I can’t prove it nowadays, but I once remarked that society should find a way for homeless people to be separated by how they became homeless.
The context was that homelessness is a spectrum and that being indiscriminate when doing anything related to the homeless downplays the enormous gap between forms of it. I’ve been on both sides of it before; I’ve technically been “homeless” (I’ve had a roof over my head for as long as I can remember, but it was often couch-hopping), as well as have done things related to the homeless. Sometimes I ask about it, I expect by now it might range between “I’m a teetotaler whose house burnt down and I’ve been on the streets ever since” to “I keep getting a home but keep losing it in shady gambles”. Surely homelessness is a case-by-case thing, right?
People are blind to these differences, however. To most outsiders, homelessness is just homelessness. From the outside, these things don’t come to mind when people are protective, so if you mention wanting to do it case-by-case, you feel the wrath of the population who I have seen seemingly insist I’m being discriminatory over victims of a sensitive topic. I think maybe a few hundred or so people weighed in against me. It was not only what many might call the most particularly severe example but also one of the earliest. The tragically “funny” thing is that it’s one of those things where most people immediately learn the reality of as soon as they become a victim of homelessness, actually interact with them, or even spend time in a psych ward like me because a lot of them turn themselves in because it means you’ll get care, so it becomes one of those things that’s said to be like a litmus test for if someone is genuinely associated with it versus someone who sees portrayals of it and tries to look like they are.
I can’t prove it nowadays, but I once remarked that society should find a way for homeless people to be separated by how they became homeless.
The context was that homelessness is a spectrum and that being indiscriminate when doing anything related to the homeless downplays the enormous gap between forms of it. I’ve been on both sides of it before; I’ve technically been “homeless” (I’ve had a roof over my head for as long as I can remember, but it was often couch-hopping), as well as have done things related to the homeless. Sometimes I ask about it, I expect by now it might range between “I’m a teetotaler whose house burnt down and I’ve been on the streets ever since” to “I keep getting a home but keep losing it in shady gambles”. Surely homelessness is a case-by-case thing, right?
People are blind to these differences, however. To most outsiders, homelessness is just homelessness. From the outside, these things don’t come to mind when people are protective, so if you mention wanting to do it case-by-case, you feel the wrath of the population who I have seen seemingly insist I’m being discriminatory over victims of a sensitive topic. I think maybe a few hundred or so people weighed in against me. It was not only what many might call the most particularly severe example but also one of the earliest. The tragically “funny” thing is that it’s one of those things where most people immediately learn the reality of as soon as they become a victim of homelessness, actually interact with them, or even spend time in a psych ward like me because a lot of them turn themselves in because it means you’ll get care, so it becomes one of those things that’s said to be like a litmus test for if someone is genuinely associated with it versus someone who sees portrayals of it and tries to look like they are.