Facing Homelessness and Ourselves

The small of her back is shaped against the brick storefront, and her chest stares down at the pavement. Her hands are open and her arms extended. She is a perfect picture of desperation—waiting on an angel who might be willing to help, or even just confirm she still in fact exists. I am not that angel, because she is not disheveled; she is disgusting. She is not tired; she is lifeless. She is not unfortunate; she is worthless.

It is so easy to protect myself with these thoughts as I pass her by—having a critically important conversation on the phone, eating pizza that’s way too greasy for such a cold day, pretending the most interesting thing in the universe is taking place in the opposite direction, always seeming to be repelled in a physical and measurable way by her presence.

Have you ever seen someone experiencing homelessness*? When you did, what did you do?

I’ve seen my share. I always thought it was sad, but a fleeting thought is as far as I got. I definitely never did anything. Often, I just pretended they weren’t there. I have a hard time looking someone like that in the eye. Well I used to, at least, until I realized why.

At college, some friends and I were discussing our interactions with the fellas outside the 7-11 in Cleveland Circle. Those guys were always there, watching students saunter back from the liquor store, the bar, Chipotle, or that strange hardware store—and you could always tell from which by their gait—returning to the comfortable confines of campus life. No one wanted them there on that corner, but that didn’t make them go away.

My friends and I talked about our behaviors when we encountered these men. We asked each other what we did. We asked each other what we said. We asked if we gave money.

With great resolve, we ridiculed many of the interactions we had seen from others. The fact that we were using what many of our peers would consider precious drinking time to even entertain this conversation—in addition to suggesting we did not have many friends—made us think we had earned the right to criticize like this. But after dissecting the failings of human dignity we were witness to, we began to realize that our actions were—in a fundamental way—not a whole lot different.

We were never outwardly insolent towards the homeless, but we were also never much of anything at all. We wanted to find out why. Why could no one figure out how to be decent?

My friend Danny suggested that maybe the reason we struggle to dignifiedly engage these men and women on the streets is that “we fear having to confront our own vulnerability.” He didn’t elaborate much on the comment, which was typical of Danny’s oratory style.

It is now a couple years later, and Danny's words are still coursing inside me—like some sort of benevolent virus— trying to be taken up by the right internal machinery, which might serve as a hospitable host to let those words take me over.

Again, the question is: Why do I deliberately avoid these men and women who find themselves homeless and on the streets?

Why is it such an imposition on my precious little life to look them straight in the eye and acknowledge their existence? Or if they call for my attention, to at the very least say “I’m sorry I can’t help right now.” Why is that so hard?

Because that’s what is asked of us as humans. Of course we can do more, but we can probably set acknowledgement of existence as the absolute minimum requirement.

We don’t have to give anyone money, if we have none to spare or otherwise have some steadfast principle against almsgiving. I understand the differing and staunch interpretations of one’s relationship with liquid capital, and I am not looking to change anyone’s stance on that matter. I am saying no one can make us sacrifice anything—material, temporal, or otherwise—but there is no reason not to look a person in the eye like a human being and recognize his or her dignity. Sometimes I forget how empowering this can be. It’s all I have ever known, so I have the luxury of taking it for granted. The cool thing is it costs us nothing to be that source of empowerment for someone else.

So then, why don’t we?

I am going to spin this failure into a positive. I am a tireless, pathetic optimist like that. That is actually very far from the truth, but in this case I suppose you could make the case that I am.

I think the root of this mess is empathy. We are much better than we give ourselves credit for, in terms of just being decent. We have more complexity and sensitivity then we realize, and they reveal themselves every time we blindly walk past that man on the corner with the clattering percussion of Styrofoam cup and pocket change.

We avoid these people because in them we see ourselves, and it scares us.

We do not know how to deal with this inherent tendency towards empathy, so we try not to.

That is the gist of this theory, and maybe it gives people way too much credit, but really I don’t think it does. People are just good at empathy. I wouldn’t go as far to say good at compassion, because I think compassion involves an element of choice, and requires practice. But compassion’s seed of empathy is hardwired, for most of us, I think.

It is not that the pretty young lady with the yapping, sweater-wearing rat for a dog and the grande chai mocha javascript latte thinks that the man she overtly eschews on the sidewalk isn’t worth her time, or is in some way beneath her, or is nothing more than a gum stain to hold together the cracking pavement. You might think she thinks this. She might even think she thinks this. But she doesn’t. Nor does the bro coming back from the bar on a Thursday night, with the over-expressive hands of drunken maladroitness, actually thinks it’s funny to make a snarky remark to his vacant-eyed, lumbering buddy about how “these bums need to find a better place to live,” because having to go out of his way and walk around them is really ruining a well-deserved evening of ethanol-assisted catharsis, after a tough week of two exams and a “5-pager about the time Plato went spelunking. Or some shit.”

I think this sort of stuff is nothing but fear—fear dressed in apathy and contempt.

I just refuse to buy the fact that these people believe anything like this. Human beings are better than that. It gets chalked up to this—even in their own minds it does—because it is a much simpler and much safer explanation for such actions of visible depravity. But, again, what manifests as depravity is based in a deep-seated empathy—empathy that gets tainted by a convenient and comfortable rationale.

We don’t see these people on the streets as not human. We see them as too human.

This is the problem. This is the threat. This is what we fear.

Because if we treat them as human, we have to accept they are just like us, and it hurts to have to reconcile their humanity with the conditions they are forced to exist in. When we look at them, we have to look at ourselves. By confronting them fully, we have to also confront our own vulnerability. When we see how broken they are, we have to see how fragile we are. We have to accept a difficult truth that if circumstances were just a little different—if we were born somewhere else, if our parent died too young, if our great grandfather had taken a more crowded boat to get here—we could so easily be them.

That could so easily be me on the ground, laying my humiliation down on the sidewalk so it can become part of the scenery of a city.

The fragility of our existence is a scary thing to approach, so we avoid it. We have a hard time looking that person in the eye, we walk a few steps wide, and we ignore their pleas for recognition. In them we see too much of ourselves, and we don’t like looking at ourselves in that situation: damaged and a victim of things beyond our control.

That is why it is difficult for us to deal with people experiencing homelessness in a graceful way. Our own grace—our inexorable instinct to empathize—interferes. It tells us to abort. Avoidance just makes things more comfortable.

Next time you see someone experiencing homelessness in the streets, I challenge you to see yourself, like you always do. But next time, approach yourself with the courage that comes from the grace you were gifted by God, or Bill O’Reilly, or Obama, or Jason Bateman, or whoever grants you with your graces. Look at that person this way—as yourself, but this time, with compassion. Look him in the eye and say hello. Ask how he is. Show him your favorite scar. Do whatever the hell you want, but do something. Know that it could be you on the ground, and know that this is not right. But know that you can’t run from it. Know that you shouldn’t be afraid. It’s something I have to remind myself quite often, but I think it’s worth the diligence.

*Shout-out to the Back on My Feet organization for introducing me to this language. By saying that people “experience homelessness,” they are freed from being definite personifications of a label, and no longer stuck in a fixed state. They are not homeless people, or beggars, or bums, or hobos, or whatever other denigrating sobriquets the kids have cooked up these days, in their caldron of artless comedy. These people are just in a situation of grievous misfortune—one that, by every basic rule of human rights, ought to be transitory. The change in wording may seem petty, but language has a knack for making the petty very powerful.