Helping People and Feeling Paralyzed

Someone left a tired old comment over on Pattrice Jones’ blog today asking when she’s going to start helping people instead of animals.

To start out Pattrice does help people: she listens and provides support, she teaches young people, she educates the people who come to her sanctuary so both people and rescued animals can find healing. But since this old gem gets thrown at us over and over, I thought I’d examine it a little more deeply.

I do feel like I do a lot of little things here and there to help human beings. A donation here and there, volunteering, just stopping and helping, a blog entry relating to human issues, and so on. At the same time, I definitely do sometimes walk right past humans in need. It’s not that I don’t care, there are actually reasons why this happens.

Right now I’m knee deep (ok, more like neck deep) in an effort to help the feral and stray cats in my neighborhood. This means that I interact with homeless cats on a regular basis.

There is also a homeless man in my neighborhood. He begs down at the highway on-ramp and then comes into my neighborhood afterward. I don’t really interact with him. If he speaks to me, I’m polite, but that’s it.

When I walk with my dogs as much as a block behind this man I can still smell the intense odor of liquor—he really does drink that much, I’m not exaggerating. He had been sleeping in one of the sheds in the neighborhood, but the people living in that house asked him to leave. I have overheard him asking other neighbors if he can stay in their sheds now that his former hosts no longer want him there. I feel terrible for him, that’s no way to live, begging at the on-ramp and sleeping in cold, possibly wet sheds. But I won’t be inviting him into my house, and it’s not because I don’t care.

Here’s the reason: I’m not afraid of cats, but I am at times afraid of humans. I’m no more afraid of homeless humans than I am in general of other people. However, I wouldn’t feel safe giving this person a place to stay. I can see he has addiction issues and I’m in no way qualified to deal with that. In fact there are shelters, such as they are, in the area, but it’s likely he doesn’t want to go into a shelter, either from fear or because they would not let him drink in the shelter.

It breaks my heart, but this is something I cannot fix. Cats don’t need addiction counseling. Their needs for food and shelter are fairly modest, and should a cat decide to try to steal something from you, they’re just going to attempt to rip open a bag of food. A cat will not build delusions about you, or believe some relationship exists which in fact does not (yes, I’ve had that problem with people before). A cat is unlikely to try to physically hurt you, and if they do, well, it’s usually not that bad. Another human being could kill me, and I am always aware of that for obvious reasons.

The services out there to help people are inadequate, I know that, yet there are still people who turn down what services do exist. Some people fear government conspiracies and so won’t ask for help or give their names to anyone they associate with the government. Many people with addictions don’t want to seek official help because one requirement for some programs is that they stop drinking or taking drugs. And of course untreated mental illness is a huge problem in the homeless community.

If I call the authorities on him, I’m not sure what they’d do except lock him up for public drunkenness overnight. So I’m not making any phone calls right now.

One thing about having been where I’ve been is realizing my own physical vulnerability. Not in an “oh, poor me” kind of way, but in the sense that I know enough to avoid situations that could put me in danger. For me, interacting too closely with this man could be dangerous.

I can donate to various programs, but I also understand that those donations won’t help the people who won’t go inside. So I feel paralyzed. I don’t know how to help without putting myself at risk, so I do nothing.

I still believe that helping animals can also help people of course. I guess it’s some kind of defensiveness people have, where they demand to know what people who help animals are doing for the homeless and hungry. I’ve never heard that kind of hostility toward a person whose favorite cause is preserving historical documents or propagating rare types of orchids. But animal issues do seem to spark that kind of hostility in some people. I’m often annoyed because I feel like I do a lot and generally when someone demands to know what I’m doing to help people, then rejects my answer as not enough, they typically won’t answer the question themselves, or if they do they answer it with an excuse. I actually had one angry woman say that she doesn’t volunteer or donate because she’s a busy mom and her kids take up all of her time and money, but at least she doesn’t waste any of her time or money on cats. I mean, I get it, kids are expensive and time-consuming, it just strikes me as odd that someone who does no volunteering or donating would feel so entitled to get so hostile with me. But, oh well, such is life I suppose. People struggle with their own lives, but always know exactly what I should be doing.

Incidentally, most of the people in my neighborhood who I’ve interacted with about the cat situation have thanked me for my efforts. And they’re the ones living there and seeing the homeless man try to live in sheds. None of them have accused me of not doing enough. I always seem to get this kind of reaction from people who have more, live in better areas, and spend less time in places like this. Perhaps if they never have to ask themselves if it’s better to let the homeless man sleep uncovered in the winter on the elementary school playground or allow him to sleep in their own shed, then the question seems much simpler at a distance.