Why, yes I did. I have empathy, sympathy and all manner of concern for these people. If society, at large can’t seem to deal with them what makes you think, I, as one person, could do anything? I avoid and evade when I can. Self preservation and all.
ETA I pay my debt to karma by volunteering in animal welfare.
Seconded. I think being an asshole requires some form of agency by the perpetrator, either an intent to be a jerk or understanding that you will be negatively impacting others but choosing to ignore it. A mentally ill person who doesn’t perceive the threat posed by traffic is not an asshole, he’s someone that deserves empathy.
I’ve had friends who dealt with mental illness. They were wonderful people who, through no fault of their own, were suffering. It’s sad to realize that some people think of them as assholes because of this.
We had a very aggressive tweaker guy who staked out the local convenience store for begging at night. If you caught his eye and declined to give money, he’d sometimes follow you to your car and pound on the window until he got a buck or you managed to speed away.
Last year he shot someone in the leg in the parking lot; I don’t know if it was related to begging, it was a relief when he was arrested (this place has great deli sandwiches, I hated having to go somewhere else at night if he was around).
I think your post may have come off as more flippant and self-centered than you intended. I know I reacted similarly as chaika. No one is expecting any of us to have a solution, but derelth’s post was about seeing the humanity in an ill woman, so using “cray-cray”, for example, came off less empathetic than you are.
That was the impression I got, as well.
Thank you for being kind to the woman, Derleth. No doubt many people ignored her that day.
What could you do as one person? Well, I do think you could avoid using insulting, dismissive words like “cray-cray.” And you might think about challenging irrational notions that people suffering from mental illness are to be feared.
Some of the people I love most in this world suffer from mental illness which can at times be debilitating. The knowledge that in addition to everything else, they must also deal with the prevalent stigma surrounding mental illness (like that expressed in the language and attitudes of your first post) literally keeps me awake at night. Thank God they have support and treatment, apparently unlike the poor woman in the OP.
BTW, thanks for your powerful post, Derleth. I have thought about it all day.
Look, I suffer with my own mental illnesses. I may have been flippant. For that, I apologize and beg your forgiveness. But I cannot deal with normal everyday individuals talking to me in a store or on the street. I avoid all, if I can. It’s part of my phobia about being out in the world. I work on it everyday. I don’t want to be housebound. I have to force myself to venture out and one tiny thing will send me running. Sorry folks it’s just how I am.
ETA FTR I am not mean to anyone. Ever.
Wearing headphones might trigger responses from disturbed* people who think you’re getting special messages they can’t hear, but are about them.
*in particular, paranoid.
One thing every human being should realize: Change the name and the tale is told about you.
Any one of us could be one of those crazy bench people. Some of us are closer to it than others.
I totally get where you are coming from. Someone behaving unusually might be mentally ill, but I am not qualified to make that judgement. I also have my own stuff I’m dealing with. Describing odd behavior as “cray-cray” is no more demeaning than describing the person as “mentally ill” if it turns out they are intentionally under the effects of a recreational drug or they are just weird.
Thank you for saying that. I hope my posts have some kind of impact around here.
Sadly true, and thank you for responding to me.
When I attended Cal, Telegraph St had what I thought was a lot of homeless/ jobless/ panhandlers (it wasn’t a lot, SF lately has shown me the truth).
The Daily Cal (student newspaper with no faculty input and few students on staff then) had an article in my junior year about one of them complaining of their ‘invisibility’. No, you aren’t invisible, but after trying to engage with a few of them as one would regular people, one quickly learns why they are there and engaging YOU. So yes, new students soon tune you out, too.
Most of them appeared able to function in society, though.
“People’s Park” still makes me sad. A drug dealers’ refuge and volleyball court is not better than a dormitory.
So, everyone is lumped into an homogenous group, a group that needs to be ignored. Why aren’t all “regular people” ignored after a couple of encounters with rude pigs (yes, “regular people” can be obnoxious as well)?
Regular people are ignored. They just don’t mind, or even prefer that strangers aren’t bothering them on the street. Homeless people are distinct in that they might consider being noticed to be a benefit, where non-homeless people tend not to.
There’s a guy in Boston who goes by Elliot Davis who is a very aggressive pan handler/scam artist. He demands $20 for a can of fix-a-flat, claiming that he has a flat tire, and gets seriously angry when people decline or offer to buy him an actual can of fix-a-flat. He’s been arrested for assault, and there are frequent posts on the Boston subreddit when people encounter him.
In my town, we also have a woman known as The Walker. Like others in this thread have noted, if you mention her to anyone in town, they know who you’re talking about.
Yes! I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right.
It’s like… well, humans are social animals, though we vary in how much socialization we need/prefer. Suppose we image a Social Interaction Unit. It’s a small thing: if someone says something to you, that’s at least one unit, more if it’s something more personal that “Nice weather.” Heck, someone meeting your gaze and nodding as you pass each other on the sidewalk probably counts for one unit.
A confirmed introvert might be perfectly well fed on a diet of 10 pts a day. A raging extrovert might need several hundred points or they start feeling lonely and neglected. Most of us have absolutely no trouble meeting our minimum. If you live with another person, you might be most of the way there before you leave the house in the morning. If you hold any sort of job other than, oh, night watchman at a graveyard, your customer/coworker interactions are plenty. Add on friends, other family members, people you interact with at clubs or civic activities…
If anything, we’re overfed all the time. Most of us at least sometimes long to be left alone, want to simply carry out some task without having to engage in social interactions with strangers, look forward to an evening alone in front of Netflix as a treat.
The problem with these types of homeless people is they AREN’T getting the usual supply of SIU built into their daily life. They’re ALONE. They don’t have close family, close friendships, friendly neighbors, coworkers… no regular contacts built into their lives.
So some of them are desperately trying to get the social interaction they need from total strangers, and most of those strangers just want to NOT have to have any more social interaction. (And especially not the confusing type you have with people whose minds are misfunctioning.) One side wants X, the other side wants Not-X – no wonder they can’t just ‘get along’ with each other.
No. People are INDIVIDUALS and should be treated that way.
The Walmart on Keeaumoku Street in central Honolulu used to have a few tables and chairs outside. On weekends local amateur Hawaiian musicians would hang out and play Hawaiian music, and that was pretty nice. But most of the time, the homeless took them over, so Walmart took them away.
A lot of the crazies in Honolulu seem to ride the No. 2 bus, usually when I’m on it too. For instance, the late-middle-aged Korean lady who always wears this sort of turban and screams about WAR COMING and YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE, DIE, DIE and showing her fellow passengers photos of Adolf Hitler on her phone. She gets kicked off the bus half the time.
Nice platitude.
True on a grand level, of course, but not possible moment to moment in daily life.
How many people do you imagine you set eyes on every single day? Hundreds, easily. I stop off at Brueggers for coffee. There are at least a dozen people waiting in line or for their orders to be ready. As I walked from the parking place into the shop I must have seen several dozen other people walking around. At least six people were working in the store. Then I walked back to my car. And it will be like that for the rest of the day. Literally hundreds of other people will share this world close enough to me that I could speak to them. Do I? Of course not! I have a life to live, and so do all of them, and uttering an endless, meaningless, stream of “Hello! How are you? Nice to meet you.” and the like will be a waste of both our times in, oh, 99% of the cases.
Do you really think I weighed each of them up as individuals? Decided what would be the best method of interaction with each of them, for both our sakes? Nope. Impossible to do, and I don’t even try. Humans recognize patterns and assign categories and make ‘rules’ for how to handle things that fall into those categories because otherwise we couldn’t begin to get through our days without being overwhelmed.
For example, I have a small but important to me category called People I Know and Care About. They are the people I do pay true attention to. How are they? Are things okay? I smile at them, talk to them, am genuinely interested in what’s happening to them, what they have to say, and so on.
The vastly largest category could be called The Mass of People Who Seem to Be Ordinary People Who Behave According to the Norms of Our Society. They have ordinary expressions on their faces, are wearing ordinary clothes, move in the usual patterns, do the usual type things… basically, they are ‘ordinary’ safe to ignore people, and I do ignore them beyond whatever attention is needed not to walk into them. And, I sincerely believe, if you took the time to question them, they’d be perfectly content that that particular middle aged woman just ran her eyes over them as she walked into Brueggers and got in line and didn’t intrude herself into whatever activity they were engaging on at that moment.
What we’re talking about a much, much smaller group. People who stand out for some reason, and thus can’t get the automatic ‘safe to enough’ treatment. Are they falling to the ground, clutching their chest? Are they shouting in rage? Are they dirty and disheveled? Are they doing something other than what you expect people in that setting to be doing? Then you have to spend a bit more attention on them, and decide what you need to do, whether it’s call 911 for them or move to the far side of the sidewalk and carefully not meet their eyes.
And, yes, it makes me less than Saint Somebody who devotes my life to caring for the walking wounded at all times. Too bad. We all decide how much of our time/effort/money we will expend on charitable actions, and those go up and down based on what else is going on in our lives. I think that is simply how it has to be.
I agree!
And the way I treat individuals is that I avoid interacting with them unless I have an actual reason or wish to.