The Unhomed and the Inhumanity!

 

San Francisco art gallery owner Collier Gwin used a hose to spray water at a homeless woman sitting on a sidewalk on January 9.

The victim “declined further police action," according to The Standard, citing the San Francisco Police Department pic.twitter.com/t2TUKXqXbV

— TRT World (@trtworld) January 11, 2023

This man is hosing this woman off the sidewalk like she was no more than refuse or dog droppings. He has no more respect for her human dignity than to do this. This man has an art gallery. What can a soul who does this to another human being know about art? He knows money and status. This man pimps the vision of souls for status. That woman may as well not have a soul to him because she has nothing of negotiable value. She brought down his property value by having a body existing outside of his place of business. He needed her body elsewhere, and this was the obnoxious way he chose to do it.

Being alive means having a body and needing to put it somewhere. It's a blessing and a curse. I've known absurd sensations of pleasure, and also what it's like not to sit or stand or even lie down comfortably.  But I've been able to enjoy my pain and delight alike indoors, because I've always had the fee for convenient body storage. I can sleep indoors any time I like, even if my bed feels like a stone to me. 

I sleep knowing others sleep on stones. How fucked up is it that we do this? We sleep knowing other human beings can have their tents, their tarps, their possessions, however meager, scattered because someone anywhere doesn't care for the basic physical fact that these people need to lay their bodies somewhere? That when we aren't awake (as no one can be, healthfully, forever) we need to put our physical, food and oxygen and water requiring selves somewhere. We need access to money to negotiate our nutritious and hygienic needs. We need blankets and clothes in absence of heating.  And we pretend other human beings who can't afford that basic allowance of humanity--don't need this? And sweep away their lives and give them nothing in recompense? 

There's another way, of course. If the unhoused require being homed to not be homeless, what if someone just put them in housing?  It sounds radical, but it just might work! What if this could be done nationwide to reduce homelessness by just putting people in homes? (The Finns--they have good ideas about cherishing people, and I respect it.)

This is something we could easily do. We can build convenience stores overnight--making affordable housing should not be more expensive than the stupid things we do to deter people with bodies from having comfortable places to lay themselves down, like pigeon-repellers except for people placed under overpasses and increasingly unseatworthy benches. Giving the homeless somewhere to live--permanently, not a shelter, is the most cost-effective solution, and the one people are avoiding because it is actually kind and decent. 

Treating human beings as human beings is a choice and one we can afford to make, and should, because the cost of not doing that is our humanity.  What if we treated human beings as human beings, and no one got hosed?