In agreeing with congressional candidate Monique DeSpain’s guest column about homelessness in Eugene, Kel Williams’ letter to the editor separates people experiencing homelessness into those suffering from mental illness or substance use and those who are “transient by choice.”
As Williams identifies himself as a retired local police officer, I do not question his experiences. I do question the black-and-white conclusions he draws from them.
Personal responsibility matters to me. But so does understanding what happened to someone before deciding what they are responsible for.
I know this personally. I survived significant childhood abuse and severe mental illness within my family. For years, that pain manifested in profoundly self-destructive ways. Eventually, I found a safety net in a local faith community. Without them, Lord knows where I would have ended up.
In 2021, I became the sole case manager at Eugene’s 410 Garfield Safe Sleep Site. I arrived with my own assumptions about homelessness. The souls I met there profoundly changed my perspective.
What I witnessed was not a collection of people choosing an easier life. I witnessed years of compounded tragedy, childhood trauma, addiction, grief and failed support systems. The tent was simply the part of their story the rest of us could see.
Unfortunately, their stories are not unusual.
If we truly want to address homelessness, we have to look further upstream. There is a moral reckoning there: What happens to children, what happens inside families, and what happens when the institutions meant to catch people fail. Behind so many broken hearts and abandoned souls are histories we don’t see: childhood abuse, sexual violence, foster care, mental illness, family instability, overprescribed opioids, rape, trauma and grief.
But looking upstream requires looking at ourselves. It is far easier to believe the person in the tent chose that life.
A 2006 Princeton study found that when participants viewed images of homeless people and people with drug addiction, a region of the brain associated with social cognition responded differently than it did to other groups. Researchers described the phenomenon as dehumanization.
Calling homelessness a “choice” makes looking away easier. “If they chose this, we owe them nothing.”
But what if the tent isn’t evidence of their moral failure?
What if it is evidence of ours?
Sarah Koski
Eugene
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