Compassion starts with a shift in language

Every year, it seems as if it could not get harder to work with and alongside unhoused and deeply marginalized people; and yet every year, the world around us seems to become meaner and colder, and simply caring about other people is made more and more difficult.

I could talk about many aspects of this, about churches facing harassment through by-laws, about threats of lawsuits, about “neighbourhood associations” with very limited ideas of what constitutes as neighbour. But I want especially to address, because I think it is profoundly theologically important, some of the words that are coming into use.

Specifically, I am seeing commentators more and more often referring to people using drugs on the street as “zombies,” from an appalling and very poorly researched article in The Atlantic claiming that harms reduction has created a “zombie apocalypse,” to a Toronto lobby group releasing videos identifying the street corner near my house as a “zombie wasteland.” Usually, this language – evoking, as it does, the image of a no-longer-human threat, lacking either rationality or relationship – is closely linked to calls for “mandatory treatment.”

There is no question that there are many people on the street who are suffering hugely from the toxic drug crisis, which has been made worse by a series of political decisions, notably the Ford government’s closure of nearly all of Ontario’s safe consumption sites, which has meant that the crisis is now much more obviously public. I rarely manage to cover the small distance from home to church, or through my local park, without stopping to check someone’s breathing. And the question of how we, as a society, have created such levels of despair is one which we should all be considering deeply.

Experts in the field have identified the many problems with the “mandatory treatment” idea, beginning with the fact that there is a huge lack of voluntary treatment for people who want it, unless they are able to pay for it privately. Mandatory treatment, even with good therapeutic models, has a poor success rate, and a high death rate when people begin to use again immediately upon release; but it is also clear to anyone who thinks about it for even a moment that mandatory “treatment” at the scale which is being proposed would not be treatment in any meaningful sense at all – at that scale, it could only be long-term incarceration.

There has been an attempt to present calls for involuntary “treatment” as some form of compassion. But it is a reasonable assumption that someone who calls another human being a “zombie” does not wish them well. It is a word designed to exclude certain people from the category of humanity at all, and to position them as beings with neither rights nor inherent dignity. It is, to use the language of our faith, an attempt to remove them from the Body of Christ.

The people in my community who are using drugs on the street are not mindless, dangerous, predatory or any of the other connotations which the word “zombie” carries. They are, among other things, people who are invariably polite when I wake them up to ensure they’re all right, and always thank me for my concern. They are people with dreams and hopes, traumas and griefs, people who make art and tell jokes and dress giant teddy bears in elaborate costumes. They are people with children and siblings and parents, people who know love and loss and longing. And for us, they are, each one of them, bearers of the ineradicable image of God. They are – like everyone else we encounter – a fragment, for us, of the divine life.

As long ago as the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa preached against those who wanted to see the unwell and unhoused people of his time sent off to “some place far away from our life,” and told his congregation, in the strongest terms he could, that they needed to understand that each one of us is deeply ill, especially those of us who think we are well, and it is only our relationships with the most vulnerable among us that can bring us healing. We cannot cast anyone out of the category of our shared humanity without injuring us all.

It is hard, as Gregory himself also grants. It is hard to be open to the depths of pain, easier to be angry, or to reject the reality on our doorsteps entirely. It is hard to get past fears and prejudices which surround us like air. It is hard – maybe hardest of all – to admit that things are terribly wrong, and that there is only a very little that we can do to make anything better.

But the little that we can do, we must do. And if it is only to look at a human person and to understand that they are not a monster, but a plain being like each of us, as much a child of God as anyone else, and to speak and be kind, this is a place to start, and it is a way for all of us to begin to be healed.