Those Who Wander: America's Lost Street Kids

by Vivian Ho

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.

“They say go get a job,” she said. “What’s the first part of a job application? An address. And you need ID. How do you get ID? In Oregon, you have to have a utility bill or a lease or something to prove that you live here. If you’re a homeless person in Oregon, how do you pull that off?” She shook her head. “It’s the definition of irony. There are people who are literally dying on the street because it’s so cold out while two blocks away they’re putting up apartments that are going to cost $1,200 for a studio. And those are the people who are going to complain because they don’t want to look out their window and see a homeless person dying.” We need housing, she said. We need better policies. But most of all, Miriam said, we need more compassion. “Most of them want to do the right thing,” she said. “Most of them want to live a better life. But they can’t. Once you’re in that, you’re so entrenched. How do you get out? We’re doing triage. We’re just triaging, and there’s no follow-up and no aftercare. They’re stuck in this vicious cycle until someone somewhere gives them that lucky break.”

Survival is not a concept most of us operating within the confines of everyday society even consider. We live in a world where we can feed ourselves with food stocked in stores, drink water from the tap, and keep ourselves warm when night falls. We know we will never run out of toilet paper or toothpaste. “Survival” may mean enduring a soporific business meeting or emerging from gridlock traffic. But for the kids we pass every day on the street, it is their day-to-day. We can live, but they can only survive. And we hate them for it. We criminalize their existence, making it illegal for them to sit or sleep or be. We donate our money to soup kitchens and homeless charities, but complain when we see someone panhandling in front of our establishments or using a public restroom. We send them the same message over and over again that they are not welcome. Their existence is a nuisance. Their humanity is no longer.

The factors that drive kids into the streets are legion, and every kid’s story is unique. We could talk about fixing a foster care system that seems to forget about way too many kids who age out and have nowhere to go. We could talk about putting in place better drug treatment programs and providing better mental health care. But the more we go into it, the farther we spiral into a pit of hopelessness, because the fact is, too many of the systems we have in place now are broken. Even if we had the commitment and the compassion to fix them all, it would take several generations before we saw any sort of results. Beyond that, there are just some root causes of youth homelessness that we won’t ever be able to fix. As long as there are children in this world, there will be parents and other adults who neglect them, abuse them, mistreat them, and molest them. Try as we might, we can’t always intervene before it reaches the point of no return for the kids affected. We can’t save everyone.

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.

“So I remember that space of apathy,” he said, “I remember being in that spot. That’s what’s happening for (Haze) now, but I still have to have faith in the human spirit enough that given the right circumstances, given the right opportunities, given an example that might come into his life, maybe that person too can eventually find some measure of health, purpose, that they matter to someone, that other people matter to him. I just have to hold out that possibility. The reality of it? Not really big. But the hope? I can’t say it’s hopeless. I’ve sat in that spot where it looked pretty fucking hopeless. All I spouted was rage.