OPINION: When humanity fails on a Midtown sidewalk

A few days ago, I was making a turn at a busy intersection in Midtown when I saw a man using a garden hose to spray a woman who was lying unconscious on the sidewalk. I felt my mind go blank and my face get hot. I gripped the steering wheel. I had to do something.

Anchorage’s homelessness problem goes far beyond endlessly teasing out our indifference to a hassle-free situation. I myself walked around this winter during a storm with the memory of a scantily clad woman begging from car to car at a red light. Not for money or food, but for shelter. She begged from my car window while I stared ahead, practicing expressing my dissatisfaction with the status quo by not doing anything about the homeless problem.

I’ve become prejudiced, too. A few months ago, a shoeless woman rummaged through a car parked in my driveway, found the garage door opener, and pressed the button while I was sitting on the couch. I went outside to find the culprit was a very young woman who looked like she’d just been beaten up. I yelled at her, and she asked me if I had any alcohol. I told her to get out.

For the rest of the day, I tried to carry on as usual. I told myself that it was inevitable, that it was sad, but there was nothing I could do. But I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that comes over me whenever I’m in contact with a homeless person. Why hadn’t I asked if I could take her somewhere? What kind of man was I?

Two weeks ago, I was cycling through a greenbelt when a guy nearly kicked me off my bike. I turned around and pictured my girlfriend jogging along that same path and being harassed by drunk guys without any fear of being caught and punished. I wanted to do something to fix this problem, but this approach doesn’t solve anything.

My feelings about homelessness are not linear. They are a complex web, similar to my feelings about humanity as a whole. Compassion is not sympathy. It is the understanding that the true picture of reality is beyond our scope of understanding, because of the narrowness of our own life experiences. Compassion is the power to overcome our own misunderstandings. We often misinterpret compassion as sacrifice or willing weakness, but those who embody compassion daily tell us there is no compassion without equanimity. As I am beginning to understand, compassionate concern is often simply about having the maturity to refrain from judgment.

And then the same scene comes to mind as I saw that day: a man on the street corner – an employee of the store next door – with one hand nonchalantly in his pocket, soaking a helpless woman in the shadows of his workplace. Water splashed over her shoulders, her hair ran over the concrete. She didn’t move.

Anger was building, so I made several sharp right turns in an attempt to come up with a plan to keep my cool during the confrontation. When I arrived at the business, the woman was gone, but the hose was still there. I went inside and asked, “Who was that person outside spraying people with the hose?” A man stood up and the conversation quickly became confrontational and unconstructive. He defended his actions by saying that he was justified because homeless people had gathered on the corner and were doing nasty things on their property. I asked if the sidewalk was part of the business’s property, and the man told me to leave.

We both went outside and continued our silly conversation. I stood my ground as a paramedic and told him that drenching someone with nowhere to go and nowhere to change into warm clothes would lead to hypothermia on the street, even on a cloudy summer day. And at that moment, my mind flashed back to another memory from a few weeks ago, when I saw a man walking on the overpass at Tudor Road and Seward Highway. He was naked and had nothing. Maybe he had been hosed down by a company employee, too. Then I wondered if this was normal and I shouldn’t be so upset. But my thoughts kept getting stuck in the bottleneck of my barely controllable rationality, and all I wanted to say was, “You have abandoned your status as a respectable human being to fight what you have decided is a lack of respectability.”

The employee was making his case as a salesman whose work had been affected by the vileness of the homeless who lived on that corner. They had to deal with needles, used tampons, spit in their faces, and the dirt, he said. I could almost understand his perspective. Being exposed daily to the raw human fragmentation of despair and violence, as it is experienced, and may be for anyone trying to make a living.

I lost his perspective because I couldn’t imagine dragging an unconscious woman out onto the public sidewalk with a garden hose to show everyone who happened to drive by that he didn’t value her as a person. What had she done? Had the woman done something nasty or violent to the man a few days prior and he realized she was back? Or had he simply looked out the window, seen her weakness and decided to take all the anger and frustration he’d been holding back from their previous confrontation out on her?

At one point, the manager approached us to intervene. She told me that she had tried to call the police multiple times about all the nonsense going on outside the store. I was caught off guard because I thought this engagement was between me and another man, but it was actually between me and the company. The situation had changed. I suddenly wanted to stop trying to convince the employees. I called off the engagement and went home.

I was most angry at myself afterwards, not for confronting my employee, but for having almost understood his point of view. I carried that image with me for days, of him standing over her body, watching the water splash on her clothes as if he was watering flowers, on the question of who the woman was and why her. If I had seen him spraying the person who was being violent towards him with a hose, my opinion would have been different. But the whole scene seeped into the more sensitive parts of my mind, reeking of cruelty.

It seems we are all becoming accustomed to the ability to deal with the thing we fear most: the loss of our humanity. For some, no matter how hard life gets, our humanity never goes away. Or maybe it has been whittled away to a thin veil over the years. And for a few, all it takes is the twist of a valve to spill out onto the vomit-stained concrete of a crowded street corner.

Pat Gault He is a retired Alaska Air National Guard Pararescueman and has lived in Anchorage since 2012.

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