Peter Singer’s “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”
Some may say that the homeless are lazy and just looking for handouts, but that is a dangerous stereotype that we must put an end to. This is Peter Singer’s “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” summary paper where he claims that it is our duty to give the homeless money and supplies if we have the means to, saying that it is “very wrong not to send money to one of the organizations…” and that we are not doing “our fair share and… children will die preventable deaths unless we do more than our fair share,”. If we are able to provide, we must; the assumption that the homeless don’t deserve the basic necessities is incredibly harmful. Some, like Booker T. Washington, hold the belief that people should “cast down [their] bucket where [they] are”, meaning that they need to help themselves. This view is flawed, though, because not everyone has the ability to help themselves in the first place; they need support from their community. It is imperative that we change how we view the homeless so that we can support them and help them eventually get off the streets.
The popular phrase “out of sight, out of mind” would be an appropriate summation of people’s feelings towards homeless people. People tend to not want to think about things they are uncomfortable with, so they just ignore them. In Peter Singer’s essay, he sets up a scenario of taking action versus being a bystander. He claims that, in the situation he provided, the “failure to donate the money… is just as bad as selling the kid to the organ peddlers”. Basically, he is saying that the failure to do anything at all is just as bad as causing the harm directly. This applies to the homeless situation because when we pass the homeless people on the street and don’t do anything, we are essentially perpetuating the cycle of homeless people on the streets; we have the means to help and we don’t. In Sebastian Junger’s book “Tribe,” he points out that those who say “the bland phrase ‘I support the troops’” would then have to actually “show up at the town hall once a year to hear these people out”. We can pay as much lip service as we want, but without proper action, these words mean nothing. Of course, there are always exceptions to this idea. Such an example is demonstrated by Barbara Lazear in her story “The Box Man,” where the Box Man would refuse “even a holiday handout” and when people would try he “shuffled away”. However, a good majority of the homeless people do not have this mindset, so it would be a dangerous generalization to assume that this is how most homeless people view getting help. When we pass homeless people on the streets we have two options; to ignore them and go on with our day, or choose to help. People in our society tend to choose the former because it’s so much easier to pretend they don’t exist at all rather than feeling compelled to help.
Homelessness does not have one easy solution, however, and there are many factors contributing to the incredibly large homeless population. Despite this being a complex issue, our community can help in quite a few ways; we can reevaluate our previous notions about work ethic, we can start getting involved in donations to the homeless, and we can begin to accept the homeless as part of our community rather than ignore them. It’s not a perfect solution, but this issue needs to be tackled in small steps at a time. Our community has the capability to begin to solve this crisis, and it is our duty to do everything we can to help.
