Out on the Streets

I spent a few weeks in Ithaca this summer, which is a simply stunning time of year to be here. Maybe it's just the fact that the pace of life is quiet, and you're not tugging your hair out over prelims and assignments, but the town seems to have a special charm during the summer.

Wandering along the Commons, however, I noticed the groups of young people huddling together. They too spending time away from school hanging out. They weren't overtly aggressive, nor loud, but their dress sense separated them from the everybody else in the area: bankers, grad students, people eating at Simeon's. The youth stood around idly, inhabiting their own social circle with little interaction with passers-by. They appeared to orbit on the margins of society.

Seeing them, I was reminded of a conversation I had earlier in the summer with a friend of mine in Montreal about street youth. Lumping all people who hang out on the streets under one homogeneous group, he said contemptuously, "I don't want to see them on my way to work, or in the area where I live. Why don't they get a job?"

Homeless people, people who hang out on the streets, people who have nothing better to do except stand around the streets -- why are we so threatened by their presence? It's sad, certainly. Then why not do something about it? My friend also accused many young people on the street of dressing provocatively simply for the sake of attention. My reply is usually standard: if they want attention, shouldn't we be giving it to them? And I personally think that it's a good thing I see people inhabiting the streets, because it reminds me that there are people who don't live like me, who don't have the shelter and security of a roof or a loving family or meaningful employment. It is all too easy to dismiss kids loitering about on the streets, but if you're going to call it a problem, and fume about it, brushing the issue underneath the carpet is not going to help. Not wanting to see them doesn't help. You have to tackle the problem head-on.

I try to keep this in mind when I encounter people who make the streets their home or hangout. Granted, most of my experiences with people on the streets in the Western world have been limited to Montreal, a city that is known for its relative safety, security and tolerance, and I perhaps cannot generalize my experiences to urban areas elsewhere. But on principle, I attempt to at least acknowledge people of all ages who inhabit the streets. A brief smile or a "sorry, no" when they ask for change has mostly been responded to with a "thanks anyway," or a "enjoy your evening." So much for young people being rude and ungracious, I guess.

Sometimes, the experience has been very uplifting. Once, after a quick shake of the head and a smile on my part, I stepped away from a panhandler only to hear him call out, "but I'll take a smile instead any day." That experience (one of my first when I adopted my personal policy) convinced me that acknowledgment is a beginning. Too many of us march straight past people on the street as if they were a parking meter, the difference being we give the parking meter more change.

True, I have been drawn into situations that I would rather not have experienced. One such "acknowledgment" on a busy street corner led me to being lectured by a panhandler on society's ills. Vaguely embarrassed, I listened to him spew venom (not entirely quietly either) about exactly how society was screwed up. But I felt duty-bound to hear out the rage I had provoked. It was disturbing, but it was not a perspective I get to hear very often. In a perverse way, I enjoyed the puzzled glances of passers-by, trying to pretend they weren't looking. A relatively well-dressed college student listening to a guy you could smell a mile away? I felt the thrill of shattering an unspoken taboo.

There has been a lot said lately about many street youth in large cities really being suburban kids out for a kick. I've noticed several well-dressed young panhandlers myself in urban areas as well, and know that they really can't be as desperate for change as they claim to be. However, surely the fact that they feel they need to resort to such means to garner attention means that there is a problem we are not addressing. If they are even satisfied with attention expressed as disgust, fear, rage, contempt, suspicion and the whole host of negative emotions that street youth appear to elicit, they must be more desperate for someone to pay attention to them than they are for a lousy quarter.

So much is also said about youth being lazy, irresponsible, adopting a devil-may-care attitude to life. I'd like to think of it as a two-way street. If society at large isn't going to listen, why should young people even bother to speak up? Politicians pit youth against other generations to serve their own interests. With incessant squabbling over whether resources get spent on the old or the young; the media (controlled and consumed by adults) insisting on portraying youth as violent and junkies, why should kids even bother voting or responding to adult concerns? Compounded with a whole host of other social issues that lead youth to be on the streets, of course they are going to express themselves differently from mainstream adult society (whatever that is).

Obviously, all street youth aren't as pure and innocent and victimized as I've painted them. However, if you're going to call kids out on the streets a problem, and then proceed to think that if you don't see it in your neighborhood, you don't have to do anything about it, I think you forfeit the right to complain. You know that saying, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem? Well, this is where that applies.

Archived article by Baj Mukhopadhyay