I just watched an interview clip where Conor Skehan (an Irish housing official) talked about the pitfalls of pulling on people's heartstrings. His point was that people are pulled into action when humans say they have no shelter - and this could be used as manipulation. The headline for the article I read about the interview focused on Mr. Skehan calling homelessness 'normal'. Because he called it normal, the publication that wrote about the interview is banking on its readers to think that that is a polarizing thing to say - it's their click bait.
In the eleven years that I have been documenting homelessness in the US, I would agree that homelessness is normal. No person in any city I have visited has ever said to me, "We don't have any homeless here."
The interviewer asks Conor Skehan if it being normal makes it right. It seems as if the interview's subtext is this:
Skehan:
People need to calm down and not react to people crying 'homeless' because you could be getting scammed.
Interviewer:
We need to hype the heck out of this any way we can to get the public to support getting people off of the streets.
Here is the crux of the dilemma. People are talking about the same thing with different life values attached to it. Homelessness is not like cancer where people have pretty clear views on the subject.
The views on cancer tend to be:
1. Cancer is bad.
2. Getting cancer is bad.
3. A cure for cancer would be good.
4. Other than with lung and skin cancer, cancer just happens. It's not 'your fault'.
Arguments against curing cancer tend to be:
1. We can't cure cancer.
2. We should put money into preventing cancer instead.
3. Curing cancer is too expensive.
4 The money is in treating cancer, not curing it (no one is [publicly] a proponent of this argument).
If we try to do the same thing with homelessness, it gets ugly pretty quickly.
The views on homelessness tend to be:
1. Homelessness is bad - but some people want to be homeless.
2. Homeless people are - well I won't publicly say that they are bad, and I'm sure some are fine people but drugs and mental illness and scammers and lazy people.
3. A cure for homeless would be good, but I don't see why do I have to put effort into someone else's life. I've got my own problems.
4. I would never be homeless. They did something to get themselves into that situation.
5. Poor bastards. I feel sorry for some of them.
Arguments against solving homelessness tend to be:
1. I will never say we can't solve homelessness because that's bad PR and I am a giving person but I will never back a futile endeavor. Our society fights wars to win and not to perpetually lose battles. Why can't they just solve their own problems?
2. Families need to take care of their own - or people should have enough money to support themselves.
3. I don't want to pay for their mistakes.
4. (Privately) There's no money to be made in solving homelessness. It's a sink-hole.
5. It's not my problem to solve, it's homeless people's or The City's problem.
The above list can grow and grow and people will continually argue about the points and how to approach them. We get caught up in the judgment of being homeless and it clouds any directive we start with. It also makes it hard to 'market'. Talking about homelessness in a directed soundbyte or headline can be difficult because people come to those words and concepts with different attachments.
So what do we do? I focus on getting specific people off of the street and back to being self-sustained. This way, I keep the dialogue contained to that person's situation and needs. Homelessness is not cancer. A homeless person is not a group of mutating cells that can be treated in a single systematic way. People are far more complex than cancer cells and we don't even fully understand cancer cells. How can we expect to understand and support a whole disparate population of people loosely tied together by the fact that they don't have stable roofs over their heads?
Homelessness is normal. But, I don't think we should accept it. We should work to get people stable - because we enjoy living in a stable society. And, we should look past the click bait and into each specific situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment