The Invisibility Agreement, also known as the I know I’m better than you Agreement, is an unspoken agreement amongst us all to act as if the “crazy” people in the street or in the subway stations are invisible. Act like they don’t exist, don’t interact with them, don’t even look at them, so that they won’t cause you any harm. In the moment, you choose to look away from their broken teeth, inflated legs, ripped clothing, dirty hands, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, bear dry feet. After the moment passes, after you’re in a different train car, after you’re at work, after you’re safe at home, you continue to look away. Turn away from the still bodies in the middle of the street, turn away from the smeared human feces along the wall, turn away from the putrid smell, turn away from their calls for help.
America is this supposedly great country with opportunity for all. The American Dream is what all strive for here and what all who work hard can achieve – is the line that we were fed as kids. Every morning, bright and early at 8 AM, we were expected to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “For liberty and justice for all” we’d say while we simultaneously watch a black child get shot a dozen times under suspicion of carrying something illegal, while we simultaneously watch our latino brothers and sisters be kidnapped and thrown in tight cells for being illegal, while we simultaneously watch our freedom of speech become illegal, while we simultaneously watch a mother carrying her baby on her back begging for a dollar in exchange for a candy bar. When do our people get justice? When do our native New Yorkers who have fallen victim to gentrification, a messy divorce, a scam, a surgery that required them to take out all of their life savings, serving time for a crime they never committed, the government that couldn’t take care of their veterans, the capitalistic society we are subjected to, get justice? The crazy people, the lunatics, the druggies, those who search all day for a flat bench without an arm rest to sleep on , are still people, aren’t they? The Invisibility Agreement allows us to ignore people because they pose a problem, an inconvenience, to us. This agreement also makes us ignore the capitalist system that is eating away at us all because I promise you that there is a more likely chance that the corrupt healthcare system will kill you than the starved man on the street.
It starts with the normalization of starving children in our subway stations that has paved the way for us to normalize the starving the children in Gaza. When you give up the Invisibility Agreement, you see life from a new perspective, a human perspective. Suddenly, you feel empathetic for the homeless man, but you don’t feel pity (because pity gets you no where), you feel anger against the system that allows their people to starve and die because that same system is too busy making sure brown kids on the other side of the world starve and die and burn and explode. Is this enough to shred your agreement?