Anyone who has lived anywhere near an American city has had some contact with the homeless.  My first real experience with the homeless was in Washington, DC in the summer of ’84 when I was working as an intern for NASFAA in their old offices just off of Dupont Circle.  I spent a lot of time running errands, taking the Metro to Capitol Hill and walking the city in general.  I don’t remember if it was ’84 or ’85 but the homeless situation got really bad when the city had to reduce crowding at Saint Elizabeths, the city’s mental institution, and so one day they just opened the gates and pushed a bunch of patients through.  I vividly remember sitting in a park eating lunch with a bunch of other office workers and looking up to see a flood of the recently expelled patients walking towards us.  To a person we all grabbed our stuff and walked as quickly as possible in the other direction.

I bring this up only to provide the context of my experience with the homeless.  Most that I ran into in DC would fall into the category of people with severe problems that led to their homeless status: mental or physical disease, drug abuse, alcoholism.  It was rare that you saw someone panhandling who looked like they were temporarily down on their luck and homelessness was their sole problem; almost all were homeless because of their primary problem.  So when I came across this piece on WiredNews I was intrigued, especially by this quote from Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless:

“More have e-mail than have post office boxes,” Stoops said. “The internet has been a big boon to the homeless.”

This is fascinating to me because I wouldn’t have thought that a majority of the homeless would have the capability to work online given many of the aforementioned mental and emotional limitations I personally observed.  Is this because I’ve had a very limited view of the homeless?  Have I only seen a “hardcore” segment of the homeless population and missed a larger, less “damaged” homeless segment?  Or is it that a majority of the homeless population can function intellectually for limited amounts of time but cannot do so consistently enough to hold down a job and function effectively in our increasingly complicated society?

Now I’m not surprised that more people have email addresses than PO boxes.  They’re free and they can “move” with the individual.  But I know many very successful people, the polar opposite of homeless, who become extremely flustered the moment they get in front of a computer or are asked to do something online.  They can navigate modern society with the best of ’em but can’t figure out how to attach an image to an email if their lives depend on it.  So how is it that these people who have such a hard time succeeding in our society can function online? 

If nothing else reading this has caused me to question my preconceptions about homelessness.  The issue is more complex than I thought and quite honestly it is slightly disturbing to me that I haven’t had cause to think about this in years.  The phrase, “out of sight, out of mind” probably summarizes it well and that’s shameful.  But what to do?