Searching for a Solution: How Can We Help the Homeless and Should We?
Just a few months ago, I was with my friends Mike and Kim, and we were walking around the city, having a great time. As we exited a store, Kim muttered something under her breath like, “Oh, no.” When I looked in the same direction, I saw a middle-aged man with a drunken stare. Kim knew him as “the town drunk,” and he had been homeless for years. He asked us for the time, and we replied, but he didn’t stop there. He followed us across the street, talking up a storm.
He was telling his whole life story in the fifteen minutes we stood there. He talked about how he grew up living poor with his family and how he wanted to be educated and go through college to get a good job so he could live well. But he said his parents just didn’t have the money and it was impossible. I felt threatened, as did Mike and Kim, from the drunken gestures of this man. I thought to myself, if this man wanted to make something of his life, I mean if he really wanted to, he would try harder and somehow do what he wanted. We tried to leave as soon as possible. But then I began reading these essays about the homeless and it started to change my mind. The essay “Virginia’s Trap” by Peter Marin especially affected me because of the way it portrays the young woman that has nothing going for her and almost everything against her.
I thought about this and decided that I had misunderstood the whole plight of this population. I thought there must be a better way to help these unfortunate people. How should we help the homeless and should we try, even though they may not help themselves? I figure that is the most important question that needs to be answered if anything is to be done. Of the essays I analyzed, Awalt’s “Brother Don’t Spare a Dime” was the one essay that went against the idea of helping the homeless because the author thinks it’s their own fault for being the way they are. The other two essays are easier on the homeless and want to lend a helping hand.
In Address Unknown: Homeless in Contemporary America,” James Wright believes that helping the homeless by providing them with more benefits will make them more prosperous. Peter Marin shares the same idea in “Virginia’s Trap,” where a young woman needs just a little more money to maintain her home but doesn’t receive enough. While Awalt has a narrow view of homeless people and believes that they should not be helped in any way, Wright and Marin advocate for helping these individuals because they have already experienced hardship and need assistance to move forward in life. Awalt’s statement that homeless people are a “waste of time” is a very general and insensitive statement.
Throughout his essay, he only mentioned working with one homeless person to help them through a detoxification program. This person failed the procedure and left to go back to the streets to drink again (Awalt 239). Just because this one person didn’t have the endurance to undergo such an operation doesn’t mean others wouldn’t. What we need is a more hands-on program with these homeless people to give them the attention they need so that the majority of people will not end up like this but eventually in their own homes.
The opposite view is shared by Wright and Marin in their more lengthy and detailed essays. Wright starts out by saying that not all homeless people are the same and should not all be treated the same. He states that there are different classes of homeless people, including the worthy and unworthy homeless. This means that only some deserve to remain homeless because they don’t try to live otherwise. These small amounts of people, about five percent, don’t deserve the time and money spent on trying to get them off the streets. However, the only way to find out if they don’t is to try at least once with them. If it doesn’t work out, that’s a small amount of effort.
