I agree that people lack compassion, but for a substantial number, it’s not ‘for no reason.’
Many people’s interactions with the homeless population are very negative, typically involving theft, drug use, and terrifying mental health breaks. Obviously, that’s very much an issue of selection bias since it’s typically the same few who give the entire homeless population a bad reputation.
I think if people gave more of their time to help the homeless and others who have fallen through the cracks of society, a lot of the cruel words and horrible treatment directed toward our less fortunate would diminish substantially. A few hours a week volunteering at your local food bank, shelter, church kitchen, nursing home, etc. Is a small inconvenience but an absolutely huge help.
Additionally, we must rethink how we treat repeat offenders and public criminality. A lot of the time police won’t even respond to a reported bike theft or incidence of public drug use. The offenders are a danger and nuisance not only to themselves and the general public at large, but also, and most substantially, to other homeless people.
Most people’s only interaction with the homeless is seeing them from a distance, and then making assumptions about them
Crotcheting one adult sized blanket can take like a month, wtf is going on with this lady
It’s almost like someone is lying on the internet. Which is impossible, since we all know that’s illegal.
A lot of people here are looking for a philosophical answer, but I personally think it’s really just a class issue. Most people in the US don’t like to hear it, but our class structure is practically a caste system.
People generally despise the people of other classes (or castes), above or below. This is reinforced by segregation and media. Ultra Rich > Rich > Upper Class > Middle Class > Lower Class > Welfare Class > Homeless. All these groups live in separate communities with specific media environments that vilify the “others”. These groups only ever interact in ways with clear hierarchy. This is only exacerbated with the death of third spaces.
Having been middle class and sliding down the ladder to the point of imminent homelessness, I’ve been struck by the fact that the distribution of assholes for each group is pretty much the same. Over and over again, I’ve seen nearly no contact between classes to dispel the images projected by each class’s respective media ecosystem.
This country is so fundamentally segregated and divided that I really don’t know how it can be changed. There is really no clean and fair way to actually inform people about the similarities between people.
I’ve lived on the streets, in a car, in a house with 10 people so we could cover rent, in slums and have crawled up to solidly middle class. I think it used to be easier to do that than it is now, like every year it gets more stratified with more slipping below average (meaning the mean) but also harder to dig out. Not impossible, but it was hard enough as person of able body and mind back then - I can’t imagine how hard now.
At work in my department only one of us has never been very poor, I do think there is some social mobility but for each of us there must be hundreds who did the same things and it didn’t work.
There’s certainly a strained mobility in the country. I said it was a “caste system” primarily because from my limited understanding of the Indian caste system. Where people are born into their caste and experience an entirely separate culture from the other castes. It’s possible that I misinterpreted what classism is and that’s a part of it as well.
one of the major traits of a caste system is that there’s no mobility down or uup
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
That’s a good quote and I’ll have to take a read of the book, but I actually think this perspective is actually part of the problem I’m talking about. To the eye of a famous accomplished author, it would appear that people below them glorify and aspire to the people of his class.
I mainly take issue with the gross oversimplification of all people below his financial status as poor and self hating. This was perhaps true at the time it was written, but I think the situation has changed since 1969 if this was true then. I think the problem isn’t really some kind of nebulous cultural inconsistency, but it’s a systemic failure in media like a said previously.
Middle-ish class people don’t talk about how poor people deserve to be poor; not even in the very conservative area I live in. They just don’t talk about them at all. That is except in the context of a news story they heard and every news story only covers poverty in two contexts: crime and societal decay. Poor people and their communities are only shown as dangerous things that people should avoid. This is unfortunately true in a lot of ways, but not the whole story and it turns every poor person into a potential junkie, gang member, or crazy person who should be avoided.
Media is definitely to blame, especially if we go the other way in the way it worships celebrities as people worthy of praise for arguably doing not much and being in the right place at the right time whilst having the right connections. It gives an impossible ideal for success that appears to reward merit but mostly rewards narcissism and self-promotion, and tries to sell these as viable paths for young adults that is free for the taking for anyone of any background.
I do also think that the middle-ish class are somewhat silently complicit, even if they say nothing bad about those less fortunate. They will never say anything bad, but they will also not allow for social housing to be built in their backyards whilst sympathetically tutting about it.
I’d argue that the only thing that’s changed since 1969 is the open hatred had the higher classes had to their poor, whereas now it’s more a source of embarassment to shut out and not talk about.
I was listening to an episode of “It Could Happen Here” about LA fire and mutual aid. What stood out was the fact that the LAPD was sweeping homeless camps DURING the fire and that people who had lost their homes came up to the organizers asking to get public housing and we’re shocked that the wait list is years long.
Pretty bleak world we’ve created.
Yup, a ton of previously fortunate people got a crash course in what the system is really like for people who needed it.
Does she realize that the fire victims are homeless because of the fire?
fire burns down people’s homes
makes blankets for fire victims
takes blankets back because fire victims are homeless now
Astounding
“This is not the Instagram post I had envisioned. Request denied.”
It isn’t for no reason. Victim blaming shields people from accepting how scary reality can be. It is the blanket of the cowardly and heartless.
Remember though they love rags to riches “stories”. Someone that does make it through and they’ll talk about how all it takes is hard work. It’s humanized when they meet someone but not so much otherwise.
Hatred of the poor is universal phenomenon that cuts across all cultures, and yet does not even have a name. The closest we have is “classism”, but this is something different. This isn’t a preference or a bias, people go out of their way to abuse the poor. Abusing the poor fills some kind of emotional need.
Hatred of the poor is universal phenomenon that cuts across all cultures, and yet does not even have a name.
I think it’s a kind of Just-world fallacy, “If I see people suffering, they must be bad people who did something to deserve it, because the world is just and people get what they deserve.”
Kind of a separate thing, but I think the psychological need fulfilled by that fallacy comes down to “I do not need to worry about this bad thing happening to me because I believe I am a good person and bad things don’t normally happen to good people. Not worrying about this is important because my very busy life has not given me the time to develop any other coping skills for that kind worry, and so if I did dwell on how this bad thing could very easily happen to me I would probably just be overcome with anxiety and depression.”
This, 100%. How people view the homeless (as a group, if not individually) is the quintessential, textbook example of just-world fallacy.
And your interpretation that it is a coping mechanism is also accurate. People need to resolve the cognitive dissonance of “I’m a good person, and good people help the homeless, but I’m not helping the homeless for X,Y,Z (possibly legitimate) reasons”. One of the easiest ways to resolve that is the just-world fallacy
The rich man’s wealth is in the city
Vexation of the soul is vanity
Destruction of the poor is their poverty
The poor man’s wealth is in a holy, holy place–Peter Tosh, “Fools Die (For Want of Wisdom)”
Good thing there is definitely no overlap between those two groups of people.
Just no words
Homeless people are a target of this administration.
The goal is to criminalize homelessness, for prison labor. My state is currently trying to ban all homeless services except for the two largest cities.
The hatred is motivated by the “Just World” fallacy I think - that homeless people must have done something to deserve their condition. If you believe in a “Just World,” you’re comforted with the knowledge that it’ll never be you on the streets, you work hard/don’t make bad decisions.
Again, I don’t think the fallacy causes this behaviour. The fallacy is adopted as a way of coping with the fear of becoming homeless. This is important because you cannot change the behaviour of a person holding the fallacy by successfully refuting the fallacy, because the fallacy isn’t the reason for their behaviour. It is merely a cover that provides moral license for their bad (ie, unempathetic, uncompassionate) behavior. If you strip it away, they will immediately feel compelled to find a different one, and their behaviour will not change. You have to address the underlying emotions that give need for these fallacies in the first place.
I understand not wanting homeless people close to you - they are dirty, smelly, prone to drugs and crime (which is why they must be helped and housed). But wanting to harm them remotely - wtf
Yeah I’m connected with a group that feeds the homeless, provides sleeping pads and connects them with other available resources. The organization has a handful of acres on their site and had tried to allow people to camp there but it was a complete failure on multiple levels. The local govt kept trying to shut it down and insurance was dropping coverage. But the clencher was the twenty dumpsters full of trash that appeared in just a few months, and all of the needles everywhere. There were three or four really good people who stayed there for a little while but most just trashed everything. We still feed them though.
How were these people expected to dispose of their trash? My household generates nearly a bag of trash per person per week, mostly food and drink packaging I think. A couple dozen people could fill a dumpster a week. But it simply disappears if we leave it by the street in front of my home. How does that work when you’re homeless?
A lot of the trash isn’t generated. It’s collected. A homeless person isn’t going out and buying stuff off Amazon or food that has lots of packaging. But if you live around homeless folks you can often recognize them by the pile of junk they’ve collected from various sources, most of which they don’t have any actual use for. Many just seem to have a compulsion to packrat things.
There was a dumpster on site. They didn’t use it. Also, what peregrin5 said.
I believe it’s a thought process along the following: “I hate seeing homeless people living on the streets in my neighborhood. They are smelly and cause crime and take our taxes while doing nothing or causing harm. I worked hard to save a lot of money to own a house in this neighborhood and they are ruining it while living here for free. If I help them, they’ll continue to stay in this area. I don’t want to make them feel welcome in my neighborhood at all so I will not donate my blankets to them.”
We have a high homeless population in my city and homeowners here all have that mindset, even though we are a very liberal city.
I feel like in this case it was… “I wove these blankets for wealthy people impacted by the fires so they can owe me praise & fame. I don’t give a shit about other people other than myself.”
Yes, I understood your point of view, and I disagree. It is not a “rational” chain of thought like that. It begins with the emotion. The emotion is not a reaction to the chain of thought, the chain of thought is a rationalization for the emotion.
I didn’t respond to you so not sure why you are acting like I did. For the sake of discussion though, both can be true. It may start as disgust and then they can form a logical rationale for why this disgust is warranted in their opinion.
Not sure what your actual argument is though. Are you saying that their disgust/discomfort with homeless people in their neighborhoods should be dismissed because it doesn’t start off as logical?
People don’t come to the decision, “I don’t want homeless people near me,” for those rational (at least, rational for the sake of discussion) reasons. Rather they use those things as rationalizations for their feelings of disgust, fear of impurity, and insecurity about their own potential poverty.
Some of those on the street lost theor homes in the fire
No, the rich ones who are down on their luck! Not the poor ones who fucking earned homelessness
What’s she going to do with 100 crocheted blankets now?
She’s going to take them back home and make them thicker and warmer for the homeless people…
Nah, she’s going to give them away to people she likes instead of dirty, lazy homeless people.
Burn them so no poor person can get their hands on em
It’ll be a public burning replete with #maga swag for sale.
