How Do We See the Homeless? Do We Even See Them At All?
And Could I Ever Be One of Them?
David Amerland’s Sunday Read this week is extremely thought-provoking, and I believe part of that is the difficulty I have in seeing him as having ever been homeless, even if only for a short period. That vision stands in such stark contrast to the way I perceive him (bear in mind, I’ve only known him online, not in person) as being highly successful. And perhaps the difficulty is not just the surprise of learning this about him, but because – if it can happen to him – what is there to say that it couldn’t happen to me? And who ever wants to consider that possibility?
I have committed myself to following and reading/watching every one of the links he’s provided today, precisely because the topic makes me so uncomfortable. It will take a bit of time, and I think I’ll end up writing a blog post once I’m done (I’ll try at least). But a few thoughts in response at the moment:
1) I have become more acutely aware of the plight of the homeless in recent weeks after having volunteered to help cook and serve a meal at the Men’s Shelter in Charlotte along with other members of the Charlotte Agnostics and Atheists (http://www.charlotteatheists.org/) and previously with my Dad’s church group. A number of the men’s stories are posted in the kitchen, and it’s remarkable how many of them were brought low from good, solid, middle-class lives by unexpected divorces, medical emergencies or illnesses, mental illness, etc. They were often people much like myself who were hit with one or two too many experiences that took everything they had. And I don’t know how to help.
2) And the worst part is that I have the money and income to help. I’m a highly successful dentist, even if that wasn’t always the case. Just 7 years ago, I myself was on the brink of bankruptcy, but even at that time, we wouldn’t have been homeless. But I just don’t really know how to help, because money alone has limited ability to solve the problem.
3) It can happen to anyone. If I were injured and couldn’t work, right now my disability insurance isn’t even close to adequate to keep us going long, and because we’re paying off massive amounts of debt, we don’t have a lot of $$ saved. We could make it 6-7 months, and then we’d be broke. Or what if a major illness hit my wife or daughters or myself? We have insurance, but it sure wouldn’t cover everything.
This is a truly scary subject, and it’s one that, as a society, we have truly failed to address. Given the resources available in the USA, this is a true tragedy, and it should be embarrassing to all of us, but for too many, it’s not. And people are suffering. Why do we allow this to be so in the richest country in the world?
I have no answers, only troubling questions.
Originally shared by David Amerland
Invisible
Back in 2006 I suddenly found myself homeless. There’s a back story to this, of course. I’d walked away from a marriage that was mutually dissolved. Confident in my own ability to rebuild my life I’d generously walked away taking nothing but my car, some clothes and a laptop. It was, in retrospect, a trifle over-optimistic approach and as the complexities of getting work, covering bills, staying in hotels and keeping everything juggling mounted, I found myself in a spot where suddenly I had no money in my account and no place to stay.
I could, maybe, had asked a friend to couch surf but the few I had left at that point had issues of their own and the ones who might have been able to help me out were likely to see it as a complication that might have jeopradized the fragility of our friendship so I decided to sleep in my car, instead. Foolhardy in retrospect.
Why is this all relevant at all, right now? Because despite the fact that we can communicate across timezones and countries and travel across the world with relative ease, when it comes to dealing with homelessness, as a society we fail to do what even the most primitive of communities seemed to manage very well. – http://goo.gl/bNjUv4.
Time Out Of Mind (http://goo.gl/a4bOqi) is a Richard Gere film where the actor, very bravely, explores an issue few of us want to confront. In his BBC interview about it he talks about the mental toughness that’s required to hold onto one’s identity: http://goo.gl/Y6ojSO when homeless.
The problem is frequently deeper than we see: http://goo.gl/g9bJbM and it’s not just that homeless people are invisible because we consciously fail to acknowledge them, they are also frequently adept at flying below our radar: http://goo.gl/xjbmGo. Psychologists see homelessness as a trauma: https://goo.gl/ekAljL though that may gloss over some of its complexities as Becky Blanton explains in her TED Talk: https://goo.gl/8Zwu5e.
What is notable here is the power of perception to define us and the rapidity of the transition that is often associated with the lack of a permanent, fixed address. In a slightly different but related context the lack of a fixed address presents a unique set of problems and a new way to apply age-old discriminations: http://goo.gl/c0bj9E. Europe’s Roma people: https://goo.gl/WnOCEx have long been subject to overt as well as covert racism, because of it.
It appears that because they are largely invisible, homeless people also fail to own the conversation space in which they are discussed. As a result, as Bee Orsini makes clear they are the last guilt-free boogeyman we can stereotypically characterize: https://goo.gl/E7n6dG. Her statistics, in themselves, are hugely revealing as is her message of how ending homelessness has to start with us, the ‘homed’ and the way we change our ideas and attitudes.
Homelessness appears to be a solvable problem: https://goo.gl/rBBydv which can be handled in many different ways: http://goo.gl/vmMDLP but which has distinct political issues which reflect the inherent hypocrisy of our social institutions: http://goo.gl/90Kx0P. It’s a point which John Maceri makes in his TED Talk: https://goo.gl/myzu6X. There are many others looking at this, too: http://goo.gl/HO2Z3c.
My stint as a homeless person, like that of most was the result of mistakes and circumstances. Unlike that of most it was so brief that it barely qualifies. Yet, this is what I learnt from just one night spent sleeping in my car: The world suddenly becomes unsafe. I tried using a public car park but in our world these are either locked after hours or patrolled by private security that simply ask you to move on. Out of the way places are inherently unsafe. There are constant noises and distractions that become extremely difficult to filter out. They all draw conscious attention to our helplessness when we allow consciousness to slip and sleep to prevail.
Having found a relatively quiet residential area where I could go fairly unnoticed and where perhaps safety would not be an issue I discovered that a car, in winter, is an extremely cold place to sleep in, even when fully clothed. This was a surprise to me and it only made me painfully aware of the existential fragility of those who sleep rough, unprotected by a car.
The sense of disconnect that comes from waking up in the very early hours of the morning, fully clothed and having no easy way of going to the bathroom, shaving or brushing your teeth.
All of these sound like little things. They are not. These tiny details have a profound impact upon our ability to marshal mental resources, focus on the building of our inner strength and develop our own sense of worth and our identity.
There is a happy ending to my story. The next day I used a Sainsbury’s supermarket public bathroom to shave in and brush my teeth and make sure my hair looked acceptable. Because I still had a mobile phone I managed to talk my way into an interview with an editor who agreed for me to do a series of stories on the impact of technology in commercial environments.
It was enough to allow me to check into a hotel, again. Get a room which would become my base for the next six months as I began to find my way in a slightly different life to the one I had left behind. In my travels across the world since that time, I have seen homelessness in New York and Las Vegas and Sydney and London. I have encountered it in St Petersburg, Russia, when the outside temperature has been thirty degrees Centigrade below freezing and I have seen it in Brisbane where you could, maybe, argue the year-round warm climate makes it the most homeless-friendly place in the world. And in every single instance I have been struck by the same thing: the ability of everyone around me to simply ignore the problem. To somehow feel unable to do anything about it, inadequate to even begin to address it.
Change is indeed, never easy: http://goo.gl/HO2Z3c. It does require us all to act in ways small as well as big in order to succeed. By far the biggest change, the most important thing is the one that needs to happen inside our heads. That is the space where tiny things lead to massive effects.
The subject of this Sunday Read is a little uncomfortable, I admit but a little discomfort should never stop us from having the kind of conversation that looks at the issues of our world, asks some hard questions and gets the ball rolling on seeking answers.
We are more fortunate than we know that we can count, each Sunday, on rivers of coffee and mountains of donuts, croissants, cookies and chocolate cake. Have an awesome Sunday, wherever you are.