"Homeless" "I think I will Not Forget This"

Persuading someone to change their opinion can be an odious task. Persuading an entire society to change their view of something is an extreme. Anna Quindlen could convince  anyone to change their view of the homeless through  her imagery  and personal anecdotes in an essay she wrote for the Times. It seems every paragraph of thought is clipped with a statement that one reads and rereads, feeling its weight and its true meaning. She talks about a homeless woman, Ann, and the pictures she carries of the home she used to have, “She was not adrift, alone, anonymous,although her bags and raincoat with the grime shadowing its creases had made me believe she was. She had a house, or at least once upon a time she had had one. Inside were curtains, a couch, a stove, potholders. You are where you live. She was somebody.” Quindlen admits to what the Global view of a homeless woman like Ann is; “adrift” “anonymous. But the idea of the Homeless stems from the idea of “home” itself- it is all of that stuff inside, potholders couches and the life you have inside that house. Ann, and countless other homeless people, have had a life and that’s who they are. Quindlen drives home this idea of the things that make up a life together by applying them to Ann and others without homes. “Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang it on. They are not the homeless. They are people without homes...No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything”. This final statement encompasses everything Anna Quindlen wants the reader to feel; these are individual people, who do not have the simple things that make you who you are.

Hilary De Vries uses similar appeals to make her argument in “I Think I will Not Forget This”. Both women use powerful strategies to make the reader reject the ideas they have of homeless people. To change their lenses completely and put a personality and a face to them. De Vries sets out to do this, she makes it clear that she is out to personalize such a huge social problem. In her essay De Vries, narrates her time in a shelter, taking the reader through what she sees, not offering her own feelings. This allows the reader to experience the shelter and draw their own ideas about how they live.

De Vries offers her first personal thought, when the women are getting ready for bed “It is almost like being back in gym class, I think. But it isn't. It isn't school. It isn't even a home. And i still wonder how people can live like this.”  A woman in the shelter says to Hilary “everyone here is different. Everyone here is an individual”.  This is what Hilary De Vries will never forget and what she wants the reader to never forget, “compassion is not limited to those who can write checks”. Both Anna Quindlen and Hilary De Vries attempt to change the lenses with which the world views those without a home. This reader believes that both women were successful.