On: 'Less than human': how unhoused people in Atlanta are being treated during the...

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.