Almost a month has passed since I started homeless life (including last month) – actually I should say homeless-ish life since I have some money to pay for food. Many people asked the reason, but this is not a planned study or anything like that, I just don’t have money to stay in a hostel. Luckily I learned a lot from this unusual life; I want to write about it this time.
I, very personally, think we should eradicate homelessness. As I said here, life without shelter prevents humans from reflecting on the meaning of life, or rather I should say homelessness forceshumans to be inhuman. Inhuman? It’s a quite severe word, but true.
Anthropologically “difference” is good news for society (I leaned this from Dave Snoden. Check this). It enhances social acknowledgments for different culture, value, and eventually lives; oppositely you can see this from the fact that past torturers or massacre begin from denying “similarities” among social groups.
However, the difference is desirable as long as they are same humans. Of course this is not a biological argument, but one month of homeless life has made me realize that homeless are not regarded as humans. At first, when I arrived at San Francisco, I was surprised by the number of homeless people (see this). But more and more homeless I meet and talk, I’ve come to see the relation between society and them as nobles and slaves.
The relation is not parents and children is as there are no responsibility for raising them. Also, although it’s sad to say, nobles don’t exist without slaves – neither our society does without homeless. How many people “wants” that there are homeless? A lot.
A bad thing is the fact that SF has relatively better governance on them. I can’t (and don’t want to) imagine how other region’s homeless live. I’ve heard in Chicago hundreds of them die because of the cold. One more bad thing. Most of them are black, at least those I met are so. Doing drugs, being alcoholic, and so on – this imprints black as the social weak.
Social movements start with bottom-up, not with top-down. Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey – their success is magnificent and deserve praise. However, it’s not the end – it’s merely a beginning. The bottom of society is still full of black people. It is plausible to think that a social agreement that black people are less valuable (or less intellectual, less respectable and so on) than others has been already built.
Consciously or unconsciously this deep-rooted commonsense makes us numb. This is bad not only for the social weak but also the majority. They becomes inhuman as well.
Unless homelessness is eradicated, we cannot create social acknowledgments for different values, because homeless are, at least mentally, not grouped as human. There are so many arguments against this by people (most of them have never be homeless) saying that homeless has to have freedom and they just chose to be homeless. How is easy to solve the thing is whether we can make an agreement to solve homeless problems. If someone wants to solve, let’s make an action. Send me your opinion.
I don’t want to live in the world where people are judged by their skin color.
Haegwan Kim is a writer who was born in Osaka, Japan in 1989 and grew up near Tokyo where went to a Korean school for 12 years.
