It’s become an American dream to one day have a life in a one of the country’s large, sprawling urban cities. Sadly, to many of those dreamers, living in the alleyways and under the overpasses of those metropolises has become a very real nightmare. And not only do homeless individuals have to deal with the fact that they lack the resources to attain suitable housing for themselves and sometimes even their families, they have to try to avoid becoming another statistic among those who have been murdered, raped, abused, and further neglected.
Modern society has been continuously conditioned to treat the homeless as less than human and this has led to laws being created that dehumanize them even further. It isn't even a gender or race issue because homelessness occurs across a diverse variety of people and cannot be pinpointed on a certain group. I have become more aware of the very real rift that exists between the homeless and the rest of society and truly believe that even if housing can't be completely affordable for all, the outlook towards those who persevere despite it should be treated as no less than human beings.
It is a natural condition as a human to ignore and deflect problems, but it's a real crisis when those problems are actual human beings most on the brink of starvation, sanity, and even death. What needs to be fixed is the ignorance fixated on the homeless and the only way to mend this is to provide more information and possibilities to aid those in need to the public. Thankfully, there are a variety of ways a young college student like myself could get involved in improving the lives of the local homeless population. But the deal is that I know that I haven’t truly dedicated myself to these possibilities and I'm fairly sure that most of my peers are unaware and mostly uninvolved as well.
Unfortunately, when our generation thinks of homelessness, what usually pops up in our limited minds are the images of beggars on the side of the freeway and the slight hint of fear as we slowly edge the windows of our cars up. This narrow mindset that has been cultivated in our society has led to the awful treatment of humans in our own hometowns, let it be through the setting up of spikes in secluded corners of buildings where one could once find shelter from time to time or brutal treatment of homeless individuals by law enforcement regardless of their mental health or abilities. The treatment of these very real people have reduced to a kind of pest that our society seems to want to get rid of instead of nurture, aid, and support so that instead of ridding the streets of bodies, we can get them in homes and jobs. It's a kind of human kindness and understanding that has become rare when it comes to "problematic" individuals.
Los Angeles, my hometown, has become notorious because of its large homeless population, including the well known Skid Row which "houses" much of them. But in my experiences volunteering at soup kitchens in LA I’ve found that no matter what background had brought them to their current situation like addiction, military, or mental health issues, they still expressed gratitude like no other and treated us in the kitchen like the human beings we all are. It's this kind of connection I've found with these individuals that makes me question why abuse of the homeless that sometimes ends in murder has passed by mostly unnoticed in our society. Just recently last year, a homeless man was killed by LAPD right on infamous Skid Row and although thankfully it caused an uproar in the community because of the excessive brutality displayed by the police, not much was done for the rights and safety of the those that still occupied the street.
The public unquestioningly needs to be made aware of the real statistics and dangers that the homeless are faced with not only by the loneliness and lack of safety provided by the streets but the intense fear and even hatred shown towards them. They're not there because they just happened to decide to leave the comfort of their homes, it takes serious situations to have a person's lifestyle taken away from them by those circumstances. So before anything, there needs to be real connections made to improve someone's life and either prevent or save them from a life of sleeping on pavement. Not only do more people need to become involved but there needs to be support from people in our government as well. Our government is designed to aid and speak for the majority and if a majority of our generation speaks out and does something about the mistreatment of the homeless, a vicious cycle can eventually be stopped. It turns the unspoken for into human beings with lives that need to be fulfilled, not shortened and ignored out in our neighborhoods.If more opportunities for work or housing were available to them instead of denied because of their only assumed dubious backgrounds, I'm sure any kind of aid would be taken and would lead to less human beings on the street and more living the lives they want to pursue.
