The Helpless

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too”.  

This is an excerpt from a speech President John F. Kennedy made on September 12,1962 challenging the country to send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth. It seemed to be impossible at the time but seven years later the goal was accomplished.

The term “homeless” is a descriptive one but the condition is not so easily understood. Once upon a time, people without a home, who wandered the streets begging were called bums or vagrants. The police would arrest them on the grounds that they could not provide proof of residence and that they were most likely committing crimes in an effort to survive. These disenfranchised people were fined, jailed, and often times run out of town. They were considered an undesirable element. It was a problem that was dealt with by criminal punishment and exclusion.

Today this same group of people are now called “homeless”. Our new enlightened approach is to support them in their state of homelessness but to do very little help them rise out of that lowly condition. We view them as a class of people who survive with guile and petty crime. We accept that they have stolen the shopping cart and almost everything in it; we are relieved when we see them sleeping in someone else’s doorway and not our own; we choose not to think about where they go to the bathroom. This class of “homeless” people, which exist below our poorest, have become a documented group in our society and by giving them that label we have shirked our responsibility to help them. Our collective sensibilities have gradually learned to accept the “homeless” as part of our world.

Sometimes the descriptive term given in the initial stages of a crisis becomes a road block to a plan of action. “Global Warming” is a term used interchangeably with the phenomenon of climate change, but it does not tell the whole story of the problem. It subsequently creates the illusion for some who live in denial that cold temperatures prove that climate change is a hoax. Homelessness is a term that doesn’t begin to address the underlying circumstances of those living on the street. It merely satisfies the public consciousness and simultaneously relieves us all of personal responsibility. Perhaps if we called these millions of unfortunate souls ”helpless people” then we would feel a need to respond to their circumstances and give aid. Let me say this for everyone, including myself to hear and to admit. We have all avoided eye contact as we past the person standing in the doorway that will become their bed as night approaches, cold and dangerous. We have all sat in the car hoping for the light to change as a partially clothed man or woman standing close to our window in the light rain flashes a make-shift sign asking for money for food. It is true that they do not have a home but more specifically they are helpless. Equally true is the fact that they are somebody’s son or daughter, brother or sister, perhaps mother or father, and they are most probably an American. As a society, when we abdicate responsibility for those unfortunate people who, for whatever reason, cannot cope with the complexities of this world, we lose the right to call ourselves civilized. Rather than hiding in the nationally self-serving idea that homelessness is a choice of the lazy or a problem that is impossible to solve we could see it for what it really is; people living in dire circumstances that they are helpless to change. We could approach it not as something that is an unavoidable part of a capitalist society but as an emergency that calls for sustained action and solution.

To solve the problems of the "helpless" is a daunting task that requires a concerted effort of many individuals and organizations. The problem and its solutions are multi-faceted and socially complicated but they do not begin to rival the complexities of space travel. It is time for us take stock in a national history of unreachable goals reached and unbeatable enemies vanquished; to use that knowledge to find the strength to tackle the ever growing calamity of the “helpless” who are barely surviving without a home. We can face the problem inspired and emboldened by the remembrance of John F. Kennedy’s explanation of why we except challenges…”Not because they are easy but because they are hard”.