By Mick Harty

Today, for me, is a day of mourning and grief, for as of today I no longer have the job my heart always wanted, and worse, the human beings my job allowed me to serve, whose lives I was given permission to touch during their most vulnerable moments, will no longer have a set of eyes, a pair of hands, or a human voice to offer them solace and support, comfort and paths to healing. 

This to me is a nearly unbearable personal loss, for in being denied this job I am not just denied employment, but I am denied a just cause, and a purposeful, publicly sanctioned means of addressing obvious and glaring injustices and indifference toward the mentally ill and the unhoused and the addicted and alcoholic, the poor, the raped, the abused and neglected, terrorized transgender children and adults, those of every class and condition considering ending their lives and the so so many others suffering unseen a plague of isolation and loneliness that swallows countless, uncounted lives in our nation.

We knew we were never a solution to profounder social ills we wanted to combat. We knew we never had more than a shaky and precarious truce with official power; we believed that by accepting the expectations for professional training and conduct and by exceeding them in performance, CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets) could actively heal wounds and blind spots in public safety that had effectively rendered entire classes of humanity invisible. White Bird Clinic’s CAHOOTS always sought to be the appropriate compassionate response to situations of often the rawest humanity no other agencies wanted. 

Humane compassionate response to crisis was the just cause, and CAHOOTS was the means to act upon it. I have the deepest love and respect for each and every one of the remarkable human beings I have had the all too brief privilege of knowing and working alongside in CAHOOTS. 

And as my dearest friend and colleague is always reminding me, CAHOOTS works and is truly great because we work as a team, trauma-bonded and united in vision, brought together in heart and mind and personal history to do the best we can to feed the hunger, clean and dress the wounds, listen to the suffering hearts and disorganized minds as we found them in our community and help them to the help they’d need. Of the van workers I have known — and those known only in legend, too — I dare say there has seldom been such a unique assemblage of street smart and book smart agitators in history. We were hippie commandos serving the forces of Good with compassion and knowledge and grit. CAHOOTS was as unique and organically grown as the streets themselves in Eugene, Oregon.  

Well, now Eugene’s streets are denied this trusted and reliable crisis response service after 36 years for reasons I can’t explain completely because of the shady darkness by which CAHOOTS has been undone. Like so many other chainsaw cuts of service — from corporate health care, Medicaid, Social Security, Veterans, Educational and Mental Health services — the mutilation of CAHOOTS is our community’s little piece of the callous, cruel and deliberate contraction of empathy, decency and humane care pushing our nation to dangerous levels of hunger, desperation, anger, lonely futility and fear. 

Mass unemployment in the face of recession or worse, terrifying illegal deportations and disappearings, an already enormous homeless population about to explode, untreated physical and mental health crises about to explode even less quietly. 

Tell me I’m melodramatic, but removing CAHOOTS is one small local step toward generating predictable social unrest that then can be quashed by lethal force. I imagine there is already federal coordination among local police agencies (à la Occupy Wall Street and campus protests of genocide) to plan for the brutal suppression of unrest and ungovernability provoked by mass firings, sudden denial of services and funds and constant sinister threats of deportation, imprisonment or being shot. 

CAHOOTS has saved lives and maintained cordial and professional relations with every type of service and agency available in Lane County, while upholding the highest standards in supporting clients with respect and compassion in every imaginable situation. I have never been so proud to be worthy of a job in my life as to have been a crisis worker with CAHOOTS for the past two and half years. I have never felt so duty- and commitment-bound to any group of co-workers, because we all got the precarious and deeply meaningful privilege and responsibility it meant to wear those hoodies and vests and ride around our community in those magnificent dirty vans. 

As I said when I began, I grieve a grave and irreparable loss to my own life and the lives of those around me. In being denied not just a job but a just cause and the means to address it, I am denied even more: I am denied the family I have come to know and rely on and trust with my life, a family of intelligent, energetic, exuberant, scarred, damaged, loving and compassionate human beings whom I respect and regard as heroic, most especially because every one of them would laugh at me for saying so. In being denied our calling, we have been denied a long-sought home for angry compassion and the family who lives there and helps us bear the trauma and gloom and grief and worry and hilarious joy of our 12-hour odysseys through human misery and loneliness. We are all compelled beyond the particle of dread we carry with us into our utterly unpredictable shifts to see what we can do. We can and have done much to ease and comfort and hear and see those eyes and hands and minds and hearts we long to reach out to, because we know what it means to feel lonely and frightened, too. 

Mick Harty began with CAHOOTS in October 2022. he has worked with juvenile criminals and special needs adults and he taught for 17 years at Baboquivari High School on the Tohono O’odham Nation. Harty also absorbed his mother’s trauma from Nazi-occupied Norway.