Hand‑me-down People

‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.‘ — Christ, Matthew 25:39-41

oOo

I’m taking a break from my series of posts to ponder a problem that has grown progressively worse in the last several decades.

Way back at the dawn of time—or at least at the dawn of my sojourn as a serious writer—I was eavesdropping on a conversation between my husband, Jeff, and my father-in-law about something my FIL had just read in the newspaper. A California coastal town that was a major tourist destination (or at least a tourist pass-thru on the way to points south or north) had a problem with indigents. That is to say, homeless people.

It seemed these people were annoying the tourists by sleeping in public places, living out of cars parked in public lots, and panhandling. The enterprising town leadership found a solution to the problem: they declared transience illegal. They would have the police scoop up people caught red-handed in the act of being homeless and transport them to the outskirts of town—near the interstate—and drop them off.

Voila! Problem solved.

To say this cavalier attitude toward human suffering made me angry is like observing that the Hulk has a little anger management problem. But I had no political clout, I didn’t live in the locale in question, and I knew that merely contacting my congress-critter would not be enough. So, I did what any red-blooded fledgling fiction writer would do. I wrote a story about it. I renamed the coastal town and worked out my own solution to homelessness that evolved out of the efforts of concerned citizens to keep the homeless from having insult added to injury.

Illo. by Janet Aulisio

I didn’t write about homelessness as a cause. I wrote about people. I collected stories of  real human beings who were homeless for a variety of reasons so I could do it realistically. I wrote about Stewart who lost his job as an engineer, and Loucette who lost her grip on reality, and Annie Lee and her kids who lost a husband and father. I wanted whoever read my story to read about real people.

I was very angry, so the result of all this was a 19,500 word novella—”Hand-me-down Town”—which became my first professionally published work of fiction when Stan Schmidt purchased it for Analog science fiction magazine in late 1989. His response to critics who complained that the story had no visible hard science it—”Sociology is too a science!”

I got letters about the story. The two that stand out were from a psychologist and a nurse who both worked with homeless people daily. They thanked me for “getting it right” and for showing real people rather than stereotypes.

I also got commentary from people who didn’t believe a word of what I’d written. The comments that stood out came from a entrepreneur and CEO of a small up-and-coming high-tech business. “It was a great story,” he said. “But of course, homelessness people are nothing like that, really. They’re all druggies and alcoholics who are homeless because they either want to be or because they can’t keep their act together.”

I kept my reflexes under control and told him about the research I’d done and the feedback I’d gotten from people who actually worked with homeless people every day. “These stories are real,” I said. “The reasons these people are homeless are real reasons. This is what their lives are like. The only really fictional part is my solution.”

He simply refused to believe me. No more did he believe that he, personally, bore any responsibility for these people. They were part of the SEP field (Someone Else’s Problem).

All this came back to me when a fellow Book View Café author, Steven Harper‑Piziks (aka “Igor”), blogged about his homeless son, who is terribly afraid of what will happen to his fellow homeless people when Ann Arbor, Michigan shuts down a homeless camp and redirects the residents to its already over-loaded system of shelters. The local administration has promised housing, but everyone who works in the system knows there isn’t enough to go around, especially not with budgets being cut and the fallout from the recession falling most heavily on those with the fewest resources and support networks.

And that, in a nutshell, is what “Hand-me-down Town” is about—support networks. To paraphrase a famous old Pogo comic strip. “We have met the support network and it is us.”

And by “us” I mean whatever and whoever it takes to solve the problem of homelessness and all the other societal problems we have unwittingly generated or perpetuated. Our government, some fellow said (I think it was that vampire hunter dude, Abe Lincoln), is “of the people, by the people, for the people”. The significant word here is “people”. That’s all of us—unless, of course, some of us are weasels, or asparagus, but I’m pretty sure there are no weasels or asparagus reading this blog.

This is not a political issue, by the way. It has no party affiliation, no denomination, no gender, no race, no ideology. It is a human issue. It’s about people, not politics, and those who try to make it about politics do so at our peril. Whether you are a person of faith or not, the risk to society of failing to deal humanely and adequately with this and other societal diseases is unacceptably high both materially and spiritually.

The activists who wrote to Analog about “Hand-me-down Town” said that the solution I proposed was not as fantastic as its appearance in a science fiction magazine might imply. And I’ve been jazzed to discover that there have been real housing programs that use my basic idea on a smaller scale.

If you’re interested in reading “Hand-me-down Down”, please follow this link to the Book View Café bookstore where you can read the story for free. And if you feel so moved, please consider donating funds or time to your local homeless shelter.

O son of man! If thine eyes be turned towards mercy, forsake the things that profit thee, and cleave unto that which will profit mankind. And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbor that which thou choosest for thyself.—Bahá’u'lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf

 (Cross-posted at Book View Cafe blog).

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