By Jamie Kanter
Arizona Daily Wildcat
March 5, 1998

Free lunch? The homeless should be so lucky

A woman killed herself last Friday.

She was found slumped over in a chair. Nearby lay four bottles of prescription drugs (not hers) and the smell of alcohol hung in the air. She gave up on her tragic life. We didn't hear about the suicide because she was a non-factor in our lives, a homeless woman living day-to-day on the coins we tossed in her direction. She mattered very little to us.

The only reason I know about this suicide is that I talked with her friend this past Sunday. The friend told me that the woman had been raped several times in the recent past and just couldn't handle life anymore.

That was only one of the terrible stories that I heard this weekend as I talked with the homeless gathered in De Anza Park. Many students from the eight UA honoraries made lunches and passed them out to the needy. I was lucky enough to be among them.

I had heard that the homeless were greedy and manipulative, skirting the system by playing on the sympathies of soft-hearted liberals. The folks that I met certainly opened my eyes.

One older man thanked us for feeding the children, claiming that they were the ones that really needed our help. Another man thanked me by handing me his copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (obviously one of his few worldly possessions). And then there was the woman that insisted on giving us a heartfelt hug in appreciation of our efforts.

Most people see the homeless as a self-serving, Machiavellian community which seeks to screw the common man out of his hard-earned dollar. That just isn't true. Anyone who spends a few minutes talking to them can easily see that. The problem is that none of us bothers to do so.

It is easy to vilify those with whom we never talk. We see the homeless begging for quarters and we ignore them, considering them a public nuisance. We see them as inhuman. After all, they don't bathe or work; they live on the streets and beg for money to survive.

We remain aloof, justifying our inaction by dehumanizing the homeless. Well, they are not faceless beasts, but human beings. We have a responsibility as fellow humans to help them.

We cannot sit back and do nothing. We have to help those in need. We owe it to humanity.

Right now, some of you are getting irked by my liberal look at the homeless, thinking to yourselves that the homeless are simply the weak links in society. You whip out your copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species and beat it with a quasi-religious fervor. You chant "Only the strong shall survive" as you pray to your Darwinian shrine.

If we truly let the strong survive, however, the world takes on a new twist.

There would be no reason to help those injured in accidents: "Sorry, Buddy, that gaping headwound looks pretty bad, but only the strong survive."

And doctors would be out of business pretty quickly if we mindlessly followed Darwin: "Sure, we could perform that appendectomy, but only the strong survive."

And our classes would be pretty empty if we kicked out students who didn't perform up to expectations: "Yeah, that 87 percent was a big improvement, but only the strong survive."

Some also claim a lack of sympathy for the needy due to the overwhelming number of the homeless who drink heavily. Apparently these eminently logical folks believe that the homeless drink alcohol to have a good time or to party with their homeless buddies. Just like college students, they are just looking to get blasted and have fun.

News flash: The homeless are not alcoholics because they just love getting drunk. These people have lived in the worst conditions, lost jobs, lost family, lost everything they valued. They experience the lowest of the lows every day and they have to face the reality that they will probably never escape their brutal reality.

You might turn to the bottle, too.

I cannot help but feel fortunate that I don't have to do so. I have never lived a day out in the streets, begging others for mere survival.

I also cannot help but feel guilty. Our society has tossed these people away like so much human garbage and then has complained that they litter our streets.

The homeless don't deserve our hatred; they deserve our help.

Jamie Kanter is a senior majoring in Spanish and psychology. His column, "On the Flip Side," appears every other Thursday.