The Poor are Hard to Love?
| Some years ago, I was watching Game of Thrones and they introduced a new character called the High Sparrow. The High Sparrow was a religious figure very focused on serving the poor. He wore disheveled clothing and went without shoes. He fed and sheltered people in poverty, bringing many struggling with severe mental illnesses, diseases, and physical disabilities into his care. As is common in Game of Thrones, inspiring characters often disappoint you and that was the case here, but he did say some powerful things that got me to think. One thing he said that stuck with me was this:“[The poor] are hard to love. [They] disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we’d look like without our fine clothes, how we’d smell without perfume.” These are hard words… they’re very concrete, very blunt. They point to a reality that many people in more polite society struggle to discuss. When encountering people in poverty, extreme poverty especially, we witness some of the most horrific circumstances a person can experience. We witness human suffering that’s hard to take. We can witness physical deformities. We can witness cuts and wounds and unhealed injuries. We can encounter blood, and vomit, and urine, and feces. We can witness arguments, yelling, fights. We can witness drug use, needles. We can witness people acting in very strange and unpredictable ways, like talking to themselves or making odd or even scary movements. We can witness smells we find uncomfortable. “[The poor] are hard to love. [They] disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we’d look like without our fine clothes, how we’d smell without perfume.” Another author, Martha Beck, speaks of something similar. She talks about the deep-seated fear of becoming a “bag lady” – not my favorite term, but a visceral description of a primal panic that many people have of poverty, homelessness, and social rejection. I bring this to our attention because I believe the main reason we, as a culture and as a people, are so hard on the poor is because they remind us of what we could be. They force us to feel something we don’t want to feel.I believe we’re fundamentally empathic people. With a few exceptions, most of us are prone to feel the situations of others. We connect with it. We relate to it. So, when we encounter pain in someone else, we experience pain in ourselves. There’s something called compassion fatigue, which is a term I don’t love. But it basically refers to a weariness when we regularly encounter hardship in others. I much prefer the term secondary trauma. We experience trauma when we witness the trauma of others. What this means is that encountering the hardship of others is also dangerous to ourselves. The pain of others can become our pain, too. And because of that, we develop many extremely complex coping mechanisms to avoid that pain. Some years ago, I read an article in the Washington Post that has become one of the most influential bits of information I’ve read on homelessness. The article was titled, “Americans want to help the homeless – as long as they don’t get too close.” The article talked about a survey which asked about people’s support for or disapproval of certain policy choices related to homelessness. They asked about panhandling, public camping, homeless services, and housing programs. They found that about a third of people did not support any interventions or policies related to homelessness. They found another third that supported all interventions and policies related to homelessness. And then they found a third group that supported services and housing but were opposed to panhandling and public camping. To be honest, this breakdown of different groups even shows up in our beloved Bloomington. Our community can really come together around services and housing, but we are at our most divisive around situations that involve the visibility of people without homes. In a follow-up study to the initial survey, researchers asked people similar questions but also did an analysis of people’s disgust response to certain stimuli unrelated to homelessness. And they discovered something fascinating – that people’s disgust response, the level and ease with which we feel disgust, did not correlate with support or opposition to housing and services, but very much correlated with opposition to panhandling and public camping. In other words, the higher your disgust response in general, the more likely you did not support policies that would bring people experiencing homelessness into the public view. It’s a strange phenomenon, but I see this happen all the time when people comment on homelessness or homeless people. People use their personal experience of disgust as a weapon, practically declaring it a moral virtue. Because something makes them feel disgusted, they declare that thing to be wrong and their perspective to be right. They turn people into animals: rats and roaches, nonhuman beings that bring disease and destruction. They fear. They defend. They fight. “[The poor] are hard to love. [They] disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we’d look like without our fine clothes, how we’d smell without perfume.” We so deeply marginalize the poor because they terrify us. They remind us of what we fear the most, they remind us of what we could be. They remind us of what we are. Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, an international collaboration of communities for people with developmental disabilities and those who assist them, offered some words that inspire me. He said, “Somewhere there has to be a complete change that we love people not because they’re beautiful or clever but because they’re a person.”Or the words of Trappist monk, Thomas Merton: “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.” Or some Hoosier wisdom from our very own Eugene Debs: “Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” One of the things I learned early in my work with people without homes, was I was most valuable not in my ability to accomplish great things, but in my surrender to my own failings. This is why this is so hard and so few do the actual work. “[The poor] are hard to love. [They] disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we’d look like without our fine clothes, how we’d smell without perfume.” To step out of our judgments and sometimes disgust, we have to recognize the judgments we have directed at people without homes are judgments we equally direct at ourselves. The only real answer is to find those “judged things” in ourselves and allow ourselves to embrace them… for us to love ourselves, our whole selves, not just our successes, but all of us. Because then maybe we can love other people in their whole selves, too. And that’s when we become useful. That’s when we become dangerous for the good. That’s when we become Love. |