It is so convenient to adopt the conventional neighbourhood attitude to the homeless: they are all druggies with mental disorders and criminal habits. Not only that, they poop, too. Just like babies. Everywhere, just like babies. It would be a blessing if they could all be thrown out with their bathwater, wouldn’t it? Not perhaps the babies — they seem to have earned themselves dispensation somehow, in spite of the pooping.
But, because of their universally bad habits — drugs, crimes, looney tunes and pooping, the homeless simply have to go . . . anywhere . . . else.
Erasmus resoundingly gives the lie to the oh-so-convenient homeless behavioural myths that excuse nasty neighbourhood intolerance.
Erasmus? If you’re just a dumb North American like this writer, you may well have to look it up. What is Erasmus? It’s an acronym for the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students1.
Many of us at least understand the concept of a ‘gap year:’ when you give your youthful education program a break. North Americans might be impressed at the whole mess of European universities that support continuing studies in a new physical and cultural milieu. Cooperating universities allow a student to experience a new culture while living in a different community and continuing a university education by attending another institution for a year.
Which brings us to Erasmus students in Italy. They represent a country’s future citizens, though not necessarily Italy’s. As a class, they are not druggies, suffering from mental disorders, or inclined to crime. (Unfortunately, except for one or two aliens doing their gap year from another planet, they do poop.)
And yet, too many are not only homeless, but experiencing community and neighbourhood prejudice, which inaccurately link homelessness to a catalogue of diseases and habits. That in turn justifies condemnation from supposedly more ‘upstanding’ citizens.
Of course, Italy’s Erasmus homeless is a depressing story. But it does serve at least one purpose. It challenges the idea that people who are homeless are somehow deserving of a fate, which they have inflicted on themselves by bad attitudes, evil tendencies, substance use, or other undesirable and blameworthy human habits and sicknesses.
In Italy, the major crime of Erasmus students who are homeless is to be young and attempting to complete an education while gaining experience of the world around them. When they are criticized with the prejudices levelled at all people who are homeless, it rather points the finger back at the intolerance of the neighbourhood, and the individual and collective social behaviours that are profoundly unworthy.
In World Nation News, you can read more about: Homeless Erasmus students in Italy
Footnotes
- The program’s name may take inspiration from the work and life of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who studied and wrote in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. See more at Wikipedia: Erasmus
