see because people are actually seeing this i feel like i need to make it abundantly clear what i mean by this: in the united states context, the majority of social problems are just disappeared. the mentally ill are often relegated to their homes, to asylums (these still exist), to hospitals. the disabled, fat, and disfigured likewise. people called “criminal” disappear into the criminal punishment system and often never emerge.
if you live in any city in america, however, there are homeless people. they are the social problem that cannot be disappeared so easily. drive along a freeway outbound from the urban center to the suburbs and look into the trees. you’ll see tents, tarps, evidence of human habitation. walk through a downtown, even in coldest winter, and you’ll see bottles that weren’t there yesterday and clothes inexplicably abandoned. people tend to either not look at these things or to look at them and name them garbage. eyesore. they don’t consider what it would be like to carry everything you own on your back. how little energy you would have for recycling or cleaning up after yourself if you had been kicked out of your shelter at 7am that morning and now had to find a nook to hide out in to escape a -5F windchill. maybe you can go to a local public library, but maybe you can’t because you twitch or smell bad or talk to yourself and people only look at you out of the corner of their eye so they know what description to give the armed security guard at the front desk.
when i’m talking about looking at your unhoused neighbor, i’m talking about looking at them first. i’m talking about smiling and waving and maybe striking up a conversation. i’m talking about offering to grab lunch. i’m talking about indulging them even when they make you uncomfortable.
on memory care floors in hospitals you often encounter the problem of nurses who have been taught how to engage patients with memory issues but who do not give proper patient care because it makes them uncomfortable. they don’t want to lie or play pretend or do anything that takes them out of their very rigidly defined reality. an old man wakes up and tries to get out of bed because it’s time to feed the cows. he wonders where his wife is. it would make his nurse uncomfortable to tell him that his wife knew he needed some rest so she went out to feed the cows, so they tell him that his wife died five years ago and he doesn’t have his farm anymore. they break his heart rather than allow him to live in a better time for a little while longer.
back in december a man sat across from me on the train who was clearly struggling. i started a conversation with him about his art he was holding, which he told me were illustrated children’s books in a language he had always known. it was a syllabary i certainly didn’t recognize, and the illustrations weren’t anything i’ve seen in children’s literature, but we were suddenly both artists on the train. i showed him my journal and he complimented the pasting job on some of my collages. then he started to talk about angels. about his angel specifically, who had died and left him behind on earth. he missed his angel so much that he planned to commit suicide before christmas. i talked to him about his angel, and about love and grief and pain, all of which we could share. he began to call me jesus. i could have told him he was wrong, that i wasn’t even into the abrahamic religions, etc., and it would have broken his heart. instead i walked with him up from the train station—and got him through the armed transit cops who tried to stop him because he didn’t have a ticket—and gave him a picture of a loving savior, and a world that would be better for having him in it. instead of hugging some faggot, he ended up hugging a jesus that loved him. it was an odd situation. it made me a little uncomfortable. it may have been one of the few instances of kindness that he got that day. it may have been the first time in a while that someone who wasn’t unhoused or working the bread line actually started a conversation with him.
imagine if no one ever looked at you. don’t say some cute shit about “oh, i wish no one ever perceived me.” no you don’t. you wish you could control people’s perception of you. but what if people weren’t only not looking at you, but they already thought they knew you. you’re twitching so you’re on something. you’re staring at nothing so you’re dumb. you’re asking for money or food so you’re a leech on society. you’re talking to yourself so you’re dangerous. they don’t look at you but they know you. so they don’t speak to you bc they already know what they’re gonna find.
two and a half weeks ago my mom was found dead on the streets of san antonio. she’d been homeless there for about 12 years. i’d only just gotten stable enough to reach out to her. the woman i contacted at the day home she went to every month to get a haircut, her nails done, and to wash her clothes said she was doing well, that she was clean, that she was very polite, that she was smart. she had two dogs that she’d cared enough about to have microchipped. their names are fin and sophia. having those dogs probably made it so she couldn’t get permanent housing, because most housing programs for the homeless don’t allow them to bring pets. a lot of people choose to keep their pets rather than give them up as a condition of securing housing.
in denver, colorado i once met an unhoused man who had a master’s degree in geophysics. his thesis was on magnetic wells and their affects of satellite orbits. he was a birdwatcher.
when you refuse to look at homeless people, or the things they leave behind (often are forced to leave behind by cops), you are actively participating in the disappearance of a population. do you think you wouldn’t lose part of yourself if safety concerns made you nocturnal? if every time you got enough stuff to set up a good camp some suburbanite called the cops on your tent? would you not talk to yourself if no one else was speaking to you?
a lot of talk goes into the problem how easy it is to become homeless. one medical bill, one missed paycheck and your life is imperiled. well, there are a lot of people who are stepped over every day who already live your worst case scenario, and the simple fact is that the majority of people in the u.s. are too scared of having an uncomfortable or even perhaps scary interaction with an unhoused person to look at them. but i need y’all to know that you are not special. it isn’t just the dirtiest, most addicted, most mentally ill homeless people who are left to die on the streets alone. it is all homeless people. people who won’t leave behind beloved pets, people who couldn’t survive in academia, people who think they’re being gangstalked, people who have jobs, people who have families. if you are one missed paycheck from homelessness, you’re also one catastrophic tragedy, one spark that catches in the apartment on the other side of your building, one chance encounter with the drug that just won’t let you go. not one goddamn person on this earth is better than the unhoused person they step over on the way to get their morning coffee, and i hope to fuck y’all figure that out before you find yourselves disappeared too.
if you actually want to change the fucking world, maybe start with looking your neighbors in the eye.
