Homelessness and the Apocalypse

A timeless debate has raged since humanity first put reed to papyrus: does art influence how we live our daily lives or does life influence what society creates? It’s the proverbial ‘chicken or egg’ argument. I know this doesn’t seem like a typical article for a blog on homelessness, but if you bear with me, I’d like to (attempt to) draw a parallel between apocalypse entertainment and the reality of homelessness. I am going to take some creative liberties but will remain as true as I can to my premise: The homeless are characters in a genre that is not afforded commercial breaks.

 My extensive research involves comparing and contrasting years of being a zombie fanboy with years of work with social services focusing on homelessness. I’m not sure how many times I will be afforded an opportunity to combine my devotion to Cormac McCarthy or The Walking Dead (television AND graphic novels) with proper advocacy for the homeless. I better do this while I can.

 A fantastic apocalyptic story has the ability to thrust a person into an immediate world of chaos with little or no explanation of how the world ended up such a calamitous state. An occasional back-story might be offered but it is little more than contextual fodder. It doesn’t really matter how things happened, just that they are happening. Our protagonists are not given a great deal of time to reflect on the fact that the world, as they knew it, faded into oblivion because they are forced to deal with ever-evolving dangers that place them smack dab into a different world they thought they would grow old and retire in. And speaking of that world…

 Any chance at a long life during the apocalypse depends on a few things, most important of which might be shelter. There are varying schools of thought on this matter, so to be fair I will present the two main theories people like to argue about. The first option is to live the life of a nomad, trusting few and interacting with even fewer. These people believe safety is synonymous with mobility. They carry possess only what they can carry and are skeptical about dealing with others. They survive day to day by living off whatever resources they can muster. The other method of survival involves communal dwelling with people who are in the same situation. These are relationships bred out of reciprocated necessity and people will bond together because there might be safety in numbers even if none of these people would have even spoken to one another before the apocalypse.  

 Another component of this genre is how people cope with having lost everything that was important to them and helped define them as individuals. The intense loss of loved ones and careers and friends and summer homes and iPhones is always a competing storyline that runs parallel to finding new reasons to live; forging a new life in a world that has cannibalized itself. Imagine having no reminders of the past… no photos or finger-painted pictures or pics to scroll through. All the past events in your life are now committed to nothing more than memory.

 The final aspect of an amazing ‘end-of-the-world’ creation is the consummate struggle between hope and despair. Will the main characters create a reason to exist and move forward or will they allow themselves to be swallowed into a nihilistic abyss and simply give up? This plot is different for each person and there are no hard and fast rules as to which will happen for each respective person in an apocalypse. But this might be the fundamental transcendent issue that defines whether a person lives or dies. Hope. The off-chance that life can get better and a new future might be resurrected from the ashes of a civilization which no longer exists as it once did.

 And if you aren’t sure what I was referencing… homelessness or the apocalypse, then perhaps its fair to say that one writer’s creation is another person’s reality.