A man rests his head on a pile of dirty shirts and curls his legs up next to a heating vent. He is tired after toting the necessities of life around all day. Before he shuts his eyes for the night, he pulls his iPhone out of his blazer’s inside pocket and checks the status of his rebooked flight.
For Americans whose travels follow a constellation of airline hubs, a night stuck in the airport is a familiar experience. When hotels are too full or connections too early, it is simply easier to push benches together into a makeshift twin mattress.
These uncomfortable nights are the closest most Americans will ever get to homelessness.
The last month of polar vortices and wintry mixes has inflicted this quasi-homelessness on many travelers (including me). Men in tailored suits huddle on the floor in Concourse D. Sleepy young women in Ivy League sweatshirts scavenge for a bathroom, toothbrush in hand. Oily-haired travelers bathe themselves in public sinks, and we greet them with sympathetic smiles, not averted grimaces.
We accept airport vagrancy as an unavoidable and mildly unpleasant side-effect of flying, a miraculous kind of slowed-down teleportation. But why do we empathize so readily with those who suffer this temporary “homelessness” but remain comparatively callous to the homeless on our streets and in our subways?
According to an Aristotelian theory of emotions found in his Poetics, we feel pity (eleos) for air travelers stuck on the terminal floor because we recognize that they had no direct agency in their ill fate. And we feel fear (phobos) upon realizing that we, too, could find ourselves bleary-eyed, staring at the Jamba Juice closing at midnight.
From a sociological perspective, we understand that codes of conduct disintegrate in times of distress. Thucydides wrote about the uncivilized funeral practices in the aftermath of the plague of the Peloponnesian War: “Sacred places…were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane” (II.52). What we might take to be an unsanitary floor in the afternoon becomes the closely-guarded nighttime property of a vagrant traveler. That shift makes sense to us.
David Fleming at ESPN points to a more modern and lighthearted example: public defecation. At the 2005 London Marathon, Paula Radcliffe set a world record, but about four miles from the finish line, she “simply placed one hand on a metal crowd barricade for balance, used the other to curtain her shorts to the side and perched, precariously, over her shoes. Then, as they say in England, she proceeded to ‘have a poo’ right there on the street and in broad daylight, within two feet of a startled spectator.” Normally, we might curse at a public pooper, but here, we clapped for her.
Whether it’s a matter of Aristotelian psychology or competitive desperation, we can understand the need to break social codes at the airport. But of course, airport “strandedness” is downright luxurious compared to actual homelessness. It’s not so bad: terminals have heat and clean water. For those homeless travelers lucky enough to find an outlet, there is electricity — maybe even free WiFi to facilitate revisiting your favorite episodes of My So-Called Life. In fact, many travelers even choose this plush quasi-homelessness instead of booking hotels. For a tiny fraction of the 644 million travelers who find themselves sleeping on the floor, the worst outcome is usually a sore neck and a lackluster bagel the next morning (paid for with a meal voucher, of course).
But for millions of Americans, homelessness means living in unsafe and inclement cityscapes, ravaged by the same winter weather that left others stranded with heat, power, and an airline-branded blanket in O’Hare. But do we withhold pity because we tell ourselves we would never make the poor life choices that lead to sleeping on a bench? Do we not fear we might also end up bathing in a sink?
As air travel shows us, misfortune picks at random, and she sometimes picks me. Sometimes you.
When we next see truly unfortunate souls on our streets, let us remember these Aristotelian lessons of pity and fear. We should not withhold our empathy just because when we catch a night-long glimpse of our own homelessness, we are able to fly away from it the next morning.
