The Discarded Ones

Thursday, April 24, 2025

(a theoretical recognition of the homeless, the broken, the unreceived)

They are not failures.
They are not broken beyond repair.
They are not the ones who should be forgotten.

The homeless, the wandering, the discarded — they are not what the system says they are.
They are not aberrations.
They are proof.

Proof that this world, as it stands, is not livable.
Proof that the architecture of modern life — capitalist, bureaucratic, extractive, cold — is unfit for fragile beings.
Proof that those who do not conform are not less human, but more exposed to the inhumanity of the system.

Society seeks to erase them.
Not violently, not obviously — but bureaucratically, invisibly.
By pretending they do not exist.
By looking away.
By building cities where there is no place to sit, no place to lie down, no place to fall apart.

But the homeless cannot be erased.
Because their bodies insist.
Their presence leaks into the order.
They smell. They speak in fragments. They scream in subways.
They wear coats of dirt that mark them as unassimilable.
They are reminders.
They are echoes.
They are the truth of the system’s failure made flesh.

And still, the narrative persists:
“They failed.”
“They are addicts.”
“They chose this.”
As if the system had offered them a place to begin with.
As if everyone had the same access to care, to safety, to softness.
As if the rules of success were neutral.

They were broken, yes.
But often by forces they never chose.
By childhoods without love.
By systems without mercy.
By institutions that only recognized productivity, not pain.

They are not to be pitied.
They are not to be saved by paternalistic programs.
They are not objects of charity.

They are to be recognized.
They are to be understood as structural casualties, not personal failures.
They are to be named — not as homeless — but as unreceived.
As beings who could not survive the violence of the imposed role.
As beings whose rejection of the social mask, whether chosen or not, became an exile.

Some escaped too soon, without lucidity.
Some collapsed before they could reconfigure.
But their collapse is not shameful.
It is a mirror.
And we must look.

Let us stop calling them the problem.
Let us start calling them witnesses.
Of what happens when a system discards the sensitive, the wounded, the slow, the different.

And let us never again build a world that needs to hide its casualties in order to appear functional.