What does it mean to be in a position of power? After watching the documentary in class regarding the homeless population in Santa Monica, I began to change my views on what the word power means. Power was used left and right in this documentary, and used in ways that through my eyes appeared to be abusing it. Something that really struck me in this video was how the police officers used their power over these homeless people, who were causing no harm to others, just because they could. The civilians did the same thing, exerting their power of money and status over the homeless people by reporting them, and saying that they were disturbed by their presence. But these homeless people are essentially just like us. They have citizenship, they have the right to vote and they have the right to exist. The only thing that separates them is money. And because America is a place where money and power go hand and hand, these homeless people, and people living in extreme poverty, are in America essentially powerless.

But these “powerless” people are causing us no harm; so why do citizens feel the need to displace them, ticket them for pointless offenses, and publically embarrass them? I believe that it is a social stigma that is put in place by the “higher” class of people. They seem to believe that poverty is a self-fixing problem, and that it is their problem that they are living on the streets. They believe that it is the fault of the homeless people that they are sleeping on cardboard at night and pushing around shopping carts full of their belongings during the day. This “higher” class believes this because they have never taken the time to understand them, to talk to them. But instead they want to make them disappear, to remove them from the streets, because they are making the streets “dirty.” Throughout that documentary I discovered that the power dynamic has become so strong in our country that it has become a form of discrimination. People treat the poor as though they are the embarrassment in our country, and try to deny them basic human rights.

But say a person of “power” took a minute to talk to the homeless, or even just decided to leave them in peace and stopped exerting their power over those who cannot defend themselves. Could a simple action such as that change the power dynamic? Possibly, but an idea like that is much easier said than done, and change, my friends, is never easy.