The Motivating Factor

It has not always been easy to continually churn out editorials for this column. There is always the risk of having the column sound like an endless series of complaints, because there are so many things that are obviously wrong that have generated a problem of homelessness in the United States, and the problem should not exist at all. I have had quite a few people approach me with their private problems who have asked me to write about them in my column; not only is it not so easy for me to do so, but it would also turn the column into a complaint department, and that is not its purpose.

So what is the purpose of this column? The answer is a lot simpler than it may seem. For the readers who are themselves homeless, I doubt that I can tell them a lot that they do not already know; they already live the experience of being homeless day in and day out, and reading a treatise about what it means to be homeless certainly offers them nothing. The key here is targeting awareness for those many persons who are in the habit of walking by on the street and pretending that homelessness is non-existent or that “someone” is taking care of the homeless; those persons need to be jostled out of their reveries and brought into the reality that homeless people face, one in which nobody cares what becomes of them and nobody is taking care of them at all, because that is the true reality of homelessness.

As I said, I need not tell the homeless any of these things; they have already learned these lessons the hard way and live with them every day. But what of the people who live comfortably in the suburbs, who watch their plasma TVs, play with their playstations, and for whom a financial crisis is when they have to cut back on entertainment because the funds are needed for other ongoing expenses? To them, homelessness is an alien world, one that speaks an alien tongue, and the only way to bridge the gap is to explain the realities of the homeless world in terms that they can best understand. It may not be easy to describe to these people the feelings of desperation and despair that the homeless live with nor the fear that comes with the struggle for survival on the streets, but at least an attempt must be made if these people are ever to feel any empathy for the homeless and to realize that homelessness is not a chosen way of life for an overwhelming majority of the persons who end up in that situation.

Anybody can end up homeless, and if the people who think it could never happen to them suddenly find themselves homeless, they will surely remember my words. My hope is, of course, that somehow my words will be able to generate some sort of a reaction that might benefit the homeless in the long run. The only way I can see that happening is if the public is aware of what it means to be homeless.

Am I being too optimistic? That’s an accusation that few people who know me well would level against me. Certainly others have written books about homelessness as a topic, but not a lot has been written about what it means to live the homeless experience, probably because the topic is not particularly attractive. Living it is definitely not attractive; that any homeless person can readily confirm. Generating awareness is the greatest hope the homeless have for resolving their plight, and that is my hope in writing: that I will be able to draw attention to the realities that the homeless face every day to those persons for whom those realities are unknown. Awareness is ultimately the key to ending the problem.