Those Who Wander: America's Lost Street Kids

by Vivian Ho

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.

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.

“Whatever the destination, it’s the journey that counts.”

The fact that there haven’t been more stories about these victimized kids doesn’t mean this cycle of hurt isn’t still turning. It means that we only pay attention when the cycle’s radius spins wild and wide enough to affect us, the ones with homes and jobs and stability—when the person hurt or killed is someone outside the homeless or street kid community.

We need housing, she said. We need better policies. But most of all, Miriam said, we need more compassion.

nobody is ever too far gone—no one is ever too far beyond the scope of compassion that they can’t be reunited with their humanity.

Looking back, I could see it in every street kid I spoke with who steals and robs and hurts and wastes away the day doing drugs. To survive as they do means losing the last of their humanity. On the streets, emotion is an extravagance that they cannot afford. If they allowed themselves to feel bad, they wouldn’t be able to do the things they need to do in order to live. It’s why we abhor this particular subset of the homeless population. We detest them because they are forced to operate outside our social norms of decent human behavior. We hate them because they survive in spite of their humanity. We hate them because they are us, at our basest, stripped of all we have holding us up as a society of human beings.