Opinions

Violence toward homeless people despicable, on the rise

In print | February 22, 2007

The mainstream media calls it “teen-on-homeless violence,” as in “black-on-black crime,” or “woman-on-woman action,” but in more real terms, the facts are this: According to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless, there were 122 attacks on homeless people last year, 20 of which were murders. The majority of the violence, which is the worst this country has seen in a little over a decade, has been committed by groups of high school males — the kind of post-Clerks clusters of self-conscious urchins you see holding their skateboards under their arms and giving the finger to passing minivans. This would be a generalization itself. This is, after all, exactly the image conjured when someone says “teenager,” except it’s accurate; it applies to almost every case in which a homeless man (and all the victims have been individual males) was murdered last year.

Consider that the state with the most violence was Florida, the home of Disney World, where one group “grabbed a bite at McDonald’s” after they rubbed fecal matter on and smashed in the face of a homeless man. Then, read this opening sentence from a CNN article: “All Nathan Moore says he wanted to do was smoke pot and get drunk with his friends.”

And so the American narrative writes itself: the guidance counselors, priests and chiefs of police, the grandmas, aunts and mothers, are going to hold one another by the shoulders, make remarkably similar confessions in the form of questions (“How did I let my son do this?”), and then, just before they say, no, no more cameras, lift their heads up once more, like they were offering the first humble words of a revolution, and say, you know, I’ll bet you it’s “that channel” with the music videos, the guns and the women.

The narrative, though, always comes after the fact. The criminologists, the news reporters and the talk show hosts are all speaking from the privileged position of retrospection. Even when one of the kids says, “In the moment, I just didn’t know what was going on,” he’s looking back. This, in reference to one of the teenage boy’s mothers, particularly killed me: “In a sad irony, she had adopted him; his mother was a homeless drug addict, a revelation he had learned not long before the beating and which his attorney used to explain his rage.” The creation of illnesses to explain insane behavior creates jobs, creates — that’s something else. What’s clear is that the explanations for these murders reveal an agenda that is practically domestic policy: to fit these teenagers’ actions into a universally accepted story of American adolescence, to sell understanding, to gain closure and to forget/move on.

However timeless, it’s bullshit. But what’s interesting, and actually frightening, is this: “Ihrcke [a murderer] told police that killing ‘the bum’ reminded him of playing a violent video game, a police report shows.”

The kids who murder homeless men aren’t mimicking that channel with the music videos, the guns and the women. They’re mocking the immediate adults in their lives. Their brains and their bodies are conditioned — the former spewing therapeutic/sociological sound bites, the latter beating up imaginary enemies — but what people forget is that the Ludovico experiment from “A Clockwork Orange” was engineered by individual adults looking to free themselves of the burden of raising youth. It’s the hearts, buried deep, that the machines can’t touch and that the adults don’t want to deal with.

Before Rudy Giuliani put them all in jail or mental hospitals, you couldn’t walk down the block in Manhattan without encountering a homeless person. The majority of those that didn’t seek shelter were, like the majority of the victims of last year’s crimes, white middle-aged males with either an alcohol or drug illness. Familiar faces.

I remember when I was in ninth grade there was this guy who sat outside Burger King, crying and howling into the morning rush every morning: “Will someone, please God, will someone feed me?” I finally stopped sometime in April, walked up to him, nervous, and said, “I’m gonna go in here and get you some breakfast.” He looked up at the awning and then to me and said: “I don’t eat that shit.” I still passed him by every morning for the next few years. I resented him more and more; I would tell people the story when they gave homeless men money; and I even wrote a short story where a homeless guy was in my house one day reading the Times and eating waffles like he was my father. It is one of the most difficult things to be repulsed by someone who you know only deserves your compassion. You start asking what seem like naive questions: Is this man really responsible for everything that’s happened to him? Why is no one else stopping? Should I offer again?

There are 744,000 homeless people in the United States and counting, but the questions everyone else is asking aren’t these personal, introspective questions, but rather ambitious world-changing questions — the kind that put the attention there — like, ‘Why are we at war?’, or, ‘How can we be letting that happen?’ I can imagine how the homeless man, that daily reminder of suffering, could come with time to embody all the other repulsively hypocritical adults in my life.

Right now it seems to me like the answer to those necessary, bigger questions about war and genocide is another question: Is our failure abroad or at home? The latter, I think, is a precedent to the former; life doesn’t imitate media, but the life it sees through the media and the life it sees next door. Similarly, the hauntingly patricidal nature of these murders this past year isn’t anything you can, or should, explain as some sociological trend or YouTube-related fad — instead, it’s a wordless message from a generation whose actions are being explained to them before they even do anything. To paraphrase Gandhi: I can’t support a country that produces a race of imitators.

Josh is a sophomore. You can reach him at jcohen2@swarthmore.edu.