The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'cartoon crowd of beggars.'
Many years ago, some friends and I tried to start an intentional community. Our food and clothes were largely scavenged. We'd churn butter in mason jars and make gallons of hummus by mashing garbanzo beans with a potato masher. Although we intended to buy land to establish an ecovillage someday, our group wasn't organized or committed enough to ever manage more than renting a house. Part of the reason for this was that we never solved the problem of what to do with the hard cases.
Our fledgling community was largely comprised of people with addiction issues and mental health challenges. We were a magnet for people with no where else to go who wanted to drink their days away in our living room. Several efforts were made to clear the rabble out, but the rabble eventually won. By the time that happened I'd long since moved away.
These days, at the coffee shop where I hang out, I often encounter people dealing with various combinations of addiction and mental illness. Most of them are harmless. Some are annoying. But they're as much a part of the neighborhood as everyone else. I usually get along with them alright. We sit together having coffee and it's fine.
But there are people who sometimes show up at the coffee shop and ruin it for me. Like Scott, who sexually harassed a friend of mine into leaving and never coming back. I've told creepy Scott why I won't be in the same space as him. Yet he still comes around sometimes. And he isn't the only creep that shows up and tries to poison the social ecology with creepiness.
It's easy to remedy a situation like this at a coffee shop by leaving. But fleeing toxicity isn't always an option. Sometimes the world forces us to deal with toxic people. My strategy for these situations is to recall the countless hours I've spent shoveling manure in my life and resign myself to being offended the entire time.
While toxic people can change, they typically do not. And when they do, it can be messy. The lines between support and enabling can become blurred. Progress can be impossible to estimate.
Extreme toxicity is fortunately rare. More common are the people who are simply annoying. The ones who, consciously or otherwise, play stupid social power games. Who monopolize group discussions, interrupting others while visibly failing to listen. Who derail emerging group understanding in favor of thinly-veiled egomania.
I try not to hang out with these people, but they're difficult to avoid. Their behavior is typically considered acceptable. It's also acceptable to push back against their nonsense, which is what I often do, with ambiguous results. Maybe if more people pushed back, there would be less nonsense to deal with.
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