Soundings

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32703, 4 September 1971, Page 6

Soundings

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DENIS McCAULEY

To a society based on property and the family unit, anyone who gives even the appearance of rejecting property and sneering at home sweet home is unpopular. The whole machinery of our society is geared to the assumption that all members live geographically stagnant lives and are always easily located. A person “of no lived abode” is a spanner in the works. He is a bum and a layabout, an insult to ratepayers, an affront to mortgagees. How can we sleep snugly in our innersprung beds when he is out there in the dark using our grass, snoring in our parks, huddling in our railway station waiting rooms. We’ll have to ask him to move along. We don’t know where, but he can’t sleep here.

Our attitude to people who for some reason or another are “of no fixed abode” is highly irrationaL The law says it is a crime so hundreds of people each year are fined. In many cases if they were able to pay their fines they would never have been sleeping in the parks in the first place; the result, an even longer spell in the open or gaol. . Try for an unemployment benefit if you have no address to give; refused. Our society reacts agaihst these people apparently in fear. Yet from a great many of them there is nothing to fear, and as for the others fear and repression is the wrong way of effecting a cure. It is odd the way the drifter with little but the clothes he wears should so threaten us that we huff and puff until we blow his doss house down. Like the besieged everywhere we close the gates, batten the hatches and prepare to pour boiling oil on the enemy outside.

As the rootless way of life increases to include an ever-widening stream of people, we insist on lumping them all together and attribute to them all the character of the lowest of their number, the genuine down-and-outs. The young probably make up by far the greatest percentage of the homeless. Many are Maoris, just in the cities from the country, with the special problems of their colour and their limited background. Others subscribe to a whole philosophy, a revolt against the ethics of society,

the so-called hippies. We can tolerate them as long as they are in some commune in the country—where we know where they are—but when we think of them sleeping in the numerous crash-pads they provide for one another or have provided for them all round the country, it is a different story. They are something dirty, like the drunk on the park bench, old and smelly as well as a menace to society. There are places for people to stay if they are down on their luck: the City Mission’s night shelter, the Salvation Army for example. But a great many of the homeless will not call on these services for one reason or another. There is very often a suspicion of religious bodies, a feeling that they. are liable to preach to you if you call on them. Whatever the reason, you may say the homeless live their life from choice. But can a brain damaged man “choose” his homelessness? An alcoholic? Or a drug dependent or a schizophrenic? Does the girl beaten out of her home by a violent father “choose” to roam the streets? I remember a few years ago when fairly widespread unemployment sent many into the open, passing Hagley Park in a taxi. In the park some "residents” had lit a fire. pie taxi driver was almost apoplectic. “Bloody marvellous, isn’t it. Look at the layabouts, and me working for 20 years for a living.” ’ “But isn’t that your choice?” I asked. “I’ve got no choice in it. I have to pay the rent, feed the kids.” “Well, how would you like to sleep in the park and have no wife and kids?” "No thanks.” “Well, then, didn’t you choose to pay the rent and feed the kids?” “Like hell I did.” A strange envy is easily aroused in many of us by the sight of the rootless. Somehow they appear to have covetable freedom, a glorious lack of responsibility, they can go anywhere they like any time they like. . ■? Perhaps this is the reason society reacts to them in. fear. It is a fear that they may be a bad example.