On Homelessness: A Blight on the Modern Soul

Author’s note: I have pondered and reflected upon such a topic for a long while, usually stirred by observing or interacting with homeless people in some once-illustrious—gilded but fallen—American city. This time, after staying at a beautiful, historic Art Deco hotel in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (where I witnessed the plight of some people and the blithe unawareness of others), I decided to allow my thoughts on the topic to sublimate through reflection via writing.

Photo by Milan Cobanov

Opposing Worlds Collide, Triggering Psychic Defenses

They walk among us—those people: the unfortunate ones who we pretend do not—and perhaps even wish (did not)—exist. The homeless are among us and upon us, though they do not typically intercourse with us—except to beg of us or impose upon us, at which point they often irritate us—inciting in us, discomfort and anxiety. Such instinctual irritation probably owes to our own psychological barriers and protections, which obviate the appropriate visceral response(s): of horror, of dismay, of shame, of guilt;—in short, of a multitude of sentiments which we would rather not feel or express.

Our aversion to these emotions, often creates in us, an automated psychological and emotional distancing in the form of annoyance or avoidance—which can only be maintained if we do not experience homeless people up close and personally as real people with whom we share a common humanity. To recognize our shared nature would necessitate a compassionate viewing of the world through their fearful, forlorn eyes—a rather horrifying perspective, and one which we are unprepared to experience, in the course of an ordinary day or during a trip to a new city. Such a tension results in either pretending their plight does not exist, or assuring ourselves that their circumstance is their own fault, and consequently not our burden to bear.

During our stay in Milwaukee, I witnessed hotel staff at the Ambassador Hotel, a beautiful and well-preserved Art Deco hotel that provides an authentic “Jazz Age” experience, sternly ward off homeless people who—owing to the older neighborhood “in need of gentrification” (wherein the venerable old hotel lies)—kept wandering up to the property to harass guests, presumably to beg for money; and in a world which wholly revolves around—and is circumscribed by—money, such a clear delineation between the “haves” and “have-nots” could not be more jarring or visceral (than the one on Wisconsin Ave in 2025).

On one hand, it was comforting to be able to trust that the hotel staff were dutifully doing their jobs, protecting the personage and property of guests; on the other, I was again saddened by the reality that the homeless occupy a disparate world that is wholly walled-off from “decent society.” At the threshold of a place like the Ambassador, there lies a disconcerting portal between two distinct, but separate, worlds that interface with one another: to enter the “Roaring 20s” world of the Ambassador, one must first exit the presently-dilapidated, deracinated, demoralized, and degenerated world of contemporary Wisconsin Ave—and it is precisely the job of staff to make sure the two worlds remain distinct, never intersecting for longer than necessary: i.e. the amount of time it takes to cross the threshold from one world into the other.

In practical terms, who could, in good faith, fault businesses and employees for trying to prevent the homeless from trammeling over current and future business interests? Such a proposition, as to grant the homeless special privileges of guilt-ridden solicitation and unrestricted trespassing, would be morally preposterous; further, such allowances would clearly violate the natural and social rights of ordinary citizens to go about their business in general peace and security. Thus, I do not suggest a change in the practical, operational regulations and procedures, surrounding a place such as the Ambassador, but rather an uncomfortable but dutiful shift in perspective, by those safely contained within society, towards those who have been exiled—excommunicated and cast beyond the gates. This essay challenges its readers to become aware of our own psychological defenses and false rationalizations, in order to allow for a greater—humane—understanding of the problem of homelessness—on a twofold (personal and societal) level.

One such rationalization and (often false) generalization is the notion that the homeless are somehow, by and large, deserving of their predicament: as if society itself in its current iteration were a fair adjudicator of their merit as human beings. The more nuanced truth is that the homeless are often victims of Fate (to varying degrees)—and are, therefore, not homeless solely due to (great and grave) personal fault. Such an opinion is one that relieves us from the burden and pain of empathy, and should therefore be treated with great suspicion.

People (or bots) want to believe we live in a just world that is a fair adjudicator of our merit as human beings. It is therefore both easy and commonplace to trammel upon the homeless—who are often seen as worthless human garbage in need of being discarded—by wicked and cruel souls such as these—who themselves are quite obviously redirecting repressed rage and brimming resentment at the easiest of possible targets: the homeless.

Through a largely unconscious process that occurs in the individual psyche en masse, a conception of reality is created—where those who live “on the outside” are somehow extraneous and adjacent to our society, while physically living within its borders. And so, the larger point (which is itself an indictment of our society at large) to be wary of, is the essentially automatic (assumptive) separation and delineation of worlds that—with an accompanying lack of empathy, understanding, and identification—automatically places such people outside of our capacity to be compassionate, and individually-discerning on a case-by-case basis; in such a way, worlds are walled-off and tens of thousands of people—and their experiences of life—are dismissed as invalid and not worth consideration—much like resumes and cover letters, in the age of auto-rejection.

“Over-Connection” Necessitates Dissociative Fragmentation

Perhaps ironically, one of the chief problems of the modern “connected” world is that we are constantly attuned to the suffering of others instead of minding our own business at home, enjoying life where we find it. Such over-connection and over-stimulation eventuates in the embodiment of an anxious, frenzied spirit where the external world often feels completely unstable and utterly horrible, precisely because we have realtime “knowledge” of happenings around the world. This knowledge is not only unnatural for a local, communal animal such as man, but also precludes the real enjoyment of life in the immediate, local present—such a declaration is to say little of the cacophonic nature of such decontextualized information, but I digress. Nonetheless, I find such an adaptation, as that of human beings to the superimposition of a virtual world upon a “real” one, to be maladaptive and incompatible with genuine human flourishing. Yet unlike other forms of remote suffering which modern persons are bombarded by, homelessness is fundamentally different—and, is therefore, our societal blight to reckon with, and communal plight to bear.

Why?, one might ask. Well, I think it is because “these people,” who suffer tremendously in our midst, are, in fact, our neighbors. We see and encounter them daily in our cities and communities, while simply going about our own business and lives. Unlike more remote “starving children in Palestine” or the “displaced peoples in Ukraine,” these people—these homeless people who lack the basic necessaries of life—suffer in our midst, while we attempt to make the best of our own lives in a shared vicinity. Such an acknowledgement does not serve to invalidate other forms of suffering, but instead is to simply note that in such matters, proximity does indeed determine responsibility and culpability: in other words, if it is in our power to do something about the suffering people in our midst, we ought consider how we might do so—as individuals foremost, and as a society more generally. It is only when forced to confront such a reality that we feel an appropriate sense of pity and horror at the homeless person’s very existence in such a denigrated state: a state that could be characterized as complete and unequivocal un-safety: a state where such persons are in grave danger, in both person and possession, at all times with no reprieve in sight.

The Homeless As the Modern Excommunicated

Can you imagine what living in such a state for any period of time would do to a person?—spiritually, psychologically, morally, and emotionally speaking. The human psyche is incredibly fragile in many respects, though also surprisingly resilient in its ability to adapt and manufacture realities that serve the end of continuation. Our minds are in many ways prone to fragmentation, and the trauma of homelessness feels to me like the end of one form of life, and the beginning of another, sub-societal one: in our society, the homeless feel akin to the excommunicated of old, in that we seldom even acknowledge them except as a statistic; fewer yet, attempt to speak for them and their interests as individuals. In such a way, I feel that they represent the true lower caste in our highly-stratified and centralized—technological and consumerist—modern crony-capitalist system.

To most of us, I think the homeless remain a bit of an enigma, in that I think we do not really understand their experience of life, or their preceding descension into the abyss. Consider that in our applied-scientific materialist society,—which is, I think, ultimately aimed at the maximization of technological and methodological “innovations” that can be produced and consumed, and which are “weighed and measured” via various macroscopic statistical methods—the worst plight one may suffer (barring personal tragedies), is to become materially destitute; once the former occurs, mental, emotional, moral, and spiritual destitution invariably follow—that is, if they did not occur concomitantly or in precession.

It would seem that the vast majority of homeless people, once they descend into homelessness, rarely fully rise out owing to the sheer horror of the experience (of homelessness), and its many desecrating influences and effects; if homelessness were only a temporary, ephemeral epiphenomenon of cascading life crises that could be overcome once the proverbial dust settled, I do not believe we would see a surging homeless population as we do today. In a community where persons are constantly under siege by the scarcity of basic necessities (and other dangerous and mentally-unstable homeless and non-homeless people)—in addition to the ever-present and easily accessible, addictive and escapist, “pseudo-elixirs of despair” (in the form of various drugs and alcohol)—life expectancy for the homeless living in homeless “communities” cannot be very great; “quality of life,” or the lack thereof, is unimaginable (to normal persons) under such deleterious conditions.

Nonetheless, modern man’s conscience is able to view homelessness as a “problem” in macroeconomic and social terms, because it is en vogue to speak of man in statistical and general terms, as if each life were but variables on a chart to plot and otherwise manipulate:

The statistical method shows the facts in light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality had predominantly the character of irregularity.

—Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

In other words, the fundamental reality is one of individual human existence and experience, and therefore a statistical perspective is necessarily distant and abstracted from truth. But if we were to allow ourselves to see homeless people not as a monolithic socio-economic group of undesirable persons, but as individual human beings who have fallen due to specific reasons and circumstances totally unbeknownst to us, we must be prepared to face the full weight of our conscience in light of startling truths.

Homelessness is Far Easier to Slip Into Than We’d Like to Admit

Surprisingly, a cursory glance at some quantitative, statistical data about homelessness indicates that many persons deemed “homeless”—typically those who retain jobs and live temporarily without a home in vehicles or with other generous persons—are often able to stabilize their lives and recover. But for those actually living on the streets, such redemption seems elusively “beyond the pale”—for each soul, there is a proverbial point of no return.

Yet the former discussion brings me to a larger point—viz. that of a shocking realization—which is to acknowledge that homelessness in the modern world is, in actuality, incredibly easy for the most atomized and isolated people (particularly those without financial support from family or any other specific group of which they are a part) to “slip into.” Homelessness can occur from any number of concurrent life-calamities, which could hypothetically proceed as follows: e.g. the loss of employment and the inability to replace it, which is then compounded by personal and/or student loan debt, and a lack of savings/investments to draw from (in a time of crisis); death of a provider (if dependent) or a spouse (who does not have adequate life insurance—which requires money to pay for in the first place); serious injury with an accompanying massive burden of insurmountable medical bills that leave one both deeply indebted and economically non-viable; acute or chronic illness that one cannot cope with alone or pay to manage/ameliorate; untreated or poorly-managed drug/alcohol addiction or mental illness; or, any similar occurrence or combination of the aforementioned possibilities—the essential point is that there are innumerable paths and combinations that can lead to homelessness in our society.

How Might One Become Homeless?

Of course it is these latter examples (untreated and poorly-managed mental illness and/or drug and alcohol addiction) that many people wishing to absolve their conscience of guilt tend to fixate on, but I believe this may be a mistake: while it is undeniable that many homeless people are addicted to various substances and/or often suffer from various mental illnesses, I don’t think the procession of events across time is necessarily so clear. What I mean by this is that homelessness—as in living alone on the street—is likely a final destination reached after a long downward spiral of descension: in such a conception, it is difficult to note just when “addiction” or “mental illness” become pathological, necessarily leading to one’s ruination. In other words, it is worth acknowledging that many non-homeless people may suffer from such diseases just as badly (or even worse in some cases): e.g. I personally know of about a half-dozen people who have died from drug overdoses, and none of them were ever homeless to my knowledge. This discussion serves to illuminate the obvious: that drug and alcohol abuse and/or severe mental illness, do not necessitate homelessness,—i.e. as in a directly causal relationship—but are merely potential factors, in a vast sea of possible tragedies and misfortunes that could haphazardly align in a sadistic twist of Fate.

People Without a “Safety Net” Will Always Be Threatened By the Specter of Homelessness

In the case of mental illness, which is seen by many as rampant (and by others as over-diagnosed), any trained psychologist (or therapist) will tell you that such conditions are invariably exacerbated by externally-imposed stress and wholesale life-strain placed upon the organism—which homelessness (or the threat thereof) as an experience, undoubtedly does. Thus, I find dismissals of the homeless on the grounds that such people were essentially “predestined” to live in such a state—on the grounds of their genetic (and/or circumstantial) proclivity towards descension into the moribund mires of mental illness and/or ruinating addictive predispositions—as a form of intellectual dishonesty and moral shirking. While the proximate cause of homelessness may be remote and unknowable in general terms, what follows is certain: we live in a society that induces enormous stress and strain to rise above our fellows: from the time we enter school until that time we are buried in the grave, we are encouraged to ruthlessly compete with one another—trampling others to rise above the pack, if need be.

The essential point I am attempting to illuminate is thus: a growing number of people in our society (particularly young people with lots of debt and little help from friends or family) occupy a class of people that some left-leaning sociologists have started to call the “precariat”: people who live a perpetually precarious (and anxious) existence. For such people, the horrifying specter of losing what little they have and descending into the void of homelessness may always loom large over their lives—it is an enduring threat to keep treading water for fear of disappearing beneath the surface altogether. For people who have a safety net (in the form of a supportive family or ample savings) to fall back on should they fail—perhaps even monumentally in some fortunate cases—at any point in life, there exists a disconnect and lack of understanding about those persons who do not possess such a necessary “luxury”; for great things cannot be built without great risk—but if the risk is so great that it could eventuate in homelessness, is it any wonder people have stopped trying to build something great for themselves and their loved ones? There has to be a mean struck—in terms of risk—between security and the elusive possibility of beneficence.

A Shocking Revelation: How Our Society Measures A Person’s Value

Since we conflate economic value (measured in terms of present wealth and future productive capacity) with human worth and dignity, it follows that the fallen, i.e. the homeless person, is literally viewed by our society as a person with no worth or value. Within such a conception, homeless people are either a “problem” to be managed by macroscopic interventions, or pitied (by various private charities and organizations) as feckless individuals—who are in need of the most patronizing forms of (undignified and degrading) “charity” imaginable. I posit, however, that the homeless are just like you and me—or, if such a declaration is too potent, what you or I could be if our life circumstances were somewhat or altogether different; and we—owing to our innately-human weakness and inadequacy—fell, gave into our vices, and became wholly-circumscribed by the insular world of the homeless (that, as has been said, exists within our society, but is its own wholly-separate sphere of human experience). Hence, we should see the homeless as human beings with compassion, allowing ourselves to feel the pain that our psychic defenses actively inhibit us from experiencing.

With such a conception, I am reminded of Simone Weil:

Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: ‘Why am I being hurt?’ harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.

The other cry, which we hear so often: ‘Why has somebody else got more than I have?’, refers to rights. We must learn to distinguish between the two cries and to do all that is possible, as gently as possible, to hush the second one, with the help of a code of justice, regular tribunals, and the police . . .

But the cry ‘Why am I being hurt?’ raises quite different problems, for which the spirit of truth, justice, and love is indispensable . . .

When harm is done to a man, real evil enters into him; not merely pain and suffering, but the actual horror of evil. Just as men have the power of transmitting good to one another, so they have the power to transmit evil. One may transmit evil to a human being by flattering him or giving him comforts and pleasures; but most often men transmit evil to other men by doing them harm.

Nevertheless, eternal wisdom does not abandon the soul entirely to the mercy of chance and men’s caprice. The harm inflicted on a man by a wound from outside sharpens his thirst for the good and thus there automatically arises the possibility of a cure. If the wound is deep, the thirst is for good in its purest form. The part of the soul which cries ‘Why am I being hurt ?’ is on the deepest level and even in the most corrupt of men it remains from earliest infancy perfectly intact and totally innocent.

To maintain justice and preserve men from all harm means first of all to prevent harm being done to them. For those to whom harm has been done, it means to efface the material consequences by putting them in a place where the wound, if it is not too deep, may be cured naturally by a spell of well-being. But for those in whom the wound is a laceration of the soul it means further, and above all, to offer them good in its purest form to assuage their thirst.

—Simone Weil, “Human Personality”

“Solving” Homelessness May Require a Paradigm Shift

Ultimately, there is quite obviously no immediate solution to the present crisis of homelessness—that is likely becoming worse, as “economic conditions” and the “job market” further deteriorate. I think, fundamentally, we need a paradigm shift about who and what the homeless are—asking ourselves uncomfortable and puzzling questions about how each individual homeless person (encountered throughout the course of routine daily life), in fact, came to be homeless. Fundamentally, such an experiential methodology—as individual inquiry via experience and deliberate thought into an issue such as homelessness—precludes citing tired, trodden macroscopic interventions—interventions which primarily serve to deflect and relocate the locus of responsibility outside our ability to act as conscious, intervening agents, on behalf of ourselves and other people. As odd as it may sound, I am asking people to consider what they could do to prevent the people they are associated with from ever becoming homeless in the first place, if anything at all; it seems to me the embarkation point when discussing such matters is in the realm of kinship,—the familial and local—wherein a buttress against the degeneration and disintegration that is homelessness could be formed and strengthened.

I do believe the reestablishment of various formal and informal, public and private institutions could also help alleviate the effects,—helping to mitigate and soothe—but ultimately, I think what is needed is a reifying of humane values—values which could help to gradually restructure the aims our society from the bottom-up, organically. For instance, consider: if we are to be true Americans, perhaps we should evaluate to what extent we are deviating from our ideals and founding principles: I leave such ponderings to the reader. In all, such a large, systemic problem cannot be solved by continually treating downstream symptoms and effects: the goal should be to prevent homelessness from afflicting our communities (like the epidemic it is) in the first place.

The Bottom Line

Hence, I am incredibly dubious about simply “throwing money” and resources at the problem by funding various NGO organizations and charities, whose institutional interests may preclude them from genuinely seeking to “solve” (or greatly diminish) homelessness—because its solvency would be against their own personal interest, i.e. putting themselves out of a job (in an economy which does not have enough good, sustaining jobs). Donating money to “the experts” to “solve” problems for us, in fact, is a great cancer in our society: for in so doing, we absolve our conscience of not taking decisive action in those spheres wherein we may actually intervene in the lives of real, embodied people (who live in our locale). In fact, we see such a “principle” play out all over the modern economy; for instance, through crowd-funding and voluntary contributions to “creators” through platforms like Patreon—where people donate money to live vicariously through people who are actually doing the work, or seeming to do so; from afar, who would, or could, know the difference?

And so, I have arrived at a startling observation about our present-day world: we live in a society which tends to believe, if implicitly by our actions and inaction, there is an amelioration for every ill (though there quite obviously is not)—and that if there is, it most often comes in the form of a good or service that may be purchased as a consumer product; hence, when politicians and constituents alike talk in the “public sphere” of “solving” various plights—such as that of the perceived “crisis in education” which centers around our schools, or that of a surging homeless population—it is most often expressed as a “lack of resources” or “funding.” Within such an assumption, it is implicitly asserted that if the “funding” were to simply increase, the “problem” would go away or be greatly diminished—as if matters pertaining to human life were a binary system of directly-correlable variables. But reality for human beings as we but glimpse it, is incredibly complex, convoluted, and dynamic; as a result, our “solutions” very seldom have the desired, projected effect. Thus it is as follows: funding without a proper conception of reality—on which hinges, applicative direction—is, itself, cancerous: you can “fund” a fire with gasoline and it will surely grow, not extinguish. There is, therefore, no guarantee that adding “resources” to a likely misunderstood problem, would not do precisely the opposite: i.e. make the problem worse.

Hence, in the case of homelessness in the highly-centralized present—where many millions of individuals feel less an agent and more a byproduct of circumstance—a real solution will not come easily or expediently: real solutions almost never materialize in such a way. Thus, I might suggest that one of the first steps we can take is simply recalibrating our understanding of the issue, acknowledging that we do not, in fact, genuinely understand the proliferation of homelessness in recent decades. It seems to me that one of the chief problems with demoralized peoples, such as the homeless, is that they are disposed to believing they are worthless—irredeemably so, I might think. From such a vista, what if we were to simply tell the decent homeless writ large—i.e. those who are (or would) sincerely seeking help—something along the lines of, “by virtue of your humanity, you are deserving of our empathy, grace, and compassion in the form of an interested intervention.” It seems to me such efforts would be far more potent if they were grounded in something much more permanent (and lasting) than temporary housing and a meal ticket for today.

Integrating the Ideal With the Real

But we also cannot be naïve about who or what the homeless are: many among their ranks indeed are severely mentally ill, and are, therefore, likely very dangerous—and whether or not such mental maladies precipitated their homelessness is, practically-speaking, immaterial. We therefore (as a society) cannot forcibly integrate the world of the homeless into ours: citizens not only deserve, but require, that third-spaces such as parks remain safe and accessible for their own flourishing. But to acknowledge that there must be protections and interventions to safeguard not only the rights, but also the needs of individuals living within each disparate world, is in no way inhumane; but instead, such a recognition may be the first step towards a potential solution—boundaries to bring about a bridging of worlds, if you will.

To deal with the homeless properly, they must be seen as what they are—or, more aptly, who they are: individual human beings, like you and me—who, for whatever particular reason(s), have fallen into the pits of hell on earth; such people should therefore be viewed less a nuisance or plague descended, and more as a reflection of our failures as a highly-organized society to prevent many hundreds of thousands of individuals at any given time from “falling through the cracks.”

Expressing such sentiments, I am again reminded of Simone Weil:

The fact that a human being possesses an eternal destiny imposes only one obligation: respect. The obligation is only performed if the respect is effectively expressed in a real, not a fictitious, way; and this can only be done through the medium of Man’s earthly needs.

On this point, the human conscience has never varied. Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians believed that no soul could justify itself after death unless it could say: ‘I have never let anyone suffer from hunger.’ All Christians know they are liable to hear Christ himself say to them one day: ‘ I was hungered, and ye gave me no meat.’ Everyone looks on progress as being, in the first place, a transition to a state of human society in which people will not suffer from hunger. To no matter whom the question may be put in general terms, nobody is of the opinion that any man is innocent if, possessing food himself in abundance and finding someone on his doorstep three parts dead from hunger, he brushes past without giving him anything.

So it is an eternal obligation towards the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has the chance of coming to his assistance. This obligation being the most obvious of all, it can serve as a model on which to draw up the list of eternal duties towards each human being. In order to be absolutely correctly made out, this list ought to proceed from the example just given by way of analogy. Consequently, the list of obligations towards the human being should correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger.

Among such needs, there are some which are physical, like hunger itself. They are fairly easy to enumerate. They are concerned with protection against violence, housing, clothing, heating, hygiene and medical attention in case of illness. There are others which have no connection with the physical side of life, but are concerned with its moral side. Like the former, however, they are earthly, and are not directly related, so far as our intelligence is able to perceive, to the eternal destiny of Man. They form, like our physical needs, a necessary condition of our life on this earth. Which means to say that if they are not satisfied, we fall little by little into a state more or less resembling death, more or less akin to a purely vegetative existence.

They are much more difficult to recognize and to enumerate than are the needs of the body. But everyone recognizes that they exist. All the different forms of cruelty which a conqueror can exercise over a subject population, such as massacre, mutilation, organized famine, enslavement or large-scale deportation, are generally considered to be measures of a like description, even though a man’s liberty or his native land are not physical necessities. Everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.

Obligations, whether unconditional or relative, eternal or changing, direct or indirect with regard to human affairs, all stem, without exception, from the vital needs of the human being.

—Simone Weil, “The Needs of the Soul”

Closing Remarks

Seen in such a light, the staff at the Ambassador Hotel indeed acted properly: it is not their job to solve the world’s ills, but to protect the hotel, its guests, and future business interests for the entity which employs them to do so. Thus, to simply let the unsavory bits of the homeless population run amok as many (Democratic) cities do—letting them squat on public property, taking over whole public parks designed to fulfill a community’s need for third-space recreation—is not only absurd and unjust to its constituents, but also does nothing to rehabilitate existing homeless people, nor prevent additional “precarious” people from themselves becoming homeless.

In fact, the goal should be to initially bridge the gap between the two worlds, before the barriers can then be blended and thereafter dissolved; our goal should be to eliminate the “homeless population” as a socio-economic group capable of being statistically-measured (owing to its commonality and vastness), but I highly doubt we can ever prevent individual persons from sometimes becoming homeless. Thus, I am apt to conclude there will always be some homeless people in an imperfect world such as this; but like most things, such a discussion (as we have been having) is a matter of scale, scope, and proportion—and at present, it is very obvious to all but the willingly-ignorant, that the current social framework of society is lacking (in such a respect) to a startling degree. Hence there are more homeless people in modern America today than ever before. It is our responsibility as individual human beings to recognize and consider the essential humanity of “the least among us,”—for if you don’t, who will?