Those Who Wander: America's Lost Street Kids

by Vivian Ho

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.

“Here” is not Americana folklore, Jack Kerouac, and the Summer of Love coming home to roost. “Here” is a crisis, decades in the making. “Here” is millions of hurt kids, abandoned on the streets, knowing little more than doing whatever it takes to survive.

“There’s a common belief that all homeless people are lazy and they should go get a job, but that’s almost impossible after you’ve slept outside a couple days,” Christian said. “For a lot of these kids, it’s like gas on a fire. Some of the kids are addicted to drugs, some of them have mental health issues. All of them have trauma. And then you have to worry about people stealing your stuff, you have to worry about being raped, you have to worry about being kidnapped, about being beat up, about your dog getting in a fight or taken, about the police messing you up. You start having grown folks messing with you every day and you start becoming even more agitated by authority, and then you don’t want that anymore.”

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.

Looking back now, Gary can see the danger that comes with finding your street family, when the people for whom you’d do anything are just as unpredictable, volatile, and hurt as you are.