A Culture Of Care In A Society Of Disgust

We didn’t know where we were going. As tourists unfamiliar with the area, we trusted the walking path Google Maps gave us. Everything seemed familiar and common to a city scene – shoppers, the occasional bike rider, a car horn blasting at the driver in front. And then we turned the corner.

The sidewalks were no longer sparsely populated with shoppers and business commuters. Rather, the crowd of people that now lined the sidewalks were houseless, wanderers, safety seekers, trauma survivors and everyone else who could identify as ‘unhoused.’ My eight year old son was with me.

I’m not unaccustomed to seeing people live and congregate on the streets. I grew up in big cities across North America, where rugged individualism and an imperialistic zeal for wealth punish those who have nothing. But what shook me this time was the size of the crowds on these city blocks. At times, my son and I held hands just so we didn’t lose each other as we brushed up against the crowded sidewalk.

What My Eyes Carried

Women wandering, with their heads down and sores on their legs. A struggling man with addiction folded over like a pile of laundry, passed out from his recent hit. A young man yelling loudly about the fact that he wished he had a peanut butter sandwich instead of the donated ham and cheese. Two friends lighting up bongs. Food spilled across the sidewalk like rice tossed over a newly married couple. Scents of urine, body odor, weed, and the Chinese restaurant serving dumplings across the street. Some were nearly naked on this blistering hot day. Others were draped in tattered sheets and blankets.

This was my son’s first time to witness a crowd like this up close. From the car window and at times near our home, he would give his own money to people who asked for change. He wasn’t unfamiliar but I wondered if he was shaken up like me. To see humanity exist in a way that was painful and sad. I knew that he might have questions or feel uncertain with the array of scenes before us.

I kept my joy. I shared smiles with those we passed by. And I asked him how he was doing.

The Comfort I Reached For

He was quiet at first – probably not sure how to put into his own eight-year-old vocabulary of what he was feeling or seeing. I looked over, took his hand, and said, “Sweetheart, everyone you see is just like us. They all have moms, went to school, had a job, or loved to play soccer. What brought them to these streets is a lot of sad and painful circumstances. And unfortunately, our society punishes those who have a lot of pain and sadness. They’re just people, son. Like you and me. You’re safe.”

The Briefcase Belief: Aporophobia

There is a culture of disgust in our society, and it rests between the papers of privilege in our invisible briefcase.

The term for this disgust toward the unhoused or low income is called “aporophobia.” Aporophobia refers to the hatred, disgust, or rejection of people experiencing poverty. The hostility is directed at a person’s financial status, what they lack, what they don’t have or haven’t ‘earned’. I didn’t know there was a phobia attached to this, but I sure felt it as I walked with my son. As much as I meant every word that I told my son, deep down I was feeling the opposite. And these opposing feelings were what I inherited, what I was taught, and what I learned as a child.

How the Briefcase Got Packed

I learned to be afraid, disgusted even. How could anyone live on the streets!? Can’t they get their act together? They’re so lazy. From my parents, friends, teachers, and co-workers, this disgust and aversion to people living on the streets wasn’t wrapped in explicit instructions such as “You need to be disgusted with those people.” No.

It was in my dad’s shifted tone during conversations about how people need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and get a job. It was in my co-worker’s demeanour as he looked down at his feet while he walked downtown, pretending not to notice the people lying on the sidewalk beside him. It was in the comment made by a teacher about how terrible the streets are and how they need to be “cleaned up from all this riff raff.”

The Briefcase Built Into the City

In North America, aporophobia is part of our culture. And this view of the unhoused or low income is drowning in dehumanization. City architecture now reflects this aversion to the unhoused. Coined as “hostile architecture”, physical elements and urban policies are installed to intentionally deter people from resting, sleeping or hanging out. What does this look like? Segmented benches with armrests placed intermittently. Spikes or studs aligning window ledges, sidewalk grates or alcoves so that people cannot rest or shield themselves from the wind. The idea? Put the unwanted out of sight. Culture of disgust.

City hall council meetings are met with angry citizens yelling at council members to do more about the ‘reckless’ and ‘unwanted’ people downtown. Vagrancy laws or criminalization of loitering are more common in municipal policies. If someone does find a place to stay, it won’t last long. The policing of encampments and the forcible removal of unhoused communities is another result of our culture of disgust. A person’s belongings, tents, blankets, food or clothes, anything that has kept them feeling or living like a person, is now all thrown in the trash.

All of these are band-aids covering up the hidden and unexamined belief that in order to have value, you have to contribute financially to society. To have money is equal to having value. And when you don’t have it, aversion, disdain and disgust parade themselves on every level of our society.

We hear this same rhetoric toward immigrants: “As long as they contribute to society . . .” We hear this in reference to the elderly: “All this medical care for the aging is such a drain on our resources.” It’s as though the value of a person is all but wrapped into a person’s GDP. Forget being valued for who you are, as much of our equity language claims.

The people I beheld were trying to survive the culture that is trying to remove them. I don’t expect them to be kind or to care. But I was wrong.

The Crack in the Briefcase

As my son and I are walking along the sidewalk of encampments, a gentleman saw my son and yelled “child on the block” to those around him. Something shifted. This alert, this announcement, was at first confusing to me. And he wasn’t the only one to yell it. On each city block we walked, a new person would yell “child on the block.” After researching this, I found that this phrase is commonly used among unhoused communities as an alert to keep the streets safe for children who may be passing by the community. It means to hide any drugs visible, to stop the drug hits, make the block ‘safer’ by being more mindful of a child. The gesture was a gesture of care. People were looking out for my son, and they didn’t have to. But they did.

The gentleman, after yelling out, looked at me in the eyes and wished me a good day. His eyes were the same colour of my son’s. He smiled. How many walks did he get to go with his mom? Did he tell her silly jokes? What did he dream of becoming as a young child?

This gesture of kindness, this moment of human kindness exchanged in a place of uncertainty, I had found a culture of care. This is the crack needed to pry open our briefcases.

What Spilled Out: Care

Humanity shone in that painful place, and it wasn’t from me. It was from the ones I’ve been taught to discard and be disgusted by. Encampments aren’t the choice of people, they are the result of harmful systems. Systems that demand you to pay for basic human rights. Homelessness isn’t a choice of a person but a symptom of a broken system that says in order to matter you have to have money.

In our individualistic culture, I often think of how much better our society, our neighbours and communities would be if we cared. I remember my friend from China telling me that his mom was shocked to learn there were unhoused people in north America.

“But Canada and the United States are some of the wealthiest countries in the world! They have enough money to care for people, no?” Her question is simple. We do have enough money. We just don’t have enough care.

Homelessness isn’t culturally neutral – it exists everywhere. But the cultural value of a person when met with relationship, can lessen the impact of homelessness, drug addiction and crime. Relationships built on care, acknowledging the trauma, examining the purpose of our western systems and being curious about the individual barriers that people experience. There is far greater room, in my opinion, to care than to have disgust.

What does a culture of care look like?

• Human rights approaches which see a person with the dignity they were born with and not measure of GDP we’ve enslaved them to be.

• Reframe our lens and views of the reasons people are unhoused. Understand they aren't to be faulted for living that way, but the systems which favour thick wallets and high stock exchange scores are to blame.

• Including the perspectives, lived experiences and solutions of those unhoused. An inventor doesn’t come up with an idea because they’re bored – they come up with ideas because they know what is missing and want to create a solution.

• Remember you can be unhoused one day too. My father had just lost his mom and his wife in the same year. Two deaths that made living seem harder than before. I remember calling him and asking where he was sleeping. “In the car”, he said. “I’ve found parking lots where the security won’t bother you.” My dad was struggling to make sense of the life he now had with the two people he loved gone. He is better now. But his story could have ended differently. He could have been that man on the block wishing me a good day, looking out for my son. All of us have the potential to become unhoused.

• Have the uncomfortable conversation. I could have pretended my son didn't see the same things as I did. I could have clung him tightly to my side with my pulse racing. I could have turned around and rerouted our path. I could have distracted him with conversations about cartoons or the latest Minecraft mod. Instead, I held his hand gently and asked him questions, told him what we were seeing and humanized strangers unfamiliar to us. Care can begin young - children are the best to teach us this. It is us adults who often have the harder time. The more we pursue those difficult conversations, the easier it becomes to feel the discomfort and find the truth.

A culture of care understands that when someone else thrives, I do too. Just as I was impacted by the suffering of others, so I will also be impacted by the health and wellness of others.

A culture of care remembers that kindness, safety and humanity can be found in the most unrecognizable of places – if we but open our eyes to see it.

A Peanut Butter Sandwich

After walking about sixteen blocks, we finally met up with my husband. I was eager to tell my husband what had just unfolded, the conversation I had with our son, the sights that we both beheld. Out of curiosity, my husband asked my son, “How was your walk?” I was waiting for him to tell about all the sights we saw, perhaps share the complexity of what he was feeling, questions of why people were yelling or why some had sores on their legs.

Without a beat, my son said, “It was good. There was a guy who really wanted a peanut butter sandwich.” If that was the biggest observation my son had that day, I’d like to think that in a simple way he understood that a person we walked by simply wanted a different kind of sandwich. Just like he does sometimes.

Later that day, I asked him more questions, wanting to make sure his mind wasn’t overly burdened or filled with anxiety. “Mom, everyone can help other people,” he said. And he was right.

Unpacking the Briefcase

That day wasn’t just eye-opening for me but an opportunity to open my narrow, heavy briefcase.

Limited by its design, my briefcase was filled with a lot of information that said very little about a person’s story, let alone their humanity.

The journey of examining that narrow case isn’t easy, and with younger eyes and ears watching, sometimes it’s just easier to keep that briefcase in the closet. But then the generation of disgust continues and nothing changes. So that day, we chose to care. An unhoused stranger also chose to care.

A culture of care is possible. And it’s never too late to start.