This past Monday was my first day as a temporary city worker, and I had been tasked with cleaning up local parks. These parks are usually trashed after a weekend, and with Sunday having been Father's Day, we were in for a good deal of cleanup. As we pulled onto the grass in the pickup, I saw an unconscionable array of filth - beer bottles, cigarettes, styrofoam, dead fish, entire casseroles, unopened goods, opened goods, clouds of flies. Something else caught my eye: a couple asleep on the table.
"These motherfuckers," the Supervisor muttered.
Suddenly, one of the Homeless rolled off the table and onto the concrete. The Supervisor looked at me, shook his head, and said "You see this shit?"
Yeah, I see it. It bothers the hell out of me, and not because they're in my way. It bothers me (and should bother you) because suffering exists in multitudes.
As we got out of the truck, the Supervisor commanded them to leave. But then he joked with the woman who fell off the table, and he mentioned her by name (she is, after all, a frequent 'guest' at the park). She was walking away, but her face lit up when she heard it.
"Thank you for remembering me," she said.
This pierced through my chest and froze time. The Woman was so neglected that she thanked the Supervisor for knowing her name. This is what happens when a human sinks so low into the social strata that they become nothing but a thing that exists - and this should scare the shit out of anyone, because existence without meaning (for humans) leads to destruction. You may not care about the individual, but displacement is on the rise.
It's true that this couple might have contributed to the mess in the park. They might have been amoral people. It's equally true that they might have been brutalized, tortured, and forgotten. The Woman clearly had little remaining intellectual capacity, but was it ever fostered? Did she have true teachers or friends? We have no way of knowing the details in individual cases.
How do cities respond to this kind of problem? By offering one way bus tickets to another city. The city I live in recently drove much of the homeless out by force, which has sparked a citywide migration to other parts of the metro area - including where I work.
We cannot open our doors to let anyone in. We should be concerned, however, that some are so lost that they have no hope of returning from madness. The Homeless are a small portion of the dark vengeance which will swallow our modern world if we do not change. In 2018, 70 million people were displaced by central powers destroying lives. The collective result will be swaths of people swarming central hubs (cities) and bringing their pain with them.
Most articles I've read on this subject focus on political solutions to homelessness. They might want new housing programs, new training programs, shelters, etc. Some of these might temporarily work, but none of them solve a primary issue: in our current socioeconomic system, if you are unwilling or unable to follow the prescribed methods, you will be destroyed. This has nothing to do with effort or work ethic. The fact remains that you do not have the option to build your own shelter, grow your own food, or move about freely. You can achieve some of these things by either inheriting treasures or falling in line long enough to get there. A "training program" is something that may equip you to survive the current system, but it does nothing to free us from corporate tyranny.
Ironically, the very system that demands cooperation is also the one that fosters the deranged and corrupted. How do you tell if someone on the street is someone 'down on their luck', or a two-faced manipulator who can't get a job because they're a sociopath? You can't, really. One way for these people to survive is to play on people's emotions and make $50/hour for panhandling. They rely completely on a city's centralized infrastructure to support them. In the wild, they would have zero chance for survival, because they do not have the empathy necessary to work with others, and they don't have the desire for real meaning.
It's terrible if you judge wrong in either case. You're either being used, or you're turning your back on a fellow man/woman who needs help.
For most people, it's just easier to dismiss them all as fucked up. Yet even if that were the case, we are paying no attention to the conditions that creates deranged people - lack of moral instruction, lack of true education, and a death sentence for not serving an industrial purpose.
