Homelessness

Hello.

Can we establish a baseline awareness here that there are a lot of disenfranchised people in the world today, even in this country? The first Comic Relief fundraiser was done in 1986. According to Wikipedia, there are anywhere from 744,000 to 3,470,000 people without homes in this country. (The large difference there is because, lacking homes and frequently jobs, homeless people are hard to track; they move around a lot. Duh.)

Even in small towns like the one where I work, there are chronic homeless people. There are also people in every part of the country who have a 'home' but it is below what most of us would consider tolerable living conditions.

This is not news.

Is it? Cuz, really, if it is news, you really freakin' need to get out more often!! Outside your head, I mean.

All of this is in light of a bizarre conversation I had with someone yesterday while doing time at the Reference Desk. A patently middle-class white-haired guy I'd never seen before came up to the desk from the direction of the reading room. He smiled and whispered so quietly I had to lip-read to 'hear' him, "Is this a warming center?"

For those of you not living in cold climates, warming centers are designated public buildings where you can go if you have no heat for some reason. They are usually gyms, senior centers, and, in the summer (when they are cooling centers), schools.

Uh, no, we are not a warming center. Why?

There are "4 or 5" people sleeping over there.

Uhm-hmm. Yes? [I try to look helpful without giving him any encouragement.]

Why are they sleeping?

Well, maybe they are here because they don't have heat in their homes. Maybe they work nights. I don't know. [No, I did not say, "Because they're tired...?" though I really wanted to.]

Are they here all the time?

Some of them we see a lot. I don't know exactly who is sleeping. Some of them might be homeless, too.

Do you feed them breakfast, too? [Now his smile is starting to look suspiciously like a sneer.]

No. We don't. [A little direct eye contact, and his smile fades.]

Someone else came to the desk just then needing help and the gentleman backed away, but hovered. When I had sorted out whatever the other person's issue was, he came back over to me and said, "Some of them look like they could be working."

SNAP. My patience at an end, I said, "Uh, huh" after a couple more seconds of eye contact and silence. He got the hint and walked away.

I don't think I handled this well, but really: WTF? Is he not aware, in spite of a lengthy article in this week's local paper about the homeless shelter in town, that there are people living below subsistence level, some of whom "look like they can work" but for a multitude of reasons can't/don't.

For heaven's sake, he looked like he could work...and clearly wasn't. Oh, wait, it's ok to be retired and wander around all day, but God forbid you should be 30 and do the same thing...!

Dear God, his whole half of the conversation was like a discussion of inanimate objects. Or mold. Look, I don't mind if people don't know things, need to be educated, want to know an answer out of curiosity...that's my job after all. If a kid had been asking me these questions, I would have been a lot more forthcoming. But... I dunno, something about this particular guy's attitude just pushed all my buttons. It was all I could do to keep from saying "There but for grace go the rest of us, y'know."

[I checked later: one guy is someone who has one of those icky places to live, works nights, and can't sleep at home. The rest are 'regulars' and homeless, and I picked up no scent of alcohol. They really were 'just' sleeping. In chairs. Quietly. The guy with the house had his coat over his head blocking out the light.]

I'm not stupid about these guys (mostly guys, with one or two women occasionally). Some of them are dangerous, many of them are substance abusers, none of them is reliable in the usual sense of that word...but they aren't mold.