By Ohiro Oni-Eseleh
They exist in small and large communities, in houses of worship and even in schools, but they are invisible. They may receive gazes from people who wonder if they just happened by accident into the spaces that they occupy, who let them in and for how long they will hang around. To some, they are to be seen and not heard. To others, the sight of them is both an inconvenience and a stain on the environment and our world rather than a prick on our consciences. They should be grateful that we allow ourselves to see them and sometimes allow them to feed from the crumbs that fall off our tables. We make judgments about them even when we do not know their life stories. They are members of our communities; the ones who live on the margins of our society. They are the poor among us; society’s rejects from whom we can learn lessons that they are not allowed to teach.
Why do people, even those who wear their religion on their sleeves, applaud political leaders who boast of their successes in cutting children and their families off food programs that provide them sustenance? Why do we act as if poor people do not deserve to live in our world or breathe the same air as those of us with more privilege? Why do too many of us speak so condescendingly about the poor and assume that economic status is the only thing that defines their existence – as if we are made differently? To separate us from those that we choose to see as inferior, many of us prefer to be identified by the titles that we acquire instead of the names that we were given at birth.
I am sure that many potentially good answers exist to the questions that I have just raised, but I cannot think of one that would make it feel right that we are relentless in our glaringly inhumane efforts to dominate, divide and oppress those that we can. In examining these questions and their potential answers, it seems to me that the common denominator is our strong desire to keep ourselves relevant and important by painting portraits mightier than our physical existence. Therefore, we have figured out that one way to do that is to keep others living on the margins of our society and blocked from any good memories that our minds may accidentally conjure up about the goodness that is inherent in the hearts and minds of so many poor people.
In our insatiable quest for fame and dominance over those who live on the margins, we develop thick skins and closed hearts that become our protective factors against the common good, as well as the armor that we need to successfully stand in the way of our hearts’ efforts to guide us righteously. Therefore, we are able to walk or drive by homeless individuals and/or families without noticing them; and we are able to watch and hear stories about the misery of those less privileged than us. We are able to observe the pain of others without flinching even as we falsely profess that we feel their pain. As people suffer and die in circumstances that could be avoided but are not, the rest of us continue to live our lives because that is what we are supposed to do. Certainly, those who are dead no longer need help and those who are alive are powerless to affect the destiny of the dead because destiny dies with us all.
The only time that we can affect the lives of others for good or bad is when they are still with us. Of what use is it to deprive people of nutrition and security, to care little or nothing about those who live on the margins of history and existence when we have it in our reach and power to lift them from those margins into honorable existence? Why do we cry at the loss of family members and/or friends that we helped to keep on the margins of society by our actions toward them when they lived? A telephone call or a visit is not very difficult to make, nor is a text message or letter so difficult to write. Yet, we consciously or subconsciously make the choice to do nothing until it has become too late to do anything.
Life on the margins of society would be unbearable for most of us who have never been there. Those who live on the margins have no options and hardly any opportunities to change their lives. In that space, social power is not only all but absent, but so too are the opportunities for individual or group exercise of agency even in a so-called democratic society where we praise ourselves as bastions of freedom and self determination. Those we may be, but civilized and healthy we are not until we eliminate the margins to which too many in our society are relegated.
Ohiro Oni-Eseleh is the Director, Adelphi University School of Social Work, Hudson Valley Center