Counter-Currents
Including Audio Version by Jim Goad!
The Luxury of Being Lazy
Jim Goad
Christine Chavez
1,765 words / 11:32
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
I have no doubt it’s painful to hear that a John Deere tractor with a pull-behind lawnmower gobbled up your homeless daughter . . . sorry, unhoused daughter . . . excuse me, daughter experiencing homelessness . . . and spat her out in chunks.
But that’s what happened to 27-year-old Christine Chavez on July 8 at Beard Brook Park in Modesto, California as the result of a “gruesome lawnmower mishap.”
For four years up until this month, the City of Modesto had allowed the park to be used as a homeless encampment. A statement issued by the E & J Gallo Winery — Modesto’s largest employer — says the vintners had purchased the park from the city the day before Chavez’s death and that a contractor was trying to do some basic cleanup work:
Gallo acquired the Beard Brook Park property in Modesto on Friday, July 7, 2023. . . . On Saturday, July 8, 2023, a landscaping contractor was hired to perform weed abatement and fire prevention services. . . . There was an accident at approximately 12pm involving the contractor’s tractor and an individual who was not visible and laying in a tall, weeded area. The contractor immediately contacted the Modesto Police Department. . . .
According to multiple accounts — including a GoFundMe page her sister started in the wake of her death — Chavez had been “sleeping” at around noon at the park in the central California town where the average high temperature in July is 95 degrees. Since none of the people alleging she was asleep were there at the time of her tragic encounter with the power mower, it’s unclear why they are so certain she was asleep.
One would assume that a motorized tractor with a pull-behind mower gets pretty loud. One also wonders not only how someone is able to sleep in a public park at noon on a midsummer day amid a tractor’s grinding industrial sounds, but why they were sleeping there in the first place.
The Modesto Bee reports that Christine Chavez came from a “close-knit family.” At the time of her death, Chavez left behind a nine-year-old daughter who was apparently being cared for by Chavez’s mother nearly 600 miles away in Yuma, Arizona.
Most of the deceased’s “close-knit” family members allegedly still live in Arizona, but Chavez’s father Cristobal moved to Modesto about five years ago. About three years ago, apparently leaving what was then her six-year-old daughter behind in Arizona, Christine Chavez “moved to Modesto to be closer to her father and would check in regularly for food, clothing and other necessities. They said she would stay at home a couple days and leave again.”
Her father says that the police contacted him after finding and identifying her remains in the park. He says he visited the site of her death, and that
There were many pieces of [her remains] around there and I called the police. . . . I went there and I still have pieces of bones, like pieces of her skull and some teeth. It’s terrible.
He also says he doesn’t believe Modesto Police spokeswoman Sharon Bear’s account that the tractor driver, who is still unnamed, “noticed a body in the grass he had already made a pass through”:
It’s a lie that they didn’t see her. . . . I’m going to keep going because I need to. I’m looking for justice and I’m going to be there until something happens.
Mr. Chavez didn’t specify exactly what would comprise “justice,” but it’s a word that other family members keep using.
“I am sad for what happened to my daughter, and we want justice for the way that she died,” says Chavez’s mother Josefina.
The GoFundMe page that Chavez’s sister Esmerelda started is called “Justice for Christine”:
I am doing this fundraiser to make Justice for my sister because while she was in the park sleeping a lawnmower tractor run [sic] over my little sister while she was sleeping. Destroyed her body and everything. . . . My dad went to the scene when the police cars were gone. There he would find pieces of my sister’s skull with hair still on the floor [sic] and bones with chopped skin. . . . So I’m asking help so we could be able to pay for a lawyer to fight this case and beat it. . . . Please help to get Justice for Christine. . . . She was a beautiful mother she lived [left?] behind her 9 year old [sic] she loved her with all her heart.
Chavez’s 33-year-old brother Randy, who still lives in Arizona, says that his sister would often stay at a Salvation Army shelter about a block from Beard Brook Park:
She was a free soul. She was a great and pure soul and she made a lot of jokes. . . . She was always such a little prankster, she was goofy. We loved that about her personality. . . . She didn’t deserve that for that reason, for being homeless. My sister was loved. The only thing she wanted was to be free.
Free of what? Obligations? Since I have not heard the merest suggestion that Christine Chavez was employed, paid taxes, or helped to financially support her nine-year-old daughter or herself, it’s hard not to suspect that she only wanted to live for free. Family members insist that Christine was not a drug addict. They have insinuated she was “experiencing mental health challenges in recent years and often chose to stay outdoors.”
Although a county coroner says it will be “several weeks” before a final cause of death will be revealed via an autopsy, members of Chavez’s family are already demanding a second autopsy.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
Nearly five years ago, 32-year-old Shannon Bigley — described as a “‘flower child’ with a roller-coaster life” — was crushed to death in Modesto by a Caltrans employee while Bigley was “sleeping inside what the equipment operator thought was an unoccupied pile of trash.”
Apparently, being a flower child with a roller-coaster life can be risky.
Although it remains unclear whether or not Christine Chavez was visible to the tractor driver until after he spotted her remains in the wake of his path, Dez Martinez, a member of a homeless advocacy group called “We Are Not Invisible,” chided members of the Modesto city council about the agony that Christine’s father is currently enduring:
He doesn’t get to see his daughter. You guys get to kiss your kids goodnight. If you buried them, you get to see them. He does not. . . .
It’s a mystery why Martinez seems to think that city council members are somehow responsible for Chavez’s death, but what seems obvious is that Christine’s father would have been able to kiss his daughter goodnight every night if Christine hadn’t made the choice to be “free” and live out on the streets.
An e-mail from Lynelle Solomon, a member of Modesto Community Action Group, alleges that “Christy could have still been alive today, had she had a safe place to rest. . . .” But apparently she had at least two safe places to rest: Her father’s house and the Salvation Army shelter that was only a block away from the site of her demise. She allegedly chose not to stay at her father’s house. And even though she was not employed or involved in any demanding physical pursuits of any kind, she had the freedom to lie down in a public park at noon on a summer’s day.
The other night, purely as a result of the algorithms that YouTube uses to pick movies for me based on what I’ve previously watched, I caught a dark little 1957 film called The Night Runner. The film is a cautionary tale about how mental hospitals, due to overcrowding, were letting people back out onto the streets far too soon for their own safety as well as the public’s. There’s a scene where the main character, an impeccably groomed man wearing a suit and tie, is walking with a suitcase somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Los Angeles, which causes a cop to turn around and ask him for identification. Since the character, a recently-released mental patient with a violent history, was able to provide identification, the cop let him go. It might have been a mistake, as the man winds up killing the proprietor of the beach cottage he rented for a week.
It occurred to me that when I was a kid, there was no such thing as “homeless people,” much less “unhoused people,” or, for heaven’s sake, “people experiencing homelessness.” There were winos, bums, hobos, and vagrants, though, and there was a heavy public stigma attached to such people. Before that, there were workhouses and debtor’s prisons.
I’m not implying I know the answer to this grimly complicated situation. I suspect that the debtors’ prisons of centuries past and the insane asylums of the 1900s were cruel, brutal, and inhumane places. Then again, having to walk through homeless tent camps on your way to work is cruel, brutal, and inhumane to the people who still have to work to feed themselves.
The hopelessly fractured and impossibly diverse United States is no longer a “society” in any meaningful sense; it’s nothing more than a cynical financial scheme posing as a nation.
I suspect that technology may soon render nearly all work — and by extension, the value of nearly all humans as economic commodities — obsolete, so very few of us have the moral high ground to keep sneering at those above and below us forever, because a grim and hopeless form of perpetual vagrancy may be in all of our futures.
But is it possible that in July 2023, Christine Chavez’s main problem was that she had too much freedom?
A 2022 essay that attempts to bust some myths and facts about homelessness contains the following passage:
Myth: Homeless people are lazy.
Fact: To survive, many people who experience homelessness are constantly searching for necessities, such as food, shelter, and a source of income. People experiencing homelessness don’t have the luxury of being lazy. They are in survival mode.
I’ve been in survival mode all of my adult life, but except for one cold Pennsylvania night in the early 1980s when I slept in my Pontiac LeMans after my mother kicked me out of the house for good at age 19, I’ve never been homeless. I’ve been too busy working to feed and house myself. Maybe it’s a flaw and maybe it’s a virtue, but I’d feel like a leech and a creep if I depended on others for food and shelter. Saddled with a conscience about such things, I’ve never had the luxury of being lazy.
* * *
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27 comments
Fantastic writing Mr. Goad. Your finishing flourish was superb. The writing from the Chavez family is a sight to behold.
From the link to Lynelle, (a white woman with a black woman’s name), she said:
Lynelle Solomon, a MoCAG member who works with the homeless. “Christy’s death is a prime example why we need safe camping and parking now, not tomorrow, in a week, month or year. Our leaders have the control to make changes and it’s about time they do.”
So, it looks like new euphamisms for vagrants are emerging into the American lexicon; campers and parkers.
Lynelle’s wolflike fight for vile degeneracy exemplifies why they used to execute witches.
“Mr. Chavez didn’t specify exactly what would comprise “justice,” but it’s a word that other family members keep using.”
I would be very concerned about what the word “justice” means to a father who has “pieces of bones, like pieces of her skull and some teeth” around the house. I think machetes might be involved, or perhaps small animals.
Perhaps the “homeless advocacy group” known as “We are not invisible” might consider reviving a variation of this classic Midwestern public service announcement:
https://assets.listia.com/photos/771c8d0d427cd6976602/original.png?s=320x320m&sig=41cb3354b4bef342&ts=1426724206
This is another great piece on a unique subject by Jim. I never know what I’m going to read about, but I always enjoy his work.
That said, I had some difficulty reading the following passage:
“I’ve been in survival mode all of my adult life, except for one cold Pennsylvania night in the early 1980s when I slept in my Pontiac LeMans after my mother kicked me out of the house for good at age 19, I’ve never been homeless.”
After “adult life,” I believe there should be a new sentence.
Let me know if I’m wrong.
Good catch. Not a new sentence, but there was a “but” missing that was included in the original recording. Fixed.
That works. Thanks.
As your last paragraph intimates, admirable character traits which people used to think it an obligation to aspire toward, have been replaced by The State. Apparently, scads of people actually believe The State (one’s faceless fellow man) is their provider.
I just started reading Ted K’s manifesto, and his thoughts on leftism in the opening salvos appealed to me so much I couldn’t help comparing his assessment of leftist character traits with what I’m seeing spelled out by this loser’s family. His assertion that the leftists inherently loathe hierarchy goes a long way toward explaining why character is no longer a matter of concern. Character as a concept implies hierarchy–some traits are better than others. I suppose this is why G. Hood discusses hierarchy so often.
Anyway, the line “The hopelessly fractured and impossibly diverse United States is no longer a “society” in any meaningful sense; it’s nothing more than a cynical financial scheme posing as a nation” is killer.
in any meaningful sense; it’s nothing more than a cynical financial scheme posing as a nation” is killer.
Too damn true. This country is nothing more than a corporation with the only real purpose of protecting while the doing the bidding of a country that was made out of thin air in 1948. Since WWII that country has been the single largest foreign entity recipient of US taxpayer monies. Just yesterday their leader addressed a joint session of US congress, by my count the 9th time by one of their leaders. Imports/exports to that country amount to approx $30 billion with the US importing much more than exporting – surely not!!! Mexico and Canada do business with the US in the amount of approx $1.5 trillion per year and leaders from both those countries have not addressed joint sessions of the US congress that many times combined!
“There was an accident at approximately 12pm involving the contractor’s tractor and an individual who was not visible and laying in a tall, weeded area. The contractor immediately contacted the Modesto Police Department. . . .”
Am I the only one bothered by the confusion between lying and laying? Is this an indictment of our modern educational institutions?
Why do you assume she wasn’t laying in the field? The Principle of Charity requires that we construe her remarks in the most favorable way. Perhaps she was laying out the tea service for her imaginary teddy bear picnic?
Good point. I thought she may have been laying eggs.
American educational institutions stopped trying to teach children English long ago. I also think being educated would be a liability when working for today’s mainstream media outlets.
Also, many news outlets have abandoned copy editors as a cost-cutting measure in recent years. And judging from many of the recently-published books from mainstream publishers I peruse, many publishers seem to have done this as well.
I get it, but are the distinctions between lie/lying/lied/lied, lie/lying/lay/lain, lay/laying/layed/laid just nineteenth century pedagogical pedantry? I can still remember my nine year-old head trying to explode when we were actually taught this. Such fine and finicky distinctions are obvious ‘white supremacy’.
She doesn’t look like any down-and-outers in these parts. Requiescat in pacem.
I like stories with happy endings, and this was both happy and humorous.
Mental illness and drugs go hand in hand nowadays. Marijuana, which everyone loves, has been proven to cause psychiatric problems and is as common as Pepsi. I know way too many people who’ve died, or had kids die, from ODs which I guess is the reason parents are letting their deadbeat kids live with them rent-free forever. Anyone out as cold as this woman, was high. Very high.
The autopsy results will be interesting. What if Christine was already dead when mowed over?
Feeling very drowsy in the warm opening hours of the dark blue mid-summer morning; leaving her group of friends who continued to chatter among themselves, sharing jokes, cigarettes, drugs and booze; Christine becomes overwhelmed with physical and mental tiredness. Sleep
The Sun breaking the horizon; Christine simply wants to rest for a while. Early birds; crickets; the gentle, soft and somehow reassuring whooshing and bleeps of passing motor traffic. Sleep.
Walking through the ever-lengthening grass, Christine happens upon a flat, bed-like and sumptuous place where she could relax for a while. Sleep.
Christine stretches her coat out on the ground, she lays down on her back then turns onto her side in a semi-fetal position. Sleep.
Christine is most comfortable. Faces and places – mum and dad – siblings – ice-creams and things – first day at school – becoming a mother – Sleep.
Christine – like a skyscraper – its lights turned off one by one. Sleep.
Christine. Her… pulse… slowed…right…down. Insufficient…oxygen…to…the…brain. Sleep.
True story: When I was recently visiting a popular urban stroll, I was approached by a young white guy with dreads and reeking of weed, perhaps even emanating from his backpack. He asked me for money for bus fare. My first thought was that he can walk off the calories from the munchies all that weed was going to trigger… excuse me, nowadays many call marijuana, ‘my medicine’. But I politely told him, I often don’t carry cash and pay for stuff with my phone, sorry. He smiled and nodded knowingly, “That’s cool. But I can take Venmo.” I politely told him I don’t use that one, but knowing me any attempt at civility was betrayed by a spontaneous facial expression of Get the fuck out of here.
I don’t think all the homeless or habitual weed smokers are lazy, though it is well established that marijuana doesn’t do one’s motivation any favors. There are all sort of views on homelessness, but if you want to hear a sanctified, sanitized and over simplified explanation of it, then talk to your usual well-meaning progressive liberal. Ignoring HL Mencken’s observation on complex problems, they see it as a simple issue of ‘lack of housing’.
First this ignores that there are different strata of the homeless. The great unwashed living in tents on the curbs cause the most obvious problems, but there are many homeless in the stats who are drifting between stays with friends, family and the occasional weekly rental motel. Of the ones in tents on the curbs and city parks, there are massive swathes of drug addicts, the severely mentally ill, and often both. When the unfortunate Ms. Chavez, above, was called ‘a free soul’, that is often the polite way of saying erratic, irresponsible, bipolar or addicted. It is also well known that when welfare checks arrive, drug use goes up (took about 10 seconds to find these). There do not seem to be major safeguards that public assistance money is spent appropriately. I frequently year progressives say that the recipients know best what they need and don’t need regulation (one of those rare exceptions to progressive desires to overregulate everyone). According to a social worker friend, the mentally ill get even larger checks. While many use these appropriately, many opt to remain homeless. Rather than spend the check on getting an apartment or room, many choose to be on the streets and pocket the cash, spending it on drugs or who knows what. There doesn’t seem to be a political middle ground that if we are giving you this money for housing, you need to prove that’s how you’re using it. Meanwhile I’m also still waiting for affordable housing in Big Sur, California.
Just from a basic arbitrage perspective, the CA real estate market makes no sense.
Living in that state itself is a serious liability for many reasons apropos to this site. But going beyond that, the grass nearly anywhere else is literally greener. That hillside adobe place is very cool architecturally, and the landscape photos are from becoming angles. But it’s still clearly that LA semi-desert backdrop that at the first upkeep lapse falls into almost preternatural ugliness.
A million two in LA will get you this vulture perch, Trejo’s house from “Heat”, overlooking an East LA Mexislum, complete with aluminum siding and a fifth acre of clifflike trash speckled yard.
That same million two in Kent County could get you, among a dazzling array of other things, this Chateauesque gem with 200 feet of riverfront on 1.5 wooded acres, minutes from dozens of high-end restaurants, shopping and a major one-stop big box store. While Michigan winters are harsh, the natural beauty that permeates just about anywhere you look so far surpasses southern CA’s Martian void that you wonder if all those communists simply don’t know what they’re missing. Or maybe those who freely choose that place feel more at ease with surroundings that match their souls.
A home buyer could take the extra $5.2M or so they would have spent on that adobe bungalow, buy a ballpark comp in Kent County, then if they still had an unscratchable itch to dodge rattlesnakes while catching an ocean glimpse through the wildfire smoke, they could get a Netjets card and rent an AirBnB for a week, 10 times a year for the rest of their life.
edit: Looks like Big Sur gets far more rainfall than LA, doesn’t change much imo.
These are great points, though I was too subtle in my sarcasm (though I may steal ‘vulture perch’ as a descriptor).
Progressives see the homelessness problem as a lack of affordable housing. Should there be homeless shelters and low income housing at Big Sur? As San Francisco is now one of the most expensive cities does it make sense that there will be a ton of new low income housing? Most of us responsible types opt to not move to a city we cannot afford. Though you can google ‘best cities to be homeless in’ and get a variety of opinions on available services. Portland is a petri dish of how progressive ideas and white-washing of social problems leads to rapid decline. It is darly hilarious but sad that Mayor Wheeler is ‘considering’ outlawing hard drug use in public. Whoa, deep thoughts, man. I gotta think on that.
Even the Atlantic, which like NPR has walked the plank into the sea of woke the past decade, is starting to sober up in its reportage of legalizing drugs in Portland. I’m not going to say it’s easy or desirable to be a homeless addict living in a tent. But if you do find yourself in the hideous death grip of serious addiction, does Portland’s enabling culture of feeding the addicts, providing tents and tolerating open drug use help facilitate them getting clean? Addicts talk about needing to hit ‘rock bottom’ before they do the serious soul searching that it is time to get straight. Portland and their ilk are suggesting that rock bottom is pretty hard, lets cushion it with some tents, sleeping bags, meals and open tolerance of fentanyl and meth and that will numb the pain. Here’s a pamphlet on drug treatment, maybe you’ll read it between nodding off from opioids or eating someones face.
In a much circulated interview, an unhoused Portland addict remarks
They’re loving us to death. You don’t have to do s–t but stay in your tent or party or if you smoke of a lot of dope, you can do that
Many on the left say that conservatives have poor understanding of addiction, that it is judgmental and criminalizing a disease that needs treatment. Fair enough. Reasonable. But many places make better use of drug courts, in which the recalcitrant addict needs to go to treatment and get clean, or sober up in a cell. What do we do when people repeatedly drive under the influence?
Right. As leftists, Portland is following the first pillar of leftist morality: Feed the deer.
The Three Pillars are,
1) Feed the deer
2)Feed the bears
3)Pigs would be able to fly if they hadn’t historically been denied access to quality nests.
Why is this in the news at all? The first thing I am lured to is a picture of a pretty white(?) girl. Beneath the think photo it looks she had serious mental issues as well as homelessness. Are the media masters now playing a new game?
The hopelessly fractured and impossibly diverse United States is no longer a “society” in any meaningful sense; it’s nothing more than a cynical financial scheme posing as a nation.
Using a few less words, it’s a nightmare.
If the Chavez family had delivered appropriate ‘justice’ to Christine as a youth, she may have fared better than ending up as bits and pieces.
It’s right. A good rod makes good people. But that is so “inhumane”, so “undemocratic”, and so not “modern”, and not “tolerant”.
No matter the reasons ahe was homeless or decided to sleep at the park doesnt matter, nor does her past, her mental state or her decision on why she wouldn’t live with family. The point of all this is that she is a human and the way the clean up was conducted by police department was unjustified. They simply cleaned up the area assuming it was an accident, didn’t tape the area for further investigation and left pieces of her as they figured homeless, accident, sounds good, case closed. Now there is no other information besides it was an accident and the driver didn’t see her. This could easily be a crime scene or maybe negligence. If it was just an accident, then why aren’t they answering questions or explaining the evidence that proves it was an accident? Well now there investigating again. After this story went viral and there’s more pressure, they decided to do there job. What ever happened to integrity, having honor and respect? So u dam right Christine deserves justice! It’s a human life that was taken away from there families. No matter of anyone’s opinion on why she was there and her past, she will never get a chance again in life. U can never say that a person. Can not change or one day turn things around. U don’t know if she may be suffering from depression or a childhood trauma or anything. So her life was her life and someone took that from her. The driver was responsible, just as if someone got hit by a car and wasn’t seen. Check the drivers phone, see his timeline and check if he was texting, social media or if he called anyone before 911. Y can cross a few things off which that. Tractors have size, so he could of seen her after running over her and panicked before her body went through the mower. And as a driver ur constantly observing in front and behind u looking for potential hazards. When the mower hit her it had to make a loud thumping sound and he probably felt it too when initially mowing her down. So u don’t think for a second that he didn’t turn and there was blood spatter everywhere? The story doesn’t make sense and that’s why information and evidence is needed. To clear up any chance of it being crime, an accident or negligence. That’s the justice they are searching for, for a better clean up, a thorough investigation and for the police department to take some responsibility of how unprofessional they handled the situation. They work for the public, so have honor in what u do. I’m a Vetran and u best believe I served with honor courage and commitment. I would still sacrifice my life to this country. And that means every race, color, rich or poor, homeless or anyone else, no matter there past or present. So with that said, Justice for Christine!
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