It’s pretty easy when confronted with some of the homeless in our town to forget that once they were children with hopes and dreams that probably didn’t include addictions or homelessness. Then you read about a vet whose belongings were dumped by the city because he didn’t move them fast enough. You can no longer ignore our common humanity when that vet says one of the things he lost was a checkerboard from his childhood that his father had carved from spruce.
The homeless are not unlike you and me except for some really bad luck or some really bad addictions or some really bad choices.
The problem of what to do about the homeless is one of the most difficult we face. For most of us, the face of homelessness is a dirty, disheveled inebriate standing on a street corner with a hand written sign on a piece of torn cardboard asking for money.
The idea that these people are squatting in our public spaces, often causing them to be both dirty and dangerous, makes most of us pretty angry. We want out children to be able to walk by a green spot without being accosted by a drunk. Women want to be able to jog along trails in the middle of the city without fear of being raped by some drug addict. We all want to be able to enjoy those spaces without coming upon people passed out, human excrement drying in our path, or someone scary and half drooling from alcohol coming down the path towards us.
Seeing the homeless as human beings deserving of any dignity or rights can be really hard when these are our images of them. The hidden homeless, the mom and kids running from domestic violence, the hard worker who was just one paycheck away from disaster when disaster struck, these are not the faces we put to the homeless because during the day they blend in and aren’t scary. Once we go home at night, we don’t get to see them bedding down in their cars or a corner of the park.
It’s easy when that drunk stumbles down the street to look past their humanity and only see the problem. Defending them as the ACLU is currently doing in a lawsuit to stop the city from disposing of their few and meager belongings is never going to win the ACLU a popularity contest. But sometimes you have to do something just because it’s the right thing to do.
If you think about it, Jesus and his apostles were probably some of the most famous homeless people in history. Jesus outright told his followers to give up everything and follow him. None of them had jobs, earned money for food or knew where they were going to sleep at night. Like Blanche DuBois, they depended on the kindness of strangers. They begged for food, slept under the stars and disdained ownership of material goods.
I wonder if Jesus was on earth today, wandering through Anchorage with 12 homeless men and a couple of women, living as best they could off the grid of material possessions, whether our community would treat them with compassion or hound them from one tent city to another?
A few weeks ago this paper ran an article about a Catholic nun who ministered to the homeless. The key word here is ministered to them. She wasn’t preaching to them. She wasn’t trying to save them from themselves. She wasn’t trying to make them change or offering her help on a quid pro quo basis. She was helping them because they were human beings and deserved to have some dignity and compassion in their lives.
I’m guessing there are a lot of people who reacted to her work the same way they reacted to the ACLU lawsuit. Even if they never said the words out loud, in their heads they were thinking that this was just enabling the homeless to continue their destructive lifestyle.
I can only say that doing the right thing isn’t always easy. Helping the homeless isn’t always popular. But those people who do are probably closer to the spirit of Christ than those of us who flinch and look the other way when that drunk stumbles towards our car.