This
time, I want to share a rather hard experience I witnessed regarding hunger,
and my exposure to poverty. Going back to GPP 115 material about middle-class
everyday interaction with the poor, ‘zones of interaction’, and the visibility
of poverty, I was presented with a rather uncomfortable visible image of the
struggle of poverty recently. Anaya Roy explained how poverty in the U.S, tends
to detach us away from it, because we feel uncomfortable and distanced from it,
unable to understand or acknowledge our own space and relation to the problem.
I thought I had a had a rather critical perspective about that notion, that I
could experience and perceive everyday poverty because I myself experience some
sort of financial/social struggle, and have seen and worked in Mexico’s slum
towns. But I had never witnesses such an uncomfortable image about the struggle
of poverty until recently. I was walking down Bancroft with my cousin, near
Urban Outfitters around 11:30pm, when we both saw a homeless person bend down,
eating dog shit off the sidewalk. As we passed by him, he kept eating it,
telling us to “stay in school, or shit you will eat.” It was a really hard
sight for both of us. At that moment, I could not even judge or look down on
him, how could I? I just felt great sorrow and guilt. Guilt that I, unlike him,
had the option to go to a cozy home and fix myself a warm meal. I had the urge
to go to a store and buy him food, but nothing was open at that time, so I just
walked away. I still feel horrible, knowing I didn’t not so anything, and
worst, about my own privilege. I still do not know where I stand in this
encounter, but know I cannot judge what he was doing because I have never been
forced to such a combination of human suffering. I just wonder what the man
perceived that act as: luck ‘having
found food’ to feed his hunger, or suffering, degrading himself to eat animal excrement
because of his economic situation, or perhaps something else to hard to
understand
I remember reading in Foucault's work or Tocqueville's book, but in the 16th or 17th Century, the French government ran a program for the poor. It combined the housing for the poor and work too (they did not get paid much). I think the government should provide that type of assistance. I made a suggestion in one of the class exercises that there should be a shower room for the homeless in the city hall at Berkeley. The reason that I said this is because people associate the homeless with a lack of hygiene. People do not even want to get close to them, they pathologize the homeless, thinking that the homeless breed diseases and want to uproot their temporary stays and kick them out of town. Shower rooms will not cast away the last perception, but will definitely challenge people's association of the homeless with unclean faces.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjE6Dw6tkgA. This person in the video looks very nice at the end of the video. He is homeless, but at the end of the video, he is a handsome man. I think we need to promote these shower rooms because it will stop the people from associating the homeless with lack of hygiene. More importantly, I think these encounters with the homeless or the poor should allow us to imagine different and creative ways in which we can help them out. Maybe we can invite the homeless to our apartments and feed them once a week or two (one at a time of course....)
ReplyDeleteOur immediate reaction to the homeless, however, is horror and sympathy and a strong urge to give them money or food (which I of course did). But now that I am in GPP classes, I start to imagining different possibilities.
What do you think?