Occupy Denver Camp Grieves

Denver has one of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the nation. Down here on the ground at Civic Center Park and down 16th St Mall, one can hear swank holiday shoppers swathed in their fine scarves, prominently toting expensive handbags, sniffing that “people like that” ought to go inside and get off the cold streets. Sure. Only, for every shelter bed in Denver there are two homeless people who need it.

So much for that idea.

But no worries. Go back to your iPod. Keep shopping, everything is fine. Everyone knows that homeless people are all drunk, filthy old men who talk to themselves a lot – and who needs worry about those sort of people. Only, 41.8% of Denver’s homeless population are actually women. 26.6% are children.

It’s odd, how often what “everyone knows” turns out to be a load of tosh. Still, let’s be frank. Plenty reading this column will spare one brief moment for the thought of a quarter of Denver’s homeless struggling through single-digit temps being children, and then you’ll forget it entirely and go about your lives.

Because you’re assholes.

Forgive the lack of diplomacy. I am not here to comfort the disturbed, but to disturb the comfortable, and anyone who hears of such horrors as homeless women and children freezing and yet does not care is truly disturbed. This disconnect – from humanity, from empathy, from anyone or anything outside of one’s own comfortable little circle – is exactly why our nation is in the plight it is in today.

People hear of horrors, and do nothing. People losing their homes in illegal foreclosures. Corporations ripping off employees. Bureaucrats destroying lives. Police beating, killing unarmed citizens. In each case, they do so because they can. The populace does not rise up to stop them. Hire an attorney, they say. Write your Congressman. Let it be someone else’s problem, so long as it is not mine.

We lost someone, and by “we” I mean humanity, not just Occupy Denver. She wasn’t a picture-perfect Occupier, but she came around the encampment often enough that we all knew her. She was loud, and often funny. Her age was hard to guess, as she could have been a hard-used late twenties, but her diction and demeanor had a middle-class upbringing air and I would put her in her mid- to late thirties. She must have been beautiful once; she still looked extraordinarily pretty. She was homeless, and quirky, but she was also impeccably clean and well-dressed. A devoutly religious woman, she would pray over us and discuss her faith at length. Occasionally we found that annoying. Her bete noire at the Occupy Denver camp was Billy; he would play his drum and she would dance, and they would argue and make music and argue some more, and then she would disappear in the evenings to where ever she went to sleep.

We knew her only as Nicole, and she froze to death two nights ago.

I wish I had better words with which to eulogize her.