Two people

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange
Yesterday evening, I looked out and saw a couple just inside a mall, quietly sitting on a bench. They might have been my age, maybe a little older. He was bent over, rolling a cigarette she was looking into the opulent, high-end store. I watched as she reached over and touched his chin out of tenderness. I've been in the city, on the job, long enough to see the signs of homelessness. They weren't particularly unkempt, but when you get paid to read people, you know.
I pointed them out to one of my coworkers, who said he had seen them in that area that morning. So it was, they were laying low, trying to stay warm in the sub-freezing weather. Now when I say "trying to stay warm", the semantics suggests avoidance of discomfort, and that's not really the case. The activity that the homeless are engaged in is survival at its most fundamental. Just trying to maintain enough nutrition to literally not lose your mind, the pain of sleeping/sitting/existing constantly in little safe areas, often numbing the pain, both emotional and physical with whatever is available.
When I left work again, I saw them leaving the mall and heading to where I was certain that they were going; the ramp that deposits onto the street from the interstate. They were walking, hand-in-hand toward their shelter for the night, hopefully neither getting mugged, raped, or killed by the predators of the homeless. I'm familiar with the place where they were heading. It's a series of interstate ramps under a mall/office complex, buried beneath the ground that eventually rise and break through the skin of the centuries old city to deposit their traffic onto the downtown streets. I've pursued folks down there and have seen the catacomb like structure and the signs of its nocturnal residents. I've seen the blankets of the survivors, the detritus of the nuts, the pipes of the crack addicts, the condoms from the whores, and the needles of the fiends.
The tenderness between the two touched me and made me want to hit someone responsible for the greatest nation on earth not being able to take care of their own. Yes, a mutually embracing and destructive reflex. I was as touched by their humanity as I was embarrassed and ashamed of the lack of it in others. I was angry again. I was sad. I was relieved to get to Kate's arms.
Of course this moment wasn't a revelation to me, it was not new. It hurts and angers me every time I pause to look at it.

We have a new intern in the office who comes from down the coast, beyond New England. This is the first that came from money. Nice enough kid, but a pencil necked rich kid also. I try and slowly share with him how bullshit his ivory towered background was on his world view and how, down here in reality, that rightwing/protect-the-money shit doesn't fly.
He's shown contempt for the homeless in the past and I wanted him to see. I made him look. I showed him what homeless was. There were not the aggressive, threatening panhandlers that he and his family uses as a model to justify why they don't fucking give more and why the government on average only takes 12% income tax from the top one or two percent. This was two people who can't go into shelter because they would be separated by gender. Two people protecting and caring for each other. Two people who don't have a phone number to answer when someone calls to offer a job. Two people without an address to receive a paycheck or a W2.
These were two people who had no home.

(cue Mercy Seat - Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds)

Fuck!...Fuck!...Fuck you!
The rage boils up, lightly from the gut, through the tightening chest, down the arms, radiating from rough, white knuckles. I want to bless the fear and ignorance of the self-righteous, self involved, self-important gluttons in a baptism of brutality. Let me show you what it feels like to be a bad monkey. You pay for my services; services that keep that protect the haves from the havenots, but this I want to do for free.
I remain silent. I don't demonstrate to THEM what it is they pay for. I have to keep heat in my home, food on my table, a roof over my head for those I love. They could just get more of the likes of me, not yet enlightened to the absurdity and folly of the game, the pitting of us against ourselves, and hunt down a rouge element.

The only way the world can justify the personal levels of consumption that we see is to dehumanize. We often dehumanize the weakest and most vulnerable.
As an example, I often see the joy of folks from other departments when we arrest someone. They like to gawk at the bad monkey in the cage, while their tough enforcer monkeys like myself do what they fear to do themselves. They derive a sense of satisfaction from seeing the bad one suffer and be put on parade and think quietly to themselves "I might be a shit, but at least I'm not as bad as that monkey."
Or they think to their self, "Hey, that's an aggressive poor, homeless person who's only trying to get something for free from me. Well fuck him and his kind." This works especially well if the offender isn't the same skin tone as the offended.
Dehumanization. Its a word used a lot, particularly those that trend politically left, but what does it really mean? Here's Wikipedia's definition and here's an article defining the term, the psychology, and the dangers.

Major causes of homelessness as cited by Wikipedia

• Lack of affordable housing
• Low paying jobs
• Substance abuse and lack of needed services
• Mental illness and lack of needed services
• Domestic violence
• Unemployment
• Poverty
• Prison release and re-entry into society
• Change and cuts in public assistance

Strangely, I didn't see one that is one of the most prevalent. If you modify the second to last one, you get:

• Military release and re-entry into society

I won't provide links to charities or some such stop-gap measures. Those are easy enough to find. Here's links I think address the problem more at its core:

• Overcoming Consumerism and an article - Anti-Consumerism and The Alternate Economy.
• Whole Earth Magazine