boll, but he was eager to talk about his non-existent pet charity during his campaign, when he claimed Friends of Pets United “saved” more than 2,500 cats and dogs over a four-year span and trapped and neutered more than 3,000 cats.

Santos’ lies are so numerous and so outrageous it’s difficult to keep track of them, and it’s doubtful he remembers all of them.

He claimed his mother worked at a financial firm at the World Trade Center and died in the 9/11 attacks, but Fatima Devolder left the US for Brazil in 1999 and never returned. She also never worked in finance. He claimed four of his employees died in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting that claimed 49 lives. Santos never had any employees, his company didn’t exist, and he didn’t know anyone who died at the nightclub. He claimed ownership over an impressive and burgeoning real estate empire, but never owned any properties and owes more than $40,000 in back rent on a Queens apartment he shared with his sister for years. (His sister was also the recipient of a $30,000 FEMA handout and contributed a hefty $5,000 to his campaign, but still owes tens of thousands in back rent on the apartment, reports say.)

Rep._George_Santos_Official_Portrait_(cropped) — George Santos has refused to resign from congress despite calls from his own constituents, other lawmakers, figures in his own party and media commentators demanding his exit. Credit: Official congressional portrait

There are too many lies to list here, too much insanity to digest in one sitting, and it’s probably not good for the blood pressure to dwell on this weasel of a man allowing a homeless veteran’s service dog to die while pocketing the money raised for her surgery.

But we’re not done yet. We still don’t know how Santos bolstered his campaign with $750,000 of his own money, or where that cash came from. It’s not even clear if Santos is his real name, or if he’s actually a U.S. citizen, with some reports — like a New York Times story from last week — suggesting he may have married his former wife for citizenship.

While New York Republicans have been among the loudest voices to condemn Santos and demand he resign or be removed from congress, national party leaders haven’t made any moves to get rid of him — and have actually given him committee assignments — because they believe they need his vote in a slimmer-than-anticipated congressional majority.

As the lies keep piling up, the biggest question is: How long will this farce be allowed to drag on?