Image of a text that reads: In conversation with some coworkers, today, one of them said that homeless people should have to work for their meals just like the rest of us.
I said, "Okay, I know a man who is homeless. He'd be happy to work. He's got a business degree. He would be happy to come clean your house, do your yard work, or help you with your filing, walk your dogs, babysit your kids, or just about any office job. What time tomorrow should he come see you?"
They all just looked at me.
I said, "Mind you, he's homeless, so he hasn't showered in a while and the only clothes he has are the ones on his back because he lost all his stuff last week when ge got picked up for vagrancy and they wouldn't let him go back for his bag. It would be a few weeks before what you are paying him is enough to get shelter and such."
And still they stared at me.
I finished, "See? It isn't that easy. He can't get a job because he's homeless with no access to hot water or clean clothes. He can't get access to shelter, hot water or clean clothes without a job. You want him to work for his meals? Give him a hand out of the vicious circle. Stop pretending that all he has to do is get a job."
Unhoused people are not intruders into our communities, they are our communities’ failure to take care of their own.
hey, i've been homeless about three times, depending on what you count as homeless. And there is something else very important that people need to realize.
you know those studies that show that if you don't physically touch a human baby it will die even if it has everything else it needs? And the ones that show that as an adult being ignored by everyone around them can drive a person mad?
When you are homeless, no one ever touches you except in an abusive way, and the only people that don't pointedly ignore you are usually treating you negatively.
Being surrounded by people who treat you like a pariah is like a form of mental torture, and it breaks you down mentally.
It only takes a few weeks of that before you are doing things like having imaginary conversations out out loud. Being homeless will take a person with a normal mental deficiency like high stress or mild depression (you know, things you are likely to feel if you become homeless) and it will tank them all the way down into delusional or dissociative etc in a pretty short amount of time.
(incidentally this is why so many homeless people wind up drug addicts. You do ANYthing to escape your situation, and it's not the physical situation you are trying to escape, it's the mental one)
the point is, when you see a homeless person doing something like screaming at an empty park bench, you don't know if they are homeless because they were already crazy, or if being homeless is the thing that drove them crazy.
Every time i see a discussion about homelessness that asks what to do about the mentally ill people on the streets, i never see this point addressed, and it's an important one.
Either way, they need help. You can't just say something like "they should have to work for their dinner"... often that's not even really relevant to the situation. If you help them regain their sanity and stability enough, yeah, a lot of homeless people would actually prefer to work for what they have, be a normal person and live a normal life, but behaving "normal" just isn't possible for most of them in their current state.
