Brent Harold: Homeless problem demands attitude overhaul

Homelessness is one of the perennially running sores of what we like to think of as the richest country on earth. This newspaper often runs stories about homelessness because, as in many cities, it is an ever-present feature of our lives, along with mountains, saguaro cactuses, and a lively downtown.

As with other running sores such as immigration, the main homelessness story is our longstanding haplessness about coming up with a solution. “Sweeping” the homeless out of downtown parks where they are an upsetting sight (like sweeping dirt under the rug, out of sight, out of mind) is of course only a Band-aid. Likewise finding another piece of turf for the homeless to alight until neighbors complain or developers move in.

As with many intractable problems, the solution must go deeper than Band-aids, in understanding the shortcomings of how the problem is presently framed, how it is thought and felt about.

The prevailing idea (and the feelings based on that idea) is that the homeless deserve their homelessness. We might not all feel comfortable putting it so harshly, we may (or may not) think they deserve a bit of our pity for their pitifulness. But the homeless, this alien blight on our city, are not like us. We would never sink so low as the guy sleeping on a sidewalk as we pass by on the way to a restaurant. They are losers at the game of life, inherently inferior to us.

Call it the “devil take the hindmost” idea.

To our “we” the homeless are “they.”

It’s as if we were to refuse to see our hurt toe as part of our body.

(I venture to call this the prevailing idea in part by consulting my own default mode too much of the time.)

The other idea, wherein lies the possibility of a solution, is that homelessness is not the failure of the homeless but the failure of our economy and way of life. For this other idea and attitude there’s another common phrase: “There but for the grace of God go I”.

As Jennifer Egan writes in a recent New Yorker magazine article about “supportive” housing for the homeless about a sometimes-homeless person she follows in the article, “Had Lisa grown up with the advantages I had, she might have accomplished anything.”

“Advantages” suggests that the economic system is to blame. Ms. Egan doesn’t give herself credit for being a comfortable, well-housed writer, and Lisa doesn’t deserve blame for her troubled, often homeless life.

The homeless have fallen into the cracks in the system, and it’s the fault not of the fallen but of the cracks.

The solution to homelessness is not in sweeps, in a handout, or in feeling pity but starts with an attitude overhaul, from “Devil take the hindmost” to “There but for the grace of God go I.”

To translate into less theistic terms, the solution lies lies in acknowledging that, like poverty in general, homelessness is a systemic byproduct of our economy and the way of life based on it.

We enthusiastically agree that we want government (that is, “we” in the form of the government we vote for) to ease the life of those of the aging and more vulnerable with aid such as Medicare and Social Security, Since we all age eventually, the aging are embraced as part of our “we.”

Our hearts go out to victims of floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes and we expect our government to express our sympathy with aid for those victims. (There but for the grace of God…)

The solution to homelessness is in widening the embrace of our “we” to include the homeless and hold our government responsible for helping those whom the economic system for whatever reason has failed. And it seems pretty clear that such a solution starts with the intellectual and emotional overhaul of our prevailing way of viewing the homeless. With acknowledging that homelessness is our sore toe.

Or we could go on putting up with the problem and the Band-aid solutions, the only downside being continuing to pay what Jennifer Egan calls “the moral cost of homelessness.”