The statistics on America’s child homelessness crisis are shocking, yes. But what’s more shocking is how quickly they’ll be filed away into the great American archive of things we’ve learned to live with.
Patti Waldmeir (“The growing problem of child homelessness”, Outlook, February 11) was right to highlight that the growing crisis goes largely unreported in US newspapers. Or if it is reported, it’s buried below the fold, lost beneath the latest political spectacle.
The greatest obstacle to ending child homelessness in the wealthiest nation in the world is not a lack of resources. It is acceptance. Once the shock is gone, so is the urgency to act.
I worked on this issue first hand in Washington, where I witnessed a peculiar kind of institutional numbness. Shocking statistics about child homelessness get absorbed into the bureaucratic machine, defanged and domesticated until they become a line item in a bill that will never come to a vote.
America has developed not just a tolerance for intolerable things but an entire professional class dedicated to managing that tolerance — experts at making the unthinkable thinkable, at processing outrage into procedure. We have built entire systems to look directly at suffering without truly seeing it.
This is how injustice sustains itself — not through sudden catastrophe but through slow, quiet erosion. Over time, society stops seeing what is always in front of it. This is how a country can end up with homeless children and still file it under “social issue” rather than “emergency”.
That your paper called out this moral outrage matters. Sometimes, naming the unthinkable is the first step towards refusing to live with it.
Alexandra Gruber-Pérez
London NW3, UK