By Michael Brown
Published in March 2012
“Why don’t the homeless take responsibility for finding themselves a job and for getting on with their lives? Why don’t those street people stop whining and pick up their boot straps? Aren’t social services enabling them to remain lazy and dependent on those services? I have gone through hard times and I made it through, so why don’t they?”
These types of questions sit deep among members of our community in the Waterloo Region, and at an emotional level, I sometimes must pause before I respond back. In that pause, I remember when I used to ask the same questions, based on my snap judgments and hazy assumptions.
In that same pause, I also remember what incredible people from our street community have helped me realize, when I was an outreach worker at The Working Centre. When they allowed me into their lives and gave me an opportunity to know them, to know each other.
Taking Responsibility
People who we categorize as homeless take responsibility. It depends on who uses the word “responsibility” and why they are using it. That is, how they choose to apply it to some people and situations, and not to others.
People without a roof over their head take responsibility for their health and well-being. They do this, for example, by walking daily from St. John’s Kitchen, to the employment centre, to labour ready, to view an apartment, and to their next destination. They often walk under extremely hot and cold weather conditions and carry their belongings with them, since they are not provided lockers by our community, among other necessities.
They do all this walking because they cannot afford bus tickets. We have made it very difficult in our culture for people to ask for bus tickets or small change. We have created beliefs that attack a person’s ego through repetition, until they feel too humiliated to ask. But as I learned from people experiencing abject poverty, you can receive money from a stranger on the street depending on how you dress, the way you talk, the reason you give, and whether or not you carry a clipboard and wear a non-profit company uniform. As I have both observed and experienced, if you look like you are happy and have a job, then it will be easier for you to get change from someone.
Many people I knew from the street community worked, whether paid or unpaid. This ranged from part time jobs, to day jobs, to volunteering at different organizations, to panhandling, to walking long distances, to meeting strangers in new services where you will have to talk about your life at some level. Their range and depth of work goes beyond our culture’s strict definition of it. And there is the strange belief that acquiring paid work, no matter how lousy the pay and how meaningless the job, means that you are a (more) valuable human being in our society. If you do not fit into our culture’s definition of paid work, then expect to be treated as inferior.
There is also collective responsibility in our Kitchener-Waterloo street community. Sometimes a person who was previously homeless takes responsibility by having others who are homeless stay at their apartment. They take a risk that they might lose their place, but this decision is made within a very constricted context where members of the broader community are not likely to help. So this previously homeless person with other homeless people collectively take responsibility to share food, clothes, blankets, and other necessities in that place. They also take responsibility to drink together under that same roof, because they can look after each other and pass out safely with others they trust and know.
I do not want to romanticize the experiences of people living in poverty. Theft and violence are real occurrences in the subculture of poverty – due to a complex set of interacting issues related to financial, material, social, and psychological deprivation. Addictions issues, as experts from our street community will tell you, are related to all this.
Many people in our street community are coping with addictions and mental health issues. This includes depression and the self-attacking that comes with it, reinforced by consistent judgmental attacks from members in their larger community. This also includes subtle and obvious social attacks from people who own and produce newspapers, magazines, books, films, TV news, and other cultural means of communicating to masses of people in a very short time.
There are also an extremely small number of individuals experiencing poverty who have the ability to conduct paid work but would rather not, at least not until a better job comes along that fits with their kinds of skills, resources, and level of education. This is because they had consistent work experiences where employers treated them horribly, and paid them non-living wages in a job that was uncertain to exist for very long. This became too demoralizing and too degrading for them. “I was treated like a dog,” is a common remark, so they no longer want to directly internalize those heavy, shuffling feelings.
The context of using the word “responsibility” often involves class based assumptions and stereotypes, valuing those who are wealthier more than those who are not. An honest, thoughtful discussion starting with ourselves, starts to examine our own class based assumptions and values. It is an uncomfortable starting point, where we begin to examine our narrow ways of interpreting others, and of our world that we travel through. Enron founder Kenneth Lay’s irresponsible and criminal accounting practices demonstrate that no class has a monopoly on good behaviour.
Applying Analysis
People in our street community apply analysis by highlighting serious problems with government, education, and agency services they use, as well as with workplaces they experienced in the private sector. For some reason, their analysis is often curtly interrupted by people who are more formally educated, wealthier, and confident than they are. Typically the tactic is to use a demeaning word or term to shut down analysis of real issues – especially evaluation provided by an increasing class of poor people who are responding to the problems they experience with economic, social, and political systems they had no hand in shaping.
Dealing with Social Assistance
One example of analysis from our street community concerns social assistance. Social assistance refers to a government program that distributes money to individuals to help them live in a market oriented society – until that individual finds a job in the paid labour force appropriate to their skills, resources, and educational level. There is one problem among many with this reality that I will underscore here. People experiencing poverty repeatedly identify that social assistance rates do not lift people out of poverty but keep them in it. In fact, you are eligible for this program only when you use up your entire savings, including investments and other assets. This is how our society has chosen to distribute resources to people who live in poverty.
Often people in our broader community take the short cut in life, by accusing individuals in poverty stricken communities for their own living conditions. Bill Keller’s book, Class Matters (2005), follows the lives of individuals from different classes in the United States, and helps the reader to start thinking about, and question, the unequal balance of social, economic, and political resources found in class dynamics. People often prefer to blame rather than listen to the life stories, knowledge, and analysis of those experiencing poverty. It is easier to blame and devalue others to make yourself feel good, rather than get to know each other across class differences. What I learned from people through my role in outreach is this: to care about each other in truly mutual ways is a serious commitment, and requires a lot of hard, honest personal and political work. The experiences we all created at St. John’s Community Kitchen and beyond sit in me deeply, and have profoundly, permanently changed who I am.
Michael Brown was a Streets to Housing Outreach Worker at The Working Centre for 4 years. This fall he enrolled in a social work PhD program in Social Policy at York University.
