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People dealing with homelessness respond to cruel tweets about them

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“If home is where the heart is, then are homeless people heartless?” This is one of several mean tweets against people experiencing homelessness that’s on a Canadian advocacy group’s website. Raising the Roof’s new and powerful PSA will get you to think twice before you tweet.

In an effort to put a face to the figure and to engage everyone in a public conversation aimed to end homelessness, Raising the Roof has collected the responses of different people living without stable shelter to cruel posts about them on Twitter. The video is heartbreaking. Watch this:

Thanks (or should I say, no thanks) to the anonymity of social media websites, we humans often forget that those we tweet and post about are humans, too. We are quick to write something mean, to laugh at someone else’s expense. But we are all human beings. (Thanks, Buzzfeed, for sharing this and saying it so eloquently last summer.) More importantly, we are all made in the image and likeness of God. Even if someone is dealing with the stresses of the streets, they still deserve human dignity.

This Holy Week, let’s remember that we are all holy—regardless of where we live.

Keep the conversation going by tweeting #HumansForHumans.

Image: Flickr photo cc by κύριαsity

About the author

Caitlyn Schmid

Caitlyn Schmid worked as assistant editor at U.S. Catholic.