Hobophobia

This graph, off of a post on the Sociological Images blog on the Society Pages, is the main message of the Occupy Wall Street protesters and the inspiration for today's post. When they say, "we are the 99%", they're referring to the minuscule 1% of the population that controls about 40% of the nation's wealth. But regardless of whether you agree with the Occupy movement, there is no denying the facts of wealth inequality. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.

This raises the greater issue of how people relate to those in lower socio-economic situations; generally, those with less money are pitied, or else seen as dependent on the wealth of the upper classes and treated with the same paternalistic attitude as the one embodied by imperial America in the early 1900s. But what especially interests me is how virtually the entire country, not just the richest 5%, treats those with nearly no money and nowhere to live: the homeless.

Because I'm writing a piece on the issue for my Speech team in my high school, I've been doing a lot of research into the plight and treatment of the homeless today. What I have found is shocking: people think the homeless are lazy, stupid, mentally ill, or addicted to drugs, otherwise they would have dusted themselves off and gotten a job already. Otherwise, they are considered as simple children in need of a parental hand to guide them to the enlightened realm of home-ownership. Even worse, especially since the early 2000s, the amount of violence against the homeless has shot up, with hundreds being brutally murdered without reason since 2006.

Yet the face of homelessness has changed drastically since 2008; with the economic downfall, more and more ordinary people find themselves without economic means to pay for their homes, moving into temporary or charity housing in order to get by. These are families with children in schools and hardworking individuals with jobs, currently homeless, but fitting none of the stereotypes of a dirty old man with a beard and a coat.

To discover the reason behind the relationship between the homeless and everyone else, we must look to the human tendency to project the situations we experience onto our own lives; as we encounter someone living under newspapers, we are subconsciously aware of how little separates them from us. All they'd need is a house and they could be our neighbor, or maybe even a member of our family. This painful awareness is what makes us so uncomfortable when we see someone sitting on a street corner with a sign asking for food, and this discomfort is implemented differently in everyone: as fear, as disgust, as sadness, as sympathy, or even as violence.