'Less than human': how unhoused people in Atlanta are being treated during the World Cup - video

July 19, 2026

I read today of a city preparing for a grand spectacle, a World Cup, and of the people swept from its streets to make the view more pleasing for visitors. They call it “cleaning,” but I know the arithmetic of displacement. It is an old sum: the cost of a festival is never borne by those who attend it.

They speak of economic forces, of legacy and investment, as if these were winds or tides, natural and unstoppable. I must tell you - an economic force is a choice. It is a policy drafted in a quiet room, and its violence is measured in the belongings tossed into a dump truck, in the human being made to feel “less than human” for the crime of having nowhere to go.

You will hear the justifications: order, safety, the greater good for the city. But I observe who defines that good, and who is excluded from its consideration. The blind spot is not an accident of vision; it is a deliberate turning of the head. When you design a policy that treats people as a stain to be scrubbed away, you have not solved a problem. You have merely moved your evidence.

Here is the domestic consequence of such grand plans: a person’s dignity is their shelter. To strip one is to destroy the other. I think of my own household, of what it means to have a hearth, a place where you are known. These people are not a problem to be managed; they are citizens, unhoused. If we build stadiums but cannot see the people sleeping in their shadows, then we have constructed only a monument to our own indifference. The ledger of a nation must include this cost, or its prosperity is a fiction.

July 19, 2026

They show a video of people being swept from the streets of Atlanta. They call it “less than human.” The writer speaks of “violent economic forces.” And now, what? Is this news? Or is it merely a test of my understanding, placed before me again?

Examine it. The city hosts a spectacle. It wishes the spectacle to be seen, not the poverty. So it moves the poverty. This is not in your power. The city’s decision, the economic force, the spectacle itself - these are externals. They belong to the category of things that happen. Your judgment about them, however, is yours entirely.

You are disturbed. Good. Now use the disturbance. Ask: what is actually mine here? Not the policy. Not the global sport. My capacity to see these people not as a problem to be hidden, but as human beings exercising their own power - the power to endure, to persist, to bear their circumstance. That is a choice I can make. The city officials have chosen their role: to present a clean stage. They will be judged for that performance. But my role is different. My role is to witness without hysteria, to understand what is and is not mine.

They call it “violent.” The violence is in the belief that a clean street is more valuable than a person’s dignity. That belief is an error. It is a confusion of what is good. The good is not in the appearance of the city, but in the justice of its actions. This, too, is an external. I cannot force them to see it.

But I can ensure I am not guilty of the same confusion. Do I judge my own worth by what is seen and praised? Or by the integrity of my own choices? The man sleeping on the grating has his own trial - the cold, the scorn, the body’s fatigue. His arena is that street. My arena is this judgment. Let me not fail in mine by weeping over things I did not cause and cannot change. Let me look, understand the division, and keep my own house in order. The rest is not action, but noise.

The heat in Atlanta is no different from the heat in Delhi during the height of summer - thick, suffocating, a weight upon the lungs - but here the air smells of asphalt and desperation rather than spices and dust. I have seen cities dress themselves in their finest for the sake of visitors, but never have I seen a city so deliberately strip its own skin from its bones to present a polished facade. The World Cup has come, as it does every four years, and with it the ancient rite of hospitality turned inside out: the guest is welcomed, but the stranger who has no coin to offer is not merely ignored - he is erased.

In Timbuktu, when a traveler arrives without means, the people do not turn him away. They offer him a mat by the fire, a bowl of rice, and a question: What news do you bring? The value is not in what he can pay, but in what he can share. Here, the stranger is not a bearer of news - he is a stain upon the spectacle. The police do not ask his name; they call him less than human, and in doing so, they reveal the true nature of the hospitality they practice. It is not hospitality at all. It is theater.

I walked through the streets near the stadium, where the air hums with the sound of construction cranes and the distant roar of a crowd. The vendors sell jerseys and scarves, their prices marked in dollars that gleam like polished gold. A man slept beneath a bridge, wrapped in a blanket that had once been blue. No one disturbed him - not out of kindness, but because the spectacle had no use for him. He was not part of the story being told.

In Delhi, the poor are poor, but they are not invisible. The beggars sit at the feet of the temples, and the merchants curse them but do not drive them away. Here, the poor are not even allowed to sit. They are swept aside, as one sweeps aside dust before a feast. The feast is not for them. It is for those who can afford to forget that they exist.

The World Cup is a great gathering, but it is not a gathering of equals. It is a gathering of those who have been chosen to be seen, and those who have been chosen to be unseen. The irony is that the more a city tries to shine, the more it reveals what it has tried to hide. Atlanta shines tonight, but its light casts long shadows. And in those shadows, the world can see its own reflection.