DENVER’S HIDDEN GEMS OF HUMANITY CREDIT: PAULA BARD CREDIT: PAULA BARD What kinds of crises? Mental breakdown or women that are raped or abused, couples that are having relationship problems . . . People with physical disabilities can’t take care of themselves, they need someone to go get food for them, throw away the pee bottle for them, and give them that level of care. And when it comes to the sweeps and that level of disruption when you’re physically disabled, the process of packing up and moving is super difficult if you don’t have a community that you are doing that with. As to shelters, if you choose to stay in a shelter, you have no level of autonomy or control over what you do or what things you have with you. Just the fact that we don’t even think about valuing these things, the ability to choose who you hang out with. Who you are sleeping next to. . . Having some extra things, the value of the privacy of a tent, a visual barrier from other people. How is it that as a society, we can’t see the value of all these things, completely bypass all of these and say no, shelters are the answer!? Just a roof and warmth. Ah, no, like are you completely ignorant of other human needs and desires, like human choice and freedom? Shelters are not conducive to that. And people just think you’re homeless, you don’t have the right to make those kinds of choices. You give up your rights You should be able to sleep till 8 a.m.; you should have that as a choice. Yeah, it is so ridiculous how disconnected we are from the human experience, and like why people choose different environments. Why do you think people are disconnected from this experience? I don’t know. Part of it is just discrimination against the homeless community, you know, they don’t deserve those freedoms, luxuries, or whatever. These are luxuries, aren’t they? That’s what they act like, like a couch, for example. If you are a homeless person and you have a couch? People flip their shit. They’re like “a couch, you’re homeless!” Things like that, like having more stuff, like having a pet. But all these things are things that housed people already have. Most housed people have TVs and couches. They are used to having these. But I do think a lot of it comes from, things about our own lives in general, as a housed society in general — like we’re not thinking about the privileges of the house, that may be part of CREDIT: PAULA BARD July 2020 DENVER VOICE 5 it. Like people are blind to their privileges, they’re just used to having these privileges so don’t actually recognize that those things are of value. Or understand them as human needs. I would wonder if people just find it hard to pay attention or if they have been taught not to see. Do we have an inability to see and take in another human being’s experience, a lack of empathy? People turn to the most egregious things first, even if it’s a perfectly clean, low-profile camp. These camps still get the heat of the neighbors. It is the idea of the tent representing the person who is not living in society. Breaking the rules. Rule-breaking, fear of people outside. Challenges the whole system, somehow something is wrong with the whole system. Also, there are these huge cultural differences, ways of dealing with conflict. Very different ways of dealing with a lot of things. Street culture vs. upper-class house culture. A lot of it is race-related, a lot of racist stuff. Yelling loudly to find community solutions (for instance), turning to violence as opposed to calling cops, not using the criminal justice system. Not trusting the criminal justice system is very much a race issue. At this point, 40 percent of the nation’s homeless population is African American. Things like that are major cultural differences. And this is an issue with service providers, too. Most of them are middleclass white folks and don’t necessarily set the services up in a way that understands that there are differences in cultural ways of being. On the housed neighbor-side, they look down and see people yelling at each other and think there’s some kind of fight going on. It might just be people joking or whatever. ■
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