Homeless people

George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London1 is a wild read for anyone who hasn't been homeless. Conditions are astonishingly, almost creatively, bad, and even when there is work it is so profoundly awful and so minimally paid that it provides for nothing more than a hellish cycle of existence. Yet somehow – perhaps because he was out of it when writing – Orwell writes with calm, wry good humour and sensible insight. Here he talks about the disrespect that society has for beggars:

A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout – in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite . . . . Why are beggars despised? – for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.

Later he mentions “three especial evils” that mark the homeless person's existence – hunger (“nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition”), enforced idleness (“a dismal, demoralising way of life”) and being cut off from women...

It is obvious what the results of this must be: homosexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than these is the degradation worked in a man who knows that he is not even considered fit for marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as demoralising as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage to a man's self-respect.

Now – other than giving some money to Anglicare one time – I never did anything for the beggars in Sydney. I'm shy around strangers and not a particularly generous person either. But I did try to think of them with respect as I passed by and sometimes I would look seriously at them or smile. So at the very least, let's be sure to regard these people with respect and not to measure them by their lack of money.

1 G Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Penguin Books, 1933), 175, 206-07.