‘Sweeps’ of homeless defy easy definition or solution

They’re not exactly sweeps.

When you think of sweeps — sweeping changes, sweeping winds, sweeping away the detritus on the back porch — the connotation is of something that is sudden and complete. What city crews are having to do in Kakaako isn’t sudden or complete. In news coverage, the slow, tedious things are left out, but in real time, the process is plodding, methodical and carefully preannounced. It’s not the terrifying Scoops from the movie “Soylent Green.” It’s more the cleanup crew after a big event asking the last few guests to please leave the hall.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration really hates the word “sweeps.” It sounds too mean. It prefers “compassionate disruption” for the larger approach, and “enforcement actions” to specifically mean the time when crews come in and start throwing left-behind junk into garbage trucks.

Compassionate disruption is not only an oxymoron, it’s forward-moving action weighed down by the fear of public opinion.

So much of our dealings with homelessness are affected by the desire to appear compassionate tangled with the frustration of trying to be truly helpful to a group of people who don’t want to be helped. Sure, some of the people living on the streets in Kakaako accepted offers of temporary shelter, but only when the threat of eviction was imminent. Otherwise, they were OK with a patched-together existence of tents, tarps, unwashed bedding and toilet buckets.

Maybe there needs to be another term, something that avoids the squishy, emotional element of “compassionate” and the obvious euphemism of “disruption.” It’s more like when the stern nurse comes to your bed the day after surgery and says you have to walk. Sure, it’s gonna hurt, but you have to get up to get better.

On Thursday morning, I watched a young family leaving the Children’s Discovery Center as the “enforcement action” was happening two streets away. Dad held his little boy’s hand while mom carried the baby. As they stepped over a pile of garbage to get to the parking lot, the little boy made a noise of disapproval. “Yeah, trash,” the father said. “It’s terrible … people should … always … pick up their trash.”

Clearly the dad was wrestling with conflicting feelings, as many of us are.

What can you tell your child about a homeless camp? What can you say to ward them away from that sort of end? Stay in school? Stay off drugs? Embrace a lifestyle where you work long hours at a job you hate to pay rent in a depressing hollow-tile apartment because things like your own bathroom and screens on the windows are worth more than personal freedom and doing what you feel? Or is it more important to teach your children kindness? How can we balance the condemnation of torpor with ideals like compassion and tolerance?

It goes back to that thing we don’t yet have a name for — the stern, caring nurse telling the patient that it’s time to get out of bed and walk.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.