The Myth of Homeless Nobility

One of the most consistently irritating, frustrating, and ultimately misguided notions, where the concept of “the homeless” is concerned, is the attitude that the homeless are, first and foremost, victims — that they are all members of an underclass we might call the Noble Poor.  Any reasonable human being feels compassion for those who are less fortunate, certainly.  Nobody wishes ill on their fellow humans as a class, not unless he or she is some manner of misanthrope.  Another way to say this is that another man’s prosperity does not take a single dollar from my own wallet.  I neither begrudge him his wealth nor blame him for my own poverty.

A man or woman who is homeless may indeed be a victim of any number of things: circumstance, genetics, bad choices… and the degree to which those factors are the result of  his or her direct actions determines just how “sorry” we should be for that person.  For that matter, even when a man destroys himself by his own hand, we often feel badly for him.  We feel pity.  We feel sympathy.  We feel empathy.

Our natural reaction, when confronted by the sight of a shoeless man begging on the street, or a woman wearing a winter coat and pushing a stolen shopping cart full of cans on a summer day, is to feel compassion.  Often our next reaction, and the source of much of our empathy and even commiseration, is the thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

But, in all honesty, is that really true?  Does a random act of chance determine whether I sleep in my car, in a cardboard box on the street, or in a warm bed?  Are each of us really only a paycheck or two away from becoming street people ourselves — panhandlers subsisting on the pity of others?  Certainly the scions of popular culture’s wisdom, the talking heads who tell us what to think through countless media venues, want us to believe that only the flimsiest of barriers separates each of us from personal ruin.  It is they who repeat, with wide-eyed credulity, their breathless aphorisms in this regard. If you and I are, as they assert, only a couple of paychecks away from homelessness ourselves, why, we would be callous, pompous, arrogant fools to believe the homeless were anything but the face of our own potential misfortune.

The reality, however, is that this simply isn’t true.

More than chance, more than fortune, more than random luck, determines whether you are a productive citizen.  Most “normal” people, most productive members of society, spend a considerable portion of every waking day working and worrying about this very eventuality. Striving not to be homeless, to provide the basic needs of life and living, occupies most people’s thoughts every waking moment that is not devoted to some other specific purpose.  Those of us who work, work hard — because we know that our actions separate us from homelessness, from failure.

This is not a sense of superiority over those who fall as far as any living being can… this is a sense of control.  By this I mean that those of us who do not believe we are “a paycheck away from homelessness” have an internal locus of control.  We believe we can act to change our circumstances, that we can do whatever is necessary to make sure we and those for whom we care do not end up begging on the streets. We understand that, barring catastrophic illness, we will never not work.  We will never not act to prevent our being homeless. We will never not fight to keep the wolf from the door.  We also know that our failings, our tragedies, are the results of our own mistakes.  They are our responsibility.

But what of circumstances truly beyond our control… or even the consequences of our own mistakes?  No man or woman is perfect.  We all do the wrong thing, or make the wrong choices.  What happens when this, or external factors we cannot alter, leave us destitute?

In those tragic scenarios, for good or for ill, for right or for wrong, we are not alone.  In a society that offers a very elaborate “safety net” of public services and private charities, there really is no reason that any individual should have to live in the open, on an urban street, with no alternatives — unless they do so by choice or because they literally lack the capacity to conceive of a different way. 

What do I mean?  Most people who are homeless are homeless because there is something very wrong with them.  They may be survivors, but they aren’t copers.  They may adapt to adversity, but they don’t overcome it; they simply have learned how to tread water no matter how deep or tragic the sea.

Whenever we speak of “the homeless” we are of course engaging in some generalizations. It’s a question of proportion, however. There are exceptions; there are people who are homeless quite literally through no fault of their own, and there are people who, while they’ve made bad choices, survive because they are, indeed, survivors at heart. But this is not the rule; this is not the truth.  Most homeless people aren’t nuclear families mistreated by heartless employers or cruel bankers.  Most street people do not have hearts of gold and are not wise beyond their stations. The exceptions prove the rule… no matter what popular entertainment would show you or have you believe.

The Treatment Advocacy Center estimates, in its fact sheet on the homeless, that one third of the 600,000 homeless persons (as estimated by the Department of Health and Human Services) are schizophrenics or manic depressives. Healing Hands, a publication of the HCH Clinicians’ Network, estimates that 38% of homeless adults have mental health problems, while fully 46% of homeless men report alcohol problems (and 30% of them report drug problems).

The Treatment Advocacy Center’s Fact Sheet cites a 1993 study of HIV among homeless men in a New York City shelter, in which 19 percent of those living in the shelter tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. According to a later study (April, 2002) in the Journal of Clinical Astroenterology (Viral Hepatitis and Other Infectious Diseases in a Homeless Population), “Chronic hepatitis C and co-infections are common among the homeless population.”

Still another study, Ectoparasitism and Vector-Borne Diseases in 930 Homeless People From Marseilles, published in the journal Medicine in January 2005, concludes grimly, “Homeless people are particularly exposed to ectoparasites…Over 4 years, 930 homeless people were enrolled. Lice were found in 22% and were associated with hypereosinophilia… Twenty-seven patients (3%) with scabies were treated… The uncontrolled louse infestation of this population should alert the community to the possibility of severe re-emerging louse-borne infections.”

These statistics obviously support the conclusion that street people are a personal security threat. The homeless endanger you.  You should treat them, not with cruelty, but with extreme caution. Not long ago I spoke on the phone with Becky Blanton, a journalist who spent a great deal of time, voluntarily, living as a “homeless” person to get perspective on this from the inside. Despite the fact that she is definitely sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, she agrees with my position on the personal security aspect of this issue — and said as much in her ebook. She concluded, “Being in need does not make someone living on the streets more safe, and quite often makes them less safe.”

Why, then, do we try so hard to make the homeless noble?  Why do we become, collectively, so very angry whenever anyone dares to point this out? It seems like common sense to me… so why are so many of us willing to denounce the messenger as a stereotyping, hateful hypocrite who lacks compassion? You can have all the compassion in the world and still see reality for what it is.

If I am mentally ill, I am not responsible for my own decisions… and I cannot be trusted to make or take them.  A very large percentage of the homeless population suffers from mental illness.  While we may certainly feel compassion for them, we would be fools to trust them or to ignore the fact that mentally ill people are frequently violent and unpredictable.  This is because they are mentally ill. You don’t hand your car keys to a madman.  You don’t stop to chat with a man who speaks to invisible people.  You don’t invite a schizophrenic into your home and tell him where the kitchen knives are.  This is common sense; one does not place trust in those who cannot be trusted to behave according to rational, commonly accepted guidelines of normal human conduct.  That is why we say they are ill, after all.  And if a man may be carrying contagious diseases, you certainly don’t hug him, no matter how sorry you feel for him. And finally, if he has a substance abuse problem, why, he’s mentally ill for all intents and purposes when he is in the grip of his addiction (or suffering withdrawl from it).

Self-defense, and the ongoing actions we take to ensure our personal security, require a ruthlessly logical acceptance of reality.  If we do not accept what is real, we cannot adequately prepare for it.  Those who might do us harm don’t care what we think about how things ought to be.  Wishful thinking is not a strategy.  By the same token, believing we are not in control of our actions, that the winds of random chance control our fate despite our earnest work to the contrary, is surrendering our will and our abilities — sacrificing them on the altar of popular culture’s collectivist mentality.  Those with an external locus of control believe those who are not homeless have merely won some lottery of life events.

Reality is different.  You are not homeless… because you refuse to be.  Acknowledging this does not make you a bad person, any more than seeing the homeless for the threat they represent makes you a hateful, uncaring, arrogant hypocrite. 

Quite the contrary; understanding these facts simply makes you a realist.