LETTER TO THE EDITOR: ‘From the citizens to the council, Burien isn’t hostile to homelessness, it is hostile to the homeless’

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a Letter to the Editor, written and submitted by verified resident. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of South King Media, nor its staff.]

From the citizens to the council, Burien isn’t hostile to homelessness, it is hostile to the homeless.

If someone insisted that people do not inherently deserve food, water, and shelter, would you find it radical? It’s not a new question by any means. The United Nations even considered it, and now unambiguously identifies food, water, and shelter as fundamental human rights; even going so far as to say that homelessness itself is a crime against humanity.

Sadly, many in Burien seem to know better than the UN, and proudly turn a blind eye to the humanity of Burien’s less fortunate. While it’s common (if not shameful) to be annoyed by or even a little afraid of the homeless, certain outspoken Burienites feel far more passionately than your average moral contrarian. They say they’re sick of seeing a “plague” – not of a gangrene poverty afflicting the homeless, but of a condition in which the homeless themselves afflict Burien by simply being alive. They would rather chop the homeless out of the city like a diseased organ than try to help. And here, the parallels to Nazi rhetoric begin. In many cases, Burienites are unintentionally employing overtly fascist concepts and ideas in discourse about homelessness.

The most common concept is the archetype of the “degenerate”, which compares a group of people to a disease (like gangrene) or to a pestilence that needs to be eradicated with violence.  It comes from a broader fascist concept of “blood and soil”, which relates to a certain imaginary “purity” in one population (especially an ethnic group) based on that population’s roots in a specific geographic location. You can think about it as “one’s blood is in the soil, and inseparable from it, forming the basis for sovereignty.” Since there is a perceived “purity” in one population, outsiders to that population may consequently be labeled “impure” and therefore harmful to that society. In a nutshell, this is the main Nazi sticking point when they talk about Jews. The Nazis took deliberate efforts to dehumanize the Jews in order to justify committing crimes against humanity towards them.

Meanwhile, certain Burienites have complained specifically about people experiencing homelessness coming from somewhere else (like Pioneer Square) and “tainting Burien” (uh oh). I’ve had conversions with people in which they refer to the homeless as a literal plague, or an infestation that “haunts” the geographic area. They are categorized (sometimes literally) as degenerates.

Furthermore, on the basis that the outsiders are tainting Burien, a VERY small number of people in Burien have already become violent. Their efforts have ranged in intensity from molotov-bombing a homeless camp on Ambaum, to slowing down in a car while pulling out of the grocery store, rolling down windows, and yelling “KILL YOURSELF” before driving somewhere warm, safe, and private. The store that they leave, in turn, sprinkles chemicals on stoops to burn the flesh of the people who try to sit there. That’s a pretty literal interpretation of extermination, and one that a former resident of Sunnydale Village said made them feel like “a literal insect.”

It seems like nobody punishes outsiders quite like Burien. From the citizens to the council (and their crusade against camping), Burien isn’t hostile to homelessness, it is hostile to the homeless. Worse, it’s easy to slip into attitudes that are over-the-top, and overtly dangerous to the wellbeing of people who are already reduced to finding a safe street to sleep on.

Obviously, dehumanizing a population to justify crimes against humanity cannot itself be justified. And if you want to avoid accidentally speaking like a Nazi, you have to avoid accidentally thinking like one. Humans are entitled to fundamental rights as a consequence of their birth, and therefore cannot be a plague. Groups of human beings don’t “inflict” a society with their mere existence, even though they do change it. Society is in a constant stage of change. A great exercise is to refer to the homeless as “people” and if you must specify, refer to them as “people who are homeless” or “people experiencing homelessness” or “people experiencing ‘housing instability’”.  The point is you’re using “people-first language” in these cases. Why? Because people-first language purposefully changes how you frame the identity of the homeless, and identity is the difference between a human being, and something that should be destroyed.

And at this point, I endeavor to emphasize that although some homeless people do drugs, and some do steal, and some are mentally ill, none of those things detract from their humanity. Basic human dignity need not be earned, though it can be withheld through conscious effort. All people have a past and (if we allow it) a future. They deserve dignity in the form of safety from violence, starvation, dehydration, and exposure. They deserve the things that make life worth living solely because they are people – a point that is central to humanitarianism, and which forms the antidote to the basis of Nazi ideology. They deserve a deeper awareness of the origins and deeper meanings of fascist-leaning rhetoric in the population which antagonizes them, because self-awareness leads to self-control.

On a personal note, seeing Sunnydale Village close was rough. Actually helping tear it down board-by-board felt like destroying the memory of a friend. I marked where the combat medic once lived, and where the outspoken activist once lived, and set aside a toy from her dog. Where are they now? When I hear that there are deaths in the small community that once existed next to the Church there, I always worry it was someone who once sat down and told me their stories. I’ll stay worried.

The main point is to (at all costs) not simplify groups of people to a symbol of something that can be hated as much as sickness and death. The solution to homelessness exists. It is complex, longitudinal, and multifaceted. It is rooted in knowing that people experiencing homelessness remain people despite the error of their circumstances.

– John Hansen
Burien

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