Blue Notes from a Red Zone

The Power of Myth

Recently, I had a conversation with a young man, who thought to engage my attention with a story about a homeless person looking for a handout from a minister.

I interrupted the narrative early on, and said, “So because one man was unwilling to get in a car with a stranger who may or may not have been taking him to a work site, you believe all homeless men are lazy, shiftless and manipulative?”

Since this young man very much wants to marry my daughter, he instantly backed down and said, “No, of course not.”

“Then what,” I asked, “was the point of this story?”

This conversation came back to me when reading a local newspaper column this morning, in which the author described homeless people thusly: “These are our dirty, our tired, our poor, our troubled, our hungry…making choices many of us wouldn’t make.”

This particular columnist is a generous, caring person who tries to do a great deal for our local homeless. But she and Stephen demonstrate the incredible power of myth, especially when it serves to comfort the comfortable. The myth is that the homeless make up a mysterious, underground community of “them,” who have nothing to do with the larger city of “us.”

This myth, while widely embraced, has little connection to the truth. And although it serves its purpose of reinforcing our belief in our security, it has its destructive side. This is illustrated by the incredible reluctance of local churches to offer cold weather shelter, and the even greater reluctance of our community to open an emergency shelter for the homeless.

The fact is that homeless people are very little different from anyone else. Head down to a soup kitchen, or day labor facility at 5:00 a.m., or an emergency shelter if you live in a community where such things exist. The homeless people you will meet are as clean as they can possibly make themselves, and are as a whole stunningly articulate and often well-educated.

The overwhelming majority work consistently and dependably. They have skills I can only envy. For example, one intermittently homeless man manages a church Saturday lunch kitchen. He gets a budget of $50 a week, and feeds 80 or more persons at a time. Others are carpenters, painters, and craftsmen. Most are eager to make better lives for themselves, and should they receive adequate resources now, will never be homeless again.

The reasons why these men, women and children are homeless are as numerous as the number of men, women and children themselves. Causes range from the lack of adequate care for the mentally ill, to family abandonment, to medical disasters, to the low wages offered as contrasted to the high cost of housing and transportation.

But in the end, the reasons why people wind up homeless, or how they lead their lives while they are homeless, should not matter to us. What should matter is that these are human beings, beloved of God, who should be beloved of us as well.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 3:08 PM