I'm a Democrat.

However, when you have lived for years seeing smart, funny, good people passed out on mats or having spasms from whatever they took, lurching around wearing ankle bracelets and you know that nobody in that pink parade of b.s. known as the Pine Street Inn is going to help them set their lives on track, despite the literally millions that the organization already has and also rakes in every year, when you have lived in the dichotomy between an institution's public relations and reality, political designations mean nothing.

I don't know how many people reading this know what it feels like to be talking to someone whom you have known for a few years and to know that she's going to die.  She's going to go back to jail.  She's going to OD.  She's going to be murdered while prostituting for drugs.  She's going to die of HIV.  She's 30 or she's 35, she's younger or she's older.  She is going to die, and it didn't have to be this way, and you think that if one more shelter employee or someone who knows nothing about what shelters are really like condescends to you or says something to defend that dysfunctional system, you can't be responsible for what will come out of your mouth in response.

The women's shelter is painted pink.  They have the money to modernize that and a lot of other things, but the last I knew they weren't even giving each guest more than one blanket until 10:00 p.m.

Kingston House, another Boston shelter, doesn't give out blankets or pillows at all.  Each guest is given one sheet; there aren't even enough beds, people have to sleep on double cots so that they're a few inches off the floor with the bodies of other guests a few inches above them.  There are wires hanging down from the ceiling.  Maybe they have repaired the elevator so that disabled guests who are forced out of the Pine Street Inn don't have to sleep outside; maybe they haven't.