Grate-man...symbol of shame

 Each morning, while driving my wife to her office in the Kingston General Hospital, on the last leg of the trip, we pass a large grate, adjacent to the hospital, a release vent for the hospital’s boiler system. And, lying on that grate, covered in a couple of bedraggled sleeping bags, is a grey-bearded man huddled under a toque. As if his own guard-rail, a small shopping cart with a few belongings rests against the curb. He has been there for many of the mornings in the last two or three months as the temperatures hovered around 0 degrees Celsius. Yesterday morning, I noticed that someone has brought him a Tim’s coffee in a bright red cup. The steam from the grate billows around him, offering whatever heat and comfort it might. If this scene were on a stage, it would offer an eery, mystical, sombre and definitely sobering scene, portending a tragic, and graphic and empathic response from an audience.

Under-street scenes from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables come to mind, as do rhetorical flourishes in political chambers, and the increasing number of laudable civic initiatives to generate tiny homes for the homeless. And yet, this is not nineteenth century France. And whether or not this man, like Jean Valjean, has any kind of ‘record’ seems beyond the moment. Individual lives, like the lost life of a very young boy on a beach, in the midst of the refugee crisis from Northern Africa, have a way of arresting our attention, when captured in video and played on screens everywhere. Numbers of boats, and numbers of arrests, and numbers of drownings from capsized vessels, while horrific, tend to glaze over millions of eyes. We can however, be rivetted by a single person, in a desperate state, if not while driving, then afterwards.

Every town and city in North America is making attempts, some creative, some a little less so, some even taking shape of tiny sheds, providing basic roof, walls, heat and safety. A friend in a church in Dundas says even a church is engaged in trying to offer shelter and hope to the street people there. And ‘street people’ as the descriptor has morphed into ‘homeless’ perhaps as a kind of ‘homage’ to the research that continues to document not only the ‘problem’ but the various attempts to mediate the “problem”.

This “grate-man” could be, a likely is, part of a statistic report, whether from law enforcement who can not miss noticing him while driving past. And, while social issues tend to gather numbers, costs, and various “remediative” steps, as if we were applying band-aids to multiple cuts to staunch the bleeding, “poverty” as a general social ill is so detached, and ubiquitous as to lose the face, the beard, the tattered bags, and even the safe ‘encounter’ from the cabin of a car. Each and every single initiative, primarily from well-intentioned, honourable, ethical and even exemplary groups of altruistic and compassionate and even empathic men and women and children, to house men and women like this ‘grate-man’ warrants both honour and respect. Nevertheless, the old adage of ‘retrieving them after they have fallen over the water-fall rather than approaching the situation from the top of the water-fall, that haunts the driver on the return home. This man has a biography, a pulse, a link to other human beings, a memory, a mind and a body being not merely weather-beaten but inevitably eroded, long after whatever hope had dissipated. This man, like the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, is a testament to courage, bravery, resilience of the human will. He is also a testament to the deeply embedded ‘detachment’, objectification, distance, and the ubiquitous shared shame of the rest of us.

The Occupy Movement saw tents popping up in public squares back in 2011, expressing opposition to social and economic inequality and the obvious lack of real democracy. Interviewing some in one of those tents, I learned about the pure and unsullied determination to bring about awareness and significant changes from the young men and women in one of those encampments. Considered health hazards, public safety impediments, and hot-beds for potential criminal behaviour, these encampments were moved, removed and effectively erased from the landscapes of towns and cities across the continent. However, in the last decade, we have witnessed a rise in poverty levels, homelessness and public energy and resources being headlined and then consuming policy professionals and political leaders trying to “deal” with the “problem”.

The mayors of both Los Angeles and New York, a black woman, and black male former police officer respectively, have announced their intent to move people from the streets into hotels and motels vacated in the pandemic. In Toronto, every day at least 8,500 people experience homelessness and at the end of November that number topped 10,000. Descriptors, as if they were diagnoses, such as financial, mental, cognitive, behavioural or physical challenges float through the coverage, and into the public consciousness, as if the elephant in the room, not only the housing shortage, but the very structure, shape, attitudes and beliefs of the culture were immune from address, did not exist.

The adjectives and nouns that attempt to ‘depict’ (and subtly to deride) the state of the individuals in whose number the ‘grate-man’ lies, serve as rationalizations for our shared ‘turning to our affairs’ from Robert Frost’s poem “Out-Out”. The poem captures the saw’s amputation of a young man’s hand, his plea to keep it, the doctor’s ether and the slow ebb of his heart into silence:

They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing! And that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

The ‘grate-man’ is not dead, except in the public consciousness, as just another one of ‘those homeless and they are now everywhere’. To those charged with making decisions on our behalf, local councils, provincial and federal governments, we all know that from serious frowns of ‘it’s too bad’ to eyes slipping back into their sockets in the question, ‘what are we supposed to do about this?” to the more conservative among us who likely perceive the problem as one of individual failure or inadequacy on the part of those who are homeless.

In fact, we also all know that we have created, and participated in and benefitted from a political and economic structure, so deeply and historically embedded, that it has come to be considered “normal” and “fixed” and “democratic” and ‘fair”.

Everything, we all know, is also relative. Compared with autocratic, despotic and tyrannical nations and societies, North America and most of Europe are legitimately proud and somewhat smug about the ‘progress’ in political and scientific and academic and technological terms. International trade, while unbalanced and somewhat dependent on forces not yet fully understood or monitored or moderated by legislation and oversight, has brought a considerable number of people out of poverty, as it is defined by international agencies.

Nevertheless, in North America, and, we are told also in Europe, increasingly numbers of people, native to various countries, and also immigrants and refugees, experienced food shortages, housing scarcity, and income stagnation, if they actually have jobs.

Technology is and will continue to segregate those who have acquired skills for the current and medium-term future from those who have not. Education and training are part of the solution to the rise tide of homeless persons. Governments, too, are experimenting with the concept of a guaranteed annual income, a modest sum for all, as another potential pathway to alleviate the suffering among the homeless persons, and as importantly to assuage the guilt and shame of the body politic, the establishment. It is the establishment, so intimately and intricately enmeshed with those who have benefitted most from the last quarter century of corporate profits, while wages and social programs, in many instances have suffered from depleted resources.

The pandemic, too, inflicted considerable damage not only to the labour market, as well as to the philanthropic sector’s capacity to raise funds. And, yet, as research among those scholars who have studied such social projects as food banks points out, there are but a band-aid on a social tumor, short-term staunches of starvation, but certainly not permanent remediation.

Culturally, too, North America is deeply enmeshed in a model of addressing serious public issues by modest responses. There is little to no public blow-back to minimal political decisions, except, in the U.S. when a modest cut in the military budget is even mentioned and the hew and cry from the ‘right’ squashes such a ridiculous idea.

However, we all know that national security, and defense of all nations, including both Canada and the United States, does not depend on the size, capability or intelligence of the military and the national security apparatus. How each and every person is regarded by the body politic, and that includes the whole culture, not only one political party or one region, or one religious or educational edifice, matters directly and indirectly in the full open, transparent and disseminated accounting of who we are as a country.

The attempt, after the glaring and nefarious evidence of neglect by the political class, to address the flood of homeless persons, like the glacial approach to global warming and climate change, manifests a public insouciance, an apathy, and a distractive pre-occupation with the immediate personal, domestic, family and job requirements each of us have to fulfil. And while we are responsible for those immediate duties, we also are responsible for the manner by which we perceive solitary men lying on boiler grates in 0-degree temperatures, or worse, while the majority of us look forward to a home-cooked turkey, a lighted tree, presents under that tree and cards and gifts to celebrate the holiday season.

The disconnect is so obvious as to be ‘pontificating on the obvious’ and therefore ought not to be needed. However, there is a significant difference between a consciousness of the issue, and even a grasp of the dimension of the problem, and the perception of that man on the grate as a fully grown, fully cognizant and fully potential human being. He is a lot more than the picture he displays; he is a lot more than a number in a data bank at city hall; he is a lot more than another ‘indigent’ whose name must be added to the growing list of those needing to be sheltered. He is also a lot more than a “problem” in search of a solution, for the rest of us. And yet, if that is how he continues to be “seen” we will perpetuate the notion of compassion as another, “from the most privileged the most is expected” kind of equation.

Only if and when that man on the grate is embraced for who he is, including his full story complete with all of its vagaries, eccentricities, darkness and potential, including the potential of his specific, warranted and even needed participation in the next steps for his life, will those of us who are indeed ‘privileged’ and who know literally nothing about his person or his life begin to open our eyes, ears, minds and hearts to the full situation he not only represents, but also moves us to change.

Homes, adequate food, access to health care, clean water, and work with dignity….these are not items for an ideological debate any longer. They are basic human necessities, not only for the privileged with university and college education, with two cars in the garage, sun-bound vacations, and over-stuffed wardrobes. The gap between the have’s and the have-not’s is so wide that it is, or ought to be an embarrassment, especially for those of us who want for nothing. And while we, ordinary folk, remain silent in the face of mounting evidence of corporate greed and manipulation of prices in food stores, at gas pumps and in pharmacies, we are complicit in both glossing over the ravages of how unfettered capitalism is literally injecting steroids into our social malaise, openly, willingly, blatantly and irresponsibly.

It is no longer tolerable to segregate individual human beings from the data banks that comprise the basis of our social and economic policy. If we cannot and will not address the homelessness of persons like him, how can or will we even begin to consider the individual humans who have already lost their homes, lives and livelihoods in draughts, storms, fires and floods….all because we are fettered to an economic model that places profit far above people…and we all know it!