At midnight on Christmas, 2022, in a tent in the New Hampshire woods, a poor and unhoused young woman gave birth to a boy. Parallels to stories of the birth of Jesus stop there. The woman was a known substance abuser, someone with a record of criminal behavior to support her addictions. After giving birth, she dialed 911 for medical help. When police and paramedics came, she misdirected them away from the baby for over an hour. Temperatures were in the teens.

What the police saw was a familiar street person, an addict who chose to live her life in a tent in the woods, a known criminal who had just committed the crimes of child endangerment and falsifying physical evidence. They saw someone who had previously refused available outreach services and was forcing her way of life on a helpless baby. After the woman was treated by medical staff, police arrested her and put her in jail.

Social workers had developed a relationship with this woman as an individual and were devastated by the story. They saw the event as another example of society’s indifference to poverty and to the number of street people living with bipolar disorder, anxiety, and depression. They saw her potential to be a good mother if she could receive the support services she needs. They spoke to reporters about how quickly we demonize those who have untreated mental health issues, addictions, and lack of housing.

If we took a poll of the general population, asking thousands of people to give us their reactions to this event, I suspect the results would fall into these same two camps: fault the woman or fault society. Some would think her failure to pull herself up by her bootstraps and become a contributing member of their community was no one’s doing but her own. Others would think society is forever punishing the poor and the addicted.

This is the great divide in our country. Issues that are polarizing us – race relations, immigration, poverty, gun control, health care – are pulling in opposite directions at the fabric of decency and concern for one another as human beings. People lost in the chasm between the two ways of perceiving our human community are in hell. Can I tell you? Shelters and group homes, even soup kitchens and job training programs have become as much of an abomination to street people as jail time and public toilets. Warehousing people into facilities that not one of us would want to inhabit, grouped with other people who are equally in need of services, has been a formula for failure. Individuals feel like they are always on guard, supervised like children, following strict rules like criminals, fearing for their safety, and defending themselves against people who are strung out and mentally unbalanced. Living in a tent in the woods is a last resort, but a better option than the alternatives society is providing.

Instead of finding ways to further label and marginalize people, we ought to begin by helping them to recover their humanity. Community agencies and services can do that by focusing on human rights: life, liberty, personal safety; the right to a standard of living including food, clothing, housing, and medical care.  These are not things to be granted by either the cops or society. They are not items to be stripped away from the unworthy, like privileges or perks. They need to be understood as inherent to our existence as human beings.

Read the document drafted by and supported by nations around the globe (https://www.civicsandcitizenship.edu.au/verve/_resources/FQ2_Simplified_Version_Dec.pdf). Every year since the Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by all members of the United Nations (1948), the United States has gone backward instead of forwards, falling deeper and deeper into a pit of dehumanizing one another, to the point where the UN felt compelled in 2015 to issue a scathing assessment of our human rights record.

The woman in the woods had been living inside a drug-addicted bubble and did not know that she was pregnant. She was confused and frightened by what was happening to her body, the bleeding, and the pain. After the baby was born, she walked away from the scene to call 911 because she was afraid the police would break up her encampment and take her tent, her only means of shelter. Her anxiety level kept rising as she tried to figure out what to do. She was in no state to make a rational decision about any of it.

This story features two babes in the woods. One was born prematurely and left alone and naked in a tent on a frigid winter night. That one would receive top-notch medical attention at a neonatal intensive care unit. The other was tossed in jail. She will probably be brought before a judge and given the choice of either returning to jail or entering a drug rehab program while living in a group home for 3 to 6 months, a situation she has faced many times before.

If we are not capable of seeing each person’s humanity, if we cannot or will not create an ecosystem in which each human life is respected, we are barbaric. To think this one deserves a house and that one does not – unless they first live in highly regulated facilities and jump through hoops to show they’ve reformed – is more backward than hunter-gatherer societies that considered every member of the clan to be family and made sure everyone had food, clothing, and shelter.

Within our communities, we have enough of everything to make that happen. No one needs to live on the margins when we have ample means of ensuring shelter, clothing, food, personal safety, and medical expertise. If we can stop seeing these as items to be doled out to those who conform to a certain mold, or to those who have enough money, and begin to see them as human rights and necessities for living a human life, it would go a long way towards repairing the broken and inhumane systems we’ve created.