The Homeless: Don't Believe Everything You Think

Yesterday, while I was volunteering at our local food bank, I was chatting with one of the other volunteers, whose interest seemed piqued when I told her I worked as a cook for the homeless. Clearly she was involved in the issue of hunger, yet she confessed that she and her friends had some concern that people on the streets were taking advantage of the resources the community extended (aka “freeloading”). This is a very common perception, as is the one that states that homeless people live that way “voluntarily.” As she was sincerely struggling to grasp the reality of the situation, she asked what my perceptions were

The more I work with the homeless, the more I understand that the reasons people lack shelter are extremely varied. Everyone has a story—and many of those stories will break your heart. All of them involve myriad factors. The backstory is never as simple as, “John is a drunk” or “She’s just lazy.” In any one individual you may see a patchwork quilt of issues such as a violent home environment, an alcoholic parent, growing up in poverty, severe mental illness, incest, substance abuse, extreme parental neglect, post-traumatic stress disorder, developmental disabilities, sudden job loss, chronic physical illness, home loss due to a natural disaster, and all the emotional fallout from these stressors.

Some of those we pass on the streets may look perfectly fine, capable of working, even charming and likely to succeed.But if you spend some time with them, you may find that the façade belies someone who utterly cannot sustain the basics required for holding a job. Sometimes I will look at someone who seems to have a lot going for them, sit down and have an intelligent, thoughtful discussion. And an hour or day later, they may appear to be completely gone, somewhere I can’t find them, severely anguished, raving about a phantom or simply somewhere else. Our human skin hides so much of the truths of our lives. You can never look at someone and presume to know how together or capable they are.

Homelessness is very rarely “voluntary.” Who would choose to be cold, hungry, harassed, vulnerable, unsafe, subject to arrest, and often literally spit on by members of our capitalist society? It is difficult for us to comprehend the miserable state these people are dwelling in. And the reality that any one of us could be homeless tomorrow. When that reality becomes too painful to bear, we tend to blame the victim.

I’ve been reading the book Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, about an impoverished Puerto Rican family living in the South Bronx in the 1980s. It is a fascinating account of a culture I previously knew little about, and sometimes recounts events so extreme that I find myself tempted to judge. In a Salon.com interview, LeBlanc addresses why our societal propensity to judge is really not helpful. “…a judgmental place allows [people] not to feel the pain, and the sadness, and the shame we should feel, really--the shame that these young people are not protected the way they should be. …judgment [is] a way to stay separate from someone else.”

In other words, if we walked in these people’s shoes, their lives and choices would make sense. LeBlanc states, “These people have tried every available response to an impossible situation. To survive, they have to be incredibly improvisational, incredibly resourceful. And if you bother to open your eyes in that place, you'll probably know that your ideas of what a person should do are just not applicable.”

This directly applies to the many homeless people I know as well. Having to survive on the streets demands cunning and savvy. These are skills that must be learned, and mistakes come at a very high price, including rape, incarceration, starvation, and often death. Some people here claim that these individuals enjoy “roughing it” or camping out. That always makes me laugh. Think about it: how enjoyable is it to camp on a damp, windy, 20-degree night in January?

Yes, most homefree people have rejected the American consumerist dream. Of course they have. That dream was broken to begin with—and rejected them first. What does it say when we cast out people who never had a fair shot at getting a good education, obtaining a well-paying job, buying a home, and collecting a lot of possessions? That they are wrong? Or that the system just might be extremely ill designed? Our societal ideals have been established with a very small group of people in mind. Those who are physically and mentally well, capable of making a living (or “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”), smart, privileged, educated, and afflicted by few external stressors. This is a pipe dream, a mold very few can fill—yet many try to twist themselves into a pretzel to achieve it. Instead of condemning the homeless as people not like us, we should realize that we are all fellow dwellers in a broken system. And we need a new one, one that truly embraces the many different situations we find ourselves in as human beings.

[Photo 1 by Kirsten Bole]