Helping and Hating The Homeless

Helping and Hating the Homeless _ By Peter Marin
1. The trouble begins with the word "homeless." It has become such an abstraction, and is
applied to so many different kinds of people, with so many different histories and
problems, that it is almost meaningless.
2. Homelessness, in itself, is nothing more than a condition visited upon men and women
(and, increasingly, children) as the final stage of a variety of problems about which the
word "homelessness" tells us almost nothing. Or, to put it another way, it is a catch basin
into which pour all of the people disenfranchised or marginalized or scared off by
processes beyond their control, those which lie close to the heart of American life. Here
are the groups packed into the single category of "the homeless":
 Veterans, mainly from the war in Vietnam. In many American cities, vets make up
close to 50 percent of all homeless males.
 The mentally ill. In some parts of the country, roughly a quarter of the homeless
would, a couple of decades ago, have been institutionalized
 The physically disabled or chronically ill, who do not receive any benefits or whose
benefits do not enable them to afford permanent shelter.
 The elderly on fixed incomes, whose funds are no longer sufficient for their needs.
 Men, women, and whole families pauperized by the loss of a job.
 Single parents, usually women, without the resources or skills to establish new lives.
 Runaway children, many of whom have been abused.
 Alcoholics and those in trouble with drugs (whose troubles often begin with one of
the other conditions listed here).
 Immigrants, both legal and illegal, who often are not counted among the homeless.
 Traditional tramps, hobos, and transients, who have taken to the road or the streets
for a variety of reasons and who prefer to be there.
3. You can quickly learn two things about the homeless from this list. First, you can learn
that many of the homeless, before they were homeless, were people more or less like
ourselves: members of the working or middle class. And you can learn that the world of
the homeless has its roots in various policies, events, and ways of life for which some of
us are responsible and from which some of us actually prosper.
4. We decide, as a people, to go to war, we ask our children to kill and to die, and the
result, years later, is grown men homeless on the street.
5. We change, with the best intentions, the laws pertaining to the mentally ill, and then,
without intention, neglect to provide them with services, and the result, in our streets,
drives some of us crazy with rage.
6. We cut taxes and prune budgets, we modernize industry and shift the balance of trade,
and the result of all these actions and errors can be read, sleeping form by sleeping
form, on our city streets.
7. The liberals cannot blame the conservatives. The conservatives cannot blame the liberals.
Homelessness is the sum total of our dreams, policies, intentions, errors, omissions,
cruelties, kindnesses, all of it recorded, in flesh, in the life of the streets.
8. The central question emerging from all this is, What does a society owe to its members
in trouble, and how is that debt to be paid? A society owes its members whatever it
takes for them to regain their places in the social order. And when it comes to specific
remedies, one need only read backward the various processes which have created
homelessness and then figure out where help is likely to do the most good. But the real
point here is not the specific remedies required - affordable housing, say but the basis
upon which they must be offered, the necessary underlying ethical notion we seem in
this nation unable to grasp: that those who are the inevitable casualties of modern
industrial capitalism and the free market system are entitled, by right, and by the simple
virtue of their participation in that system, to whatever help they need. They are entitled
to help to find and hold their places in the society whose social contract they have, in
effect, signed and observed.
9. Look at that for just a moment: the notion of a contract. The majority of homeless
Americans have kept, insofar as they could, to the terms of that contract. In any shelter
these days you can find men and women who have worked ten, twenty, forty years, and
whose lives have nonetheless come to nothing. These are people who cannot afford a
place in the world they helped create. And in return. Is it life on the street they have
earned? Or the cruel charity we so grudgingly grant them?

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Helping and Hating the Homeless _ By Peter Marin

 Men, women, and whole families pauperized by the loss of a job.

 Runaway children, many of whom have been abused.

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