OPINION: When humanity failed on a Midtown sidewalk

A few days ago, while turning at a busy intersection in Midtown, I saw a man dousing a woman with a garden hose while she lay unconscious on the sidewalk. My brain began to twist and I felt my face get hot. I gripped the wheel. I had to do something.

The homelessness issue in Anchorage is well beyond the point of drawing from the endless amount of apathy we have in store for situations that are bothersome but inconvenient. I myself walk around with the memory of a woman at a red light this winter, during a storm, underdressed and walking from car to car begging — not for money or food, but for shelter. She begged at my window and I kept looking straight ahead, practicing expressing my disapproval of our state of affairs on homelessness while doing absolutely nothing about it.

I’ve developed my own biases as well. A couple months ago, a shoeless woman rummaged through my car while it was parked in my driveway, found my garage door opener and hit the button while I was inside sitting on my couch. I ran out to see the perpetrator was a very young woman who looked like she’d just been beaten up. When I yelled at her, she asked if I had any alcohol. I told her to leave.

For the rest of that day, I tried to go about my normal business, saying to myself that it is the way it is — yes, it’s sad, but there’s nothing that I can do. Yet I could not escape the nagging feeling that bubbles to the surface anytime I have an interaction with an unhoused person. Why had I not asked her if I could take her somewhere? What kind of man am I?

Two weeks ago, a guy almost kicked me off my bike while I was riding along the greenbelt. I looked back at him and imagined my girlfriend jogging along that section of path and being harassed by drunk men with a certain lack of fear of being caught and punished. I wanted to do something to make the problem go away, but that’s not how any of this works.

The feeling I have toward the homelessness issue is not linear. It is a complex web, similar to how I feel about humanity in general. Compassion is not sympathy; it is an understanding that the true picture of reality is beyond our scope of comprehension because our own life experience is narrow. Compassion is a position of power over our own misconceptions. We often misunderstand compassion as sacrifice and voluntary weakness, but those who embody it daily will tell you that there is no compassion without equanimity. As I’m beginning to understand, compassionate regard is often simply having the maturity to withhold judgment.

Then I see something like I saw that day: The guy on the street corner — an employee of the adjacent business — soaking a helpless woman in the shadow of his workplace with one hand placed casually in his pocket. The water bounced off the woman’s shoulder; her hair flowed along the concrete. She didn’t move.

When the anger hit me, I swung my car around a few sharp right turns and tried to come up with a plan so I wouldn’t lose my cool during the confrontation. When I reached the business in question, I saw that the woman was gone and the hose was left in place. I walked inside and said, “Who was it that was just hosing off the person outside?” A man stood up, and the conversation became instantly confrontational and non-constructive. He defended his actions, saying that the homeless people had amassed on that particular corner and done such horrible things on their property that he was justified in what he’d done. I asked if the sidewalk was a part of the business’s property, and the man told me to get out.

Both of us went outside and continued our ridiculous conversation. I held my ground as a paramedic, telling him that soaking somebody who doesn’t have anywhere to go and change into warm clothes would leave them hypothermic in the streets — even on a cloudy day in the summer. And my mind, in that moment, flashed to another memory from a few weeks earlier, when I saw a man walking over the Tudor Road and Seward Highway overpass — completely nude and carrying nothing. Now I wondered if maybe he had also been hosed off by the employee of a business. Then I questioned whether this was normal and I shouldn’t be so offended. But my thoughts kept getting jammed in the bottleneck of barely controlled reason when what I wanted to proclaim was, “You, sir, have abandoned your status as a respectable human in order to combat what you have decided is the lack of respectable humanity.”

The employee was stating his case as a salesman whose occupation had been affected by the vile behavior of unhoused people on that corner. He said that they had left needles and used tampons and spit at his face, and he’d had to deal with their mess. I could almost see his perspective; the daily proximity to all that raw, human schism of desperation and violence, both experienced and attributed, and what that might drive anybody just trying to make a living to do.

Where I lost his perspective was my inability to imagine myself going through the process of dragging a garden hose all the way out to a public sidewalk to show an unconscious woman and anybody else who happened to be driving by that I did not value her as a human. What had she done? Had that woman done something disgusting or even violent to the man a few days prior, and he’d found that she’d returned? Or had he simply looked out the window, seen her vulnerability, and decided to inflict all the anger and frustration he’d held in from prior confrontations on her?

At some point, the manager approached us to intervene. She told me that they had tried multiple times to call the police about all the nonsense going on outside their business. I was caught off guard, because I had assumed that this engagement was between me and another man, only to find out that in fact, it was between me and a business. The landscape had changed. I suddenly just wanted to stop trying to reason with the employee. I disengaged and went home.

Afterward, I was most angry with myself — not for confronting the employee, but for almost seeing his perspective. I’ve sat with the image for days — him standing over her body and watching the water splash off her clothing as if he were just watering the flowers. Something about that question of who that woman was, and why her? If I’d seen him using the hose on a person who was being violent toward him, my opinion would be different. But the whole scene has soaked into the more tender pockets of my soul and reeks of cruelty.

It seems that we are all becoming familiar with our capacity to deal with what we fear the most — the loss of our humanity. For some, it will never be lost, regardless of how hard life gets. For others, perhaps it has been chiseled away to a thin veil over many years. And for a few, it needs only the turning of a valve to let it spill onto the puke-stained concrete of a crowded street corner.

Pat Gault is a retired Alaska Air Guard pararescueman. He has lived in Anchorage since 2012.

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