While on a lunch date last week, my grandmother told me about a segment she’d recently heard on the Russian roulette of 20th-century art forms that is our local radio station’s call-in show. One caller caught her attention, a woman who claimed she wasn’t comfortable bringing her grandchildren to the library where I am a librarian because of all the homeless people.

We chatted about it over our bagel sandwiches before moving on to other topics, but something about the idea of that call stayed with me long after we’d said goodbye. It prickled under my skin all weekend.

When my coworker and I finally listened to the clip the following Monday, it was pretty much what we expected, right up until her signoff: “I as a taxpayer,” she said, “don’t appreciate having to walk through a bunch of dirty, smelly homeless people.”

If honesty is a virtue to be unconditionally admired, I suppose there is something laudable about that statement. And yet I am overwhelmingly put in mind of a quote from (yes, really) one of my favorite romance novels: “If you have no compassion,” one character asks after a man expresses disgust at a disfigured child, “have you not even manners?”

Perhaps not. According to a 2006 article, pictures of people in “extreme out-groups” (e.g. the homeless) did not activate the socially-cognizant prefrontal cortex in the same way that pictures of “normal” people do when viewed by an observer. In other words, the subjects in the study subconsciously viewed the homeless as less than human.

To give this caller the benefit of the doubt that she was clearly not extending towards the homeless, she did seem to recognize that the people she did not want to walk by were in need. But even as she worked her way around the fact that homeless have no options outside of the library for day shelter, the woman on the other end of that line proposed a segregationist solution: a warming room, presumably quarantined from the rest of the library. Imagine the logistics of that, for a moment: “Welcome to the library, sir. Are you homeless? Yes? Please sit in this one room with the other people that the rest of us don’t want to look at, several of whom you actively dislike.”

It’s the sort of “not in my backyard” mentality that leads us to criminalizing outdoor camping and claiming it applies to all people equally. We all know homelessness is a problem, but it’s such a big and complex problem that the only solution seems to be “if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”

And the homeless people get it. They understand that they are unwanted. Some commiserate after an incident caused by a troublemaking member of their cohort. Some avoid eye contact until they can trust that you’re a safe person to invest a positive emotion in. The homeless can empathize with the concerns of the housed in a way that is difficult to replicate in reverse.

Don’t take me for a saint—I’ll admit that my job would be much easier if all of our homeless regulars up and headed to Grand Rapids tomorrow. That sometimes I do just want to slap the phone out of Sam’s hand instead of politely telling him, one more time, that he needs to use headphones while in that library. How disheartening it is when Mark shows up drunk again after he was doing so well for a week or two. That when I heard that one of our homeless regulars, an aggressive addict with a penchant for making threats and a year-long library ban, was killed in a car accident, I was—to my great shame—relieved.

Perhaps the deep and righteous rage I felt against this woman on the radio was a reflection of the anger at myself for thinking, in the deep down dark place in my heart, just like she does. That if I didn’t have to look at the homeless my life would be better. Because unlike many good and useful nonprofit organizations, my job is not to help the homeless get housed; it’s to help them in the meantime.

And that’s hard. It’s hard to know how much help is mine to give. It’s a knife-edge balance built out of a series of judgement calls that translate into a moral failure if you’re wrong and sometimes even when you’re right. I get it wrong, sometimes. A lot of the time, even.

But then once I sat with a man who tried to drink himself to death earlier that day, waiting for the paramedics to show up and try to save him from himself. Maybe the reason he asked me to call 911 for him was because I was the one who was there. Or maybe it was because I knew his name, and we’d said hi to each other every day, and I’d told him I liked his Mass Effect tattoo once.

I’d trade that, instantly, for him to have a house and an income and a life free from alcohol. But I wouldn’t trade it for my own comfort, or that of anyone else.

Homelessness is one of our country’s great failings, a joint failure of government, individuals, curiosity, and imagination. It has only gotten worse in recent years and will likely continue to do so. And until we reckon with our collective failure, the least—the very least—we can do is look.

Annaka Koster

Annaka Koster (’18) graduated from Calvin with majors in English and history and the University of Michigan a couple years later as a “master” of information science. She’s now a public librarian in her hometown. Outside the library, Annaka can be found doing a sundry of nerdy things, including reading comics, playing board games, and mourning her pet snail, Clive.