Those Who Wander: America's Lost Street Kids

by Vivian Ho

according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, only about 10 percent of all homicides nationwide involve strangers—

At best, these kids blocked sidewalks and lived on handouts. At worst, they were a violent, threatening presence who fought among themselves and scared away customers from local businesses.

They run away to escape a life in which it was beaten into them that they were nothing, less than nothing, and then they are taken in by the streets, where the last of their humanity is ripped from them. Because on the streets, there is no black and white. There is no good and evil. There is only survival. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots. You can’t persevere if the trauma you suffered as a child makes it impossible for you to look a person in the eye, if the only way of life you know is a needle in your arm to numb the pain.

“To travel as a vagrant is white privilege,” he said. The Chapin Hall study, on the other hand, found that African American youth had an 83 percent increased risk of having experienced homelessness, meaning there is some level of disconnect within this population.

By categorizing homelessness as a choice for some, we declare them less worthy of our sympathy, already worn thin to the point of nonexistence when it comes to the indigent. We ignore how few choices they had that made them choose a life on the streets, and we place an impossible expectation upon them: if you chose to be homeless, then you can also choose to not be.

In the first two decades of our lives, we are socialized to reach certain milestones at a rapid pace, and then we are left with the rest of our lives stretching long and ominously ahead of us. We

“Et peu importe la destination, c’est le voyage qui compte,”

have learned that truth is relative—there are only the facts and what you believe those facts say, and that varies from person to person.

You can’t force someone into a life they don’t want to live, and troubled adolescents do not give a fuck about their surroundings or the people that surround them.”

These days, San Francisco isn’t so much in the midst of a Summer of Love as it is deep within a Spring Awakening of Wealth.

that these kids will say it’s their choice because nobody wants to admit they’re miserable.

All kids are guilty of bad ideas, and it is completely dependent on their level of privilege how irreversible and harmful those ideas end up being.

Rainbow Family of Living Light,

But toward the end of our talks, I began to wonder whether we could really consider a lie to be a lie if the person telling it truly believed it to be real.

But we can’t discuss the concept of evil without considering the origin of it. We can’t call someone a monster without analyzing how monsters are made.

I could not prove that he was lying, yet I felt certain that the trauma was real.

we flip the script here, he is saying that murdering someone is what he needed to get his life together.