This was written in response to comments made on oregonlive.com, about homelessness in Portland. The commenters were compassionate towards "those who deserve it" (whatever that means) while using terms like "junkie street kids with aggressive dogs" and losers":
"These "losers" and "junkie street kids" are suffering human beings. Did you ever stop to think that there may be some kind of horrible conditioning that led them to such a state in their lives. Sure we can get annoyed and bothered when it appears that all "those people" (blatantly not realizing that whether we like it or not, they are part of our community) are all just out to take.
I was a homeless drug addict and alcoholic for 13 years. The life that preceded such a tragic life was not a pretty one. My mother had abandoned me to cook crystal meth, left me with an violent alcoholic father who was later murdered in life, I was kicked out of my house at the age of 11 for shaming my father, later to wind up in Maclaren for trying to survive on the streets, I took up prostitution by the age of 14, all but three of my friends have been murdered, OD'd, commited suicide, or are either in jail or in an insane asylum for life. So instead of judging people because they either pull at our heart strings, or inconvenience our little selfish world, or they, what is mostly likely the truth, force us to look at the brutal truth of what our perfect delusional little world has turned into,we might realize that WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE. I am just as guilty as the next, and probabaly even more so, because I suffer from the same disease as everyone else, which is the failure to see a human being, when we look at a human being.
The services for drug addiction and alcoholism in this state are abysmal, yet we claim to be so liberal. We feed and clothe the homeless, therefore putting a band-aid on a shotgun wound. We are all so opposed to war, that we tend to forget that the men and women who have fought for their chosen ideal, have only done what they thought was best, and therefore forgetting the validation every human needs and deserves. We have placed CHILDREN in positions to be tried as adults (whatever that is supposed to discern) and therefore completely robbed them of any chance of rehabilitation. Do we honestly believe that humanity has regressed so much, to insist that murderes and rapists are born and not made?
Maybe, just maybe, the problem does not lie so much in the individual, but in the foul callousness that we have achieved, as a whole society. I am not saying that people should not be held accountable for their actions, but I would hope that we would look for what creates such "mosters" as we have come to regard them as. How much longer can we continue to point the finger at the world around us, blaming everyone else for the state of the nation, while we continue to work in our comfotable little jobs, drive our fancy little cars, and go home to our safe neighborhoods, while there are women and children sleeping in the street, while trusting little boys are being raped by priests and teachers, while a child is doing life in prison because he commited a crime at the age of 15 and had to adapt to prison life, where murder and rape are not only the norm, but a means of survival? If I haven't done anything to ammend the situation today, and everyday, then it is not fault of the "loser homeless junkie" who has inconvenienced my joyous little downtown shopping spree, but me. I am the only one to blame.
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Sean, I love this post but I think you're losing sight of the real objection to those comments.
ReplyDeleteCloberella is saying "I'm okay with social services for veterans, for the disabled, for the elderly, and for victims of tragedy. But I do not believe that the scarily dressed youth with the scary dogs are any of those. I believe them to be freeloaders who are unwilling to work."
You’re saying that it’s wrong to judge other people, and that we’re all responsible. But I think there’s more – that cloberella’s actually wrong about most of these kids.
First and most importantly, we're responding to anonymous comments on the internet. Which I want to point out first because anonymous comments are maybe the least appropriate forum ever imagined for rational and thoughtful discourse. But you put a lot of thought and a lot of yourself into your response, so I think you deserve the same consideration.
That said, there seems to be a cycle at work, involving alienation from societal norms (due to any number of external influences - poverty, tragedy, mental illness, abuse, neglect) which leads in turn to a natural response of embracing the alienation. Which then just serves to widen the gulf, and so the cycle.
The choices, in this case, are choices of wardrobe, of lifestyle, of assimilating with a streetkid culture that is set up in direct opposition to societal norms. There is a lot of comfort to be had in lashing back out at the society which we feel wronged us. But that comfort involves making a series of active choices which serve to further our alienation from society.
This is, I think, what cloberella is trying to articulate. She feels that the people most deserving of charity are the people who seem most willing to be rehabilitated. She has an image, a prejudice, of what a helpable homeless person looks and acts like. And gutter punks don't look like that. They look like people who have made deliberate choices to thumb their noses at society.
The problem that the commenters are overlooking, and the one I think you did a great job of explaining, is that these kids are often victims. That their decision to freeload and move to Portland for the social services was made because of some dire need.
It’s important to consider why cloberella's angry. She is afraid. First, afraid because streetkids are scary and crusty and look violent. But also, she's afraid of being taken advantage of - afraid that those streetkids are actually from healthy suburban homes and are panhandling for fun. She is afraid that if she gives them money, she'll be made a fool of. And she has this fear because she doesn't understand them.
And so the question, I think, is this - given a finite amount of aid, who gets helped first? Cloberella is suspicious of streetkids for a number of reasons. Most of them aren't valid.
But I'm not sure there isn't maybe something about continuing to make deliberate bad choices that means you shouldn't be first in line for help. Thing is, I don't have any way of measuring worthiness, or of deciding who genuinely wants to change.
And that's really where I end up on this question - I don't know if there's any way to measure agency - how much of a situation is choice, and how much is circumstance. So I think we, as a society, have to just accept that we can't be sure we're helping when we try. That if what we're giving really is a gift, then it's up to the recipient to choose what to do with it. And so while it's tempting to want to think that whatever help you're giving is going to help someone transform their life, help them return to some societal ideal of self-sufficiency, sometimes you just have to shrug and hope that even if they're using the money for drugs, you're at least bringing some small measure of comfort into their lives.
I apreciate the comment, but you are using a person I wasn't quoting as a basis for invetsigation. As for choices, I was 14 when I was given the options to make my choice. Couldn't go to my dads, he was murdered, couldn't go to my moms cause if she wasn't cooking meth, I wasn't wanted, couldn't go to anybody on my fathers side cause they saw my father in me and were afraid. So I became a ward of the state, which forced me into the the foster home of a devout Pentacostal couple who were heavy handed, made us go to church five days a week, and practiced embarassing forms of public humiliation as punishment. In my eyes there was no choice, I was to live on the streets if I was to stay sane. At the age of 14, one cannot guage the impact of said "decision", and I turned to punk rock and drugs to blot out the miserable existence of forgotten street kid.
ReplyDeleteSome are not afforded the options others have, but our society is fashioned in a way to vilify children for exploring the only options their maladjusted minds could concoct. This is the basis of my blog.