What is Homelessness?
How do you deem whether a person is homeless?
Being homeless is when you don’t have a place to return to.
Being homeless is when you don’t have a shelter.
Being homeless is when you are bound to sleep on the street.
Being homeless means you are constantly suffering from discrimination.
BUT being homeless also came with a perks. Is called being invisible to those around you. They would walk through streets of the city and no one would seems to notice them. Surprisingly, the trash that we throw on the streets have the same perks too.
Alright, let me rephrase this perks on the perspective of our society. What is trash? trash is something that we deem useless or something that has no value. To set things straight, sometimes we thinks that homeless people are someone who has no value, someone that has no benefit to the society, unfortunately it includes me. Ultimately, the truth behind the perks is not that we did not notice them, is just that we are too egoistic to consider their needs and sometimes the society don’t even consider them as human to began with.
Well, we could defend ourselves in terms of Psychological egoism, the doctrine that holds that individuals are always motivated by self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. In other words, the ultimate motive for all voluntary human action is the desire to experience pleasure or to avoid pain. We humans only do stuff that are beneficial to us. Sometimes, we can’t find the reason to help people and we are fixed in a mindset that helping people required too much efforts and is too troublesome. So instead of helping someone in need, we turn a blind eye to them.
However, is this really who we are? do we really have no feelings for other person’s suffering?
All I would say is that, being homeless is not a crime.
But discriminating the homeless is a crime. The true madness is knowing that you could help someone but you refused to.
To sum up everything, what really stopping us from helping each other is the idea of being self centered. In order to reduce or improve on the issue about homelessness, firstly we as an individual needs to be more selfless and the local government needs to be less greedy. According to SHELTER, a NGO that tackles on issue about homelessness, said that poverty are one of the top causes of homelessness. After all, when we look at a bigger picture, homelessness is just a small effect of corruptions.
So if you are still looking for a reason to extend your help to those who need it. Let this words be in your mind.
“To build a better nation, first you will have to build the people. Free people from homelessness. Free people from the claws of corruption.”
– JC Urban Photography
Reference
http://england.shelter.org.uk/campaigns_/why_we_campaign/tackling_homelessness/What_causes_homelessness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
Jc URBAN Photography 