I watched someone get looked through today. Ignored like trash on the sidewalk. Nobody yelled at them. Nobody physically touched them. One person glanced in their direction, then through them, then their SEP Field activated (Somebody Else's Problem Field of View). That person stepped out of the way like you would a puddle, or a pile of dog shit, to avoid being in the same space as the human they ignored. She’s homeless, and she heard it. You can always tell when someone hears it. Her face didn’t change, but something went out behind her eyes.
I am now thinking about that and the rot of our society. The rot that has humans stepping around other humans. That look took half a second. She sees it all day.
The story we tell ourselves
Our society has already come up with ways to justify that rotten behavior. They’re all addicts, They’re all sick, It’s a disease. Those lines aren’t really about her. They’re about us. If she’s broken in a way we aren’t, then what happened to her can’t happen to us. The explanation gives us somewhere to stand. That explanation is a lie.
Some people on the street do struggle with addiction or mental illness, and that’s real. But “some” became “all” because “all” lets us stop looking. It turns a person into a category, and a category is easy to walk past. It's the label we can scrape off of our shoe as we walk by.
How it actually goes
Here’s one version, and I know people it has happened to. A company folds, or a market turns, and a job disappears. Savings cover a few months, then a few weeks. Rent is the first thing to go, then the car, and the car was how you got to interviews. Applications ask for an address, and now you don’t have a clean one. Each loss makes the next one easier, and none of it takes a single bad choice. It takes a bad year stacked on a bad month.
Nobody wakes up and applies for this. Most of the people I know who ended up outside never saw it coming and spent a long time trying to climb back before anyone noticed.
What the look costs
Having no home is hard. Being treated like you stopped counting makes it worse, because it tells a person that the world has already filed them under gone, and people who believe that stop trying to come back.
We’re also not as far from that sidewalk as it feels from a warm kitchen. A roof is a good thing, and I hope you keep yours. But most of us sit a handful of bad breaks away from that corner, and what separates us from her is mostly how the dice landed.
What we can do
We can’t fix housing in an afternoon, but we can refuse to pass someone without seeing them. We can look at them and say hello. We can give what we have, or give nothing, but not give them the look. It costs us almost nothing, and it may be the only human contact they get all day.
She was somebody’s kid and somebody’s coworker, and she’s somebody’s crew. She still is.
We are all human. Let’s act like it.
Captain Linke D. Scott
Notoriously evil. Disgustingly vile. Still looking you in the eye.
0 comments