I have volunteered for a number of organizations dedicated to attaining permanent housing and stable conditions in the community. What tends to surprise a lot of folks is how utterly “normal” most of the unhoused population are, how quickly their situations became so precarious, and how hard every one of them were working to improve their lives.

America seems to anchor its society around a number of “myths” that help to rationalize our ongoing complicity in things I think are non-controversially evil (to be fair, this tendency certainly isn’t unique to America). They run the gamut, from the first Thanksgiving (topical!), to the bootstrap-pulling self-made success story, to Islamic terrorists who hate America for its freedom. I know a lot of that is really reductive, but I still believe these “myths” work to define our cultural identity in ways that aren’t always negative, but tend to leave little room for nuance or appropriate consideration of other perspectives.