This year I didn’t participate in the fiction of seasonal concern for the homeless. I was asked to go on TV and radio, but I chose to ignore the pleas from anxious-sounding producers who talked about the terrible regime of homelessness that hits them whenever Christmas approaches. And then an interviewer who pulls sorrowful faces, until the next item, the largest chocolate Santa in the world perhaps.
I’ve spent so many Christmases doing this gig, and when you raise the question that this is all a farce, “try talking about homelessness in the cold winds of January”, they smile in incomprehension.
Homelessness is not just a Christmas phenomenon, yet for centuries, certainly since Dickens’ time, we have seen it as the backdrop to Christmas joy.
I assure you, I am not a cynic. I am a sceptic. That means I reserve judgement as to what we can achieve over Christmas for the homeless. We probably have a window of universal concern about homelessness that lasts (perhaps) six weeks. And then it is back to letting homeless issues join the hundred other reasons we should be dissatisfied with how those in need are treated.
As I’ve said for too long, I think it is a human rights abuse to allow people to sleep, live and fall apart on the streets. That we should have alternatives, therapeutic communities where people can be removed of the reasons why they have become homeless and needy in the first place. Where the demons are dug out that cause collapse in a person’s life.
That mental health issues bubble about us as we watch beggars and street dwellers trying to make sense of this blasted and broken life.