As tragedies unfold all around us, we cannot neglect one need without jeopardizing them all
Summer ended this week, and what a summer it’s been. But if the trials of 2020 have shown us anything, it’s that we are standing on common ground.
That may seem hard to believe, given this summer of division — between protesters and police, between political parties, between the housed and the unhoused.
Catastrophic events, from the pandemic, the economic recession, and more recently the devasting wildfires, affect us all today and will continue to impact our lives for untold years to come. In the Venn diagram that defines our varied communities, we are increasingly overlapping in shared crisis. None of us can say they are beyond reach of the tragedies happening around us. And none of us can say we don’t have a shared responsibility to prepare and protect moving forward.
Nowhere is the pressure of this overlap felt more heavily than among those experiencing extreme poverty. Homelessness has always been a health care crisis, but our universal proximity to the pandemic brings the devasting costs of living without shelter home to all of us. We must respond holistically.
Because the work of homeless services, our health care infrastructure, emergency response networks, the fight for racial equity, the investment in housing access — they’re all interconnected. We cannot neglect one without jeopardizing them all. But that’s what we do when we respond to extraordinary situations with short-term emergency reactions, as if the threat only goes as far as we can reach, when it actually extends much farther than we can see.
This has also been the summer for coming to terms with systemic racism and understanding the oppression baked into our systems. Systemic racism and suppressed incomes have left communities of color, already hit hardest by the pandemic, particularly vulnerable to the economic downturn. Before COVID-19 became a household word, Black, Indigenous and people of color were already overrepresented among populations in poverty, cost-burdened renters, people experiencing homelessness and those with poor health outcomes. In response, the Black Lives Matter movement has been a powerful, educational platform for change, standing up not just for immediate action but for permanent justice.
It has been a summer to grieve the climate change. We’ve lost so much ground, too much ground, to bipartisan posturing, but there can be no doubt from the fires this summer and the consequences similar events foreshadow, that our economic, social and environmental policy are threaded together. Last week in Street Roots, Kathryn McKelvey wrote about the links between the climate crisis and the homeless crisis, herself experiencing homelessness when her Vernonia home was destroyed in a flash flood. Climate change exacerbates homelessness, and those among us with the least resources before a natural disaster occurs are most likely to fall to the manmade disaster of homelessness.
Common ground does not mean even ground, and the valleys are tragically deep. The impacts of crisis hit each of us differently, and privilege affords some of us a means of escape the trauma, while others are left behind.
Nor does common ground mean we all became more alike this summer, but we have become closer in some ways. Homelessness crept a little nearer to our families and neighbors. Racism, individual and institutional, was laid bare in horrifying images. Climate change settled deep into our lungs. Each of our lives now relies on the broader community in ways they never have before.
Have we ever in our lifetimes had more cause for empathy in a time of such urgency?
Let the lessons of this summer inform our future, give us fuel for bold initiatives toward connective solutions – around public safety, housing, race and wage equity, our environment and more. Whatever cause you stand behind, connect the dots with those around you, get engaged, learn the issues, tune in and vote. Now is the time to act with solidarity to transform our community, not respond with emergency to compensate for its failures.
Street Roots editorials represent the opinion of the Street Roots organization and editorial board.
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