Just another Aunty Christ rape post. No big deal.

It’s a little alarming to realize I’m telling myself that the call I went on with the homeless woman who got hit on the head and sexually assaulted with a bottle because she wouldn’t give her heroin to the guy who camps next to her wasn’t “that bad.” It wasn’t that bad because I wasn’t there very long, and because the long, frustrating process of trying to find her a place to stay and a way to get there had only begun when she announced that she had to leave the hospital, like, now and start her long, frustrating day of gathering enough change from passersby to secure more heroin. What would have been five hours of sitting and chatting to the patient and making phone calls on her behalf in order to secure the somewhat-satisfactory result of a place for her to stay, given grudgingly by the one resource I have access to, was truncated, ending too quickly for me to fully realize how even-less-satisfactory this result was.

There’s a kind of crocodile-wildebeest attitude that those who are part of the System have toward those who are outside of it, I notice, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I feel instinctively that it’s a heartless thing. We are here to witness and document your defeat, but we cannot help you. That would be enabling your mistakes, which are numerous and which have put you in danger in the first place. So the weak, enfeebled wildebeests fall prey to the crocs, every time. Because, that’s life. Or that’s how you learn, or something. If you saved them once, you’d have to save them every time. Hakuna matata, dude.

Of course, treating someone like a grown up person who can make her own decisions isn’t at all a bad thing, whereas treating someone like a dumb infant sometimes is. American culture is all about the tough love (á là Intervention: “You wanna go get high? Fine, but don’t expect us to be here for you when you get back.”). But it’s also, I want to say, about infantilizing adults as much as possible: TV, religion, Snuggies. Goddamn it, fucking Snuggies. What is the Snuggie if not our warm, fleecy route back to the womb?

What American culture is sadly not about is treating people sympathetically when they most need it. I get it. We don’t want to encourage drug addicts. We don’t want to waste precious resources on the homeless. But why does this manner of dealing with people always feel to me like we’ve decided that some people are fine to deal with and some people are beneath our notice? I guess what I’m really asking is what’s wrong with saying, “We understand that you have two competing needs right now. Go take care of the one, and come back. We want to help you. You are worth helping.”

Probably once I’ve been doing this a little longer, I’ll realize that everyone’s a schemer, and then I’ll wonder what the point is, even—why I’m even bothering to go to the hospital at 3 a.m. to help some damn person who doesn’t really want the help I am allowed to give her.

At one point tonight, I realized that what this all comes down to, what we’re really talking about, is privilege. Before I started doing this work, I couldn’t have comprehended someone not wanting to report a rape because she was afraid her only clothes would be taken away. But it happens all the time. It breaks my heart. Oh, all the things that happen that break my heart—little dignities that we take for granted, withheld.

So while I was appalled to hear Rihanna’s interview about her attack, I have to say, I’m even more appalled at things that happen every day, in my town, to people who we’ve decided don’t really matter, and can leave without a good plan about how they will stay safe, and if they show up on our door later on, we have already told them that we will not help them.