The girl escapes from her tiny apartment on Sutter Street in San Francisco, leaving behind claustrophobia and a lingering scent of cat urine. Outside, in the blinding mid-morning light, is the same tension with a different rhythm.

The walls are still closing in, but this is the surrounding buildings with their many stories. And the urine smell, it’s still there. She exhales, trying to evacuate the sourness, but when she inhales again it’s there, slightly more acrid and hot.

It’s human.

She anticipates what she will see today: an obese woman in a ripped dress, begging, specifically, for hamburgers. With only one tooth in her fat mouth, she will be propped on an upturned garbage can. The girl will scoff at her, making some cruel joke in her mind about feeling sorry for the stupid trash can.

At O’Farrell Street and Mason, an emaciated African-American lady will choke out a sweet greeting, breaking the girl’s heart. The girl will ignore her. In front of the corner store will be a man who can’t stand, sleeping on flattened cardboard or begging for change on his knees. The girl will step over him.

Three blocks away from the Powell Street subway, the girl knows that three more characters will appear, like pop-ups in a storybook, to wrench her heart and mind to bitterness.

There they are: a shaking Indian woman who cannot speak; the skinny black man in the plaid hat, waving about Street Sheet newspapers, laughing at nothing; and inside the station, a man with a backpack, waiting at ticket machines and stealing change from ignorant tourists.

Beneath her contempt, this parade of human decay stings her, but she thinks that she cannot help. She supposes that she would give something to each one of them, if only it didn’t mean being significantly poorer each day. There are just too many, on every corner, in every alley, clumps of people dressed in rags and begging, begging, begging.
So this city girl learns to ignore them, to do nothing. She replaces her sorrow with disdain and justifies her callousness: she is too overwhelmed to care. Or maybe she just doesn’t.
That girl is me. Every day, this transient street society makes me feel exponentially helpless and uncaring. As just another one of San Francisco’s young adults, I’m part of a potentially dangerous epidemic: a war of apathy against the city’s homeless.

“It’s just way too much, too often,” says Alycia Dymond, a 21-year-old technical theater student at SF State. She’s sipping green tea from a paper cup. I think of a cup on the sidewalk, filthy and shoved in my face by a poor man in the street. Alycia’s eyes are the saturated blue of fairy’s eyes in Disney movies, and she says she doesn’t help the homeless. “I can’t bring myself to. I live in the Haight, and it’s difficult to just walk down the street without stepping on someone. It’s horrible, but they’re kind of like pigeons. You throw change to one, and five more come flocking and begging.”

It is this attitude of separation from the homeless, this sub-humanization, that breeds our indifference towards them. It also makes it easier for us to ignore their plights, blame them for their conditions, and amplify those common characteristics in them that we find repulsive.

“Homeless people do share commonalities, and it makes them interchangeable,” says Emerson Alvarenga, a 20-year-old visual arts major at SF City College. He believes that society not only dehumanizes homeless people but that we keep them that way by refusing to acknowledge them. “We like our little hierarchies. People like to know the pecking order. Seeing people that are so destitute makes us feel powerful and justified.”

So it appears that the sentiment is not uncommon among San Francisco’s young adult population. I’m sitting at a rickety table outside of Cup a’ Joe’s coffee house on Leavenworth Street. It rests at the transition point between the Tenderloin district—with its abundance of prostitutes, drug-addicts and homeless; and Nob Hill, a surreal land of cheery rich folk, expensive cars and small dogs in sweaters. From my vantage point in the affectionately named “Tendernob,” the collision of poverty and prosperity is disheartening.

A girl with a doll’s face and flapper-style, dyed black hair, stares at something across the street, eyes narrowed. Her eyebrow arches high and she giggles, so I discreetly follow her gaze.

On the corner, a shrunken, sunburned old man yells inexorably at a light pole. I think: he’s probably wandered up from the Tenderloin. He’s only wearing one, untied shoe. The girl—Shannon—says that she’s laughing because she doesn’t know how else to react.
“It shouldn’t be funny. It isn’t,” she relents, her face falling into seriousness. Shannon is 23 years old, an animations student at the Academy of Art University down the street.

“It’s just that I see it so often that it became funny, you know?” Yes, I do. “I don’t have the energy to care. You can’t save everyone, so don’t save anyone.”

She looks suddenly stunned. Maybe she didn’t mean to say this, because she’s not looking at me anymore. She’s not looking at the homeless man, either. She cranes her neck away from me, disturbed, and this conversation is over.

Alycia and Shannon (who won’t give me her surname), feel debilitated by the routine barrage of homelessness in San Francisco. The city’s dense population is approximately 740,000; 6,248 of those people live on the street. San Francisco is only 46.7 square miles. The translation: per square mile of San Francisco, a distance only slightly larger than four city blocks, there are roughly 133 homeless people, desperate for care.

With such statistics, it’s not shocking that people are bewildered by this urban disease. It is alarming that the sickness of apathy makes homeless people objects to be tolerated rather than people with lives and needs.

Experts in sociology tend to agree that the root of rising homelessness—and our subsequent apathy towards it—arises from deficiencies in government assistance programs, giving responsibility to the government entity rather than society.

David Hilfiker, a medical practitioner for the homeless in Washington, D.C., has a cheery disposition and sparkling eyes behind thick-framed glasses. “Poverty is not nearly so simple as people have made it,” he says. “We must not use [government assistance program’s] failure as a rationalization that relieves us of our responsibility to our fellow citizens.”

Expertise aside—because what I have to offer is experience—perhaps we should remember that these are homeless people. “The Homeless” is not the same as “The School Mascot” or “The Barista.” The mascots and the baristas get to shed their costumes and uniforms at the end of the day. The destitute individuals dressed in rags, asleep in the archway of Glide Memorial Church on Ellis Street, do not. By personalizing the situation, we may break our hearts, but we might also break them open.

It’s drizzling and gray in the city today. I’m disgruntled, walking to the subway in this weather. My familiar derelicts appear as I expect them to, and I ignore them, as they expect me to. At Mason Street and O’Farrell, something‘s different. The kind lady who never begs but always smiles—the one who is so thin she can barely stand—is gone. It doesn’t strike me until the next day, when her corner is empty again.

Weeks later, she’s still missing, and I feel an exquisite guilt.

She’s gone. Erased.

Is she gone because of me? Because of all of us? Is she forgotten because we’re all too busy to have compassion? Because we can’t bring ourselves to be selfless?

My generation has inherited a legacy of complacency towards those in need, but what we must realize is that we’ve also inherited the responsibility and the opportunity to change it. The consequence of our apathy will be total isolation from humanity and the qualities that make us human: love, intelligence, altruism. Our detachment will breed instead confusion, hatred and a loneliness we won’t be able to quench.

I’m in the subway, paying for my ticket with the change I can’t spare. I drop a quarter, and leaning down to retrieve it, I stop.

I leave it on the sticky tile because, maybe someone will find it. Maybe this time, I can spare some change.