You know Mark Rippee’s story if you have followed this blog or read any of the media stories about him. For years, this mentally ill, blind, and homeless man clung to a brutal existence on the streets of Vacaville, California. County and state services, not bound by any hard and fast rules, left him to die there, and he did.
Catherine Rippee-Hanson’s brilliant, damning creation deserves to be enshrined as the prevailing image of American society’s degree of concern for its “crazy people.”
If you retain only one image of those dispossessed by our systems of care for our most helpless citizens, let it be this one.
