A Round of Applause for Dehumanization
- Annika OMelia
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
This Is Why Rock Island Line Exists
Because there is always more than one narrative.
There is the narrative that protects the egos and reputations of the powerful. And there is the narrative that protects the realities—and reputations—of the vulnerable.
Last night at the Rock Island City Council meeting, Kai Swanson—a Rock Island County Board member, President of the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, and the husband of Alderwoman Jenni Swanson—used public comment to set the record straight.
Positioning himself as a “not so loud voice, nonetheless backed up by facts,” Kai thanked City Council for “staying the course” on homelessness policy and described much of the public outcry—from youth, faith leaders, activists, and citizen journalists—as “as loud as it has been baseless.”
His core message was familiar: passion is understandable, but passion without accuracy cannot produce effective policy. In his telling, community voices have been emotional, careless, and misinformed—while Council, steady and reasoned, has done the hard and thankless work.
That framing is convenient.
It is also a power move.
Because once someone claims authority over “facts,” everyone else becomes noise. Once critics are defined as inaccurate, their moral claims can be dismissed without being engaged.
And that is exactly what followed.
Accuracy Without Humanity Is Not Truth
Kai referenced the death of an unhoused woman—whom I will call Mama, at her children’s request for anonymity—and suggested that narratives around her death were “false and misleading,” implying she returned to a vacant structure to “practice her addiction,” and that her death was therefore the result of her own choices rather than local policy conditions.
Here is what is true and necessary to say.
I spoke directly with Rock Island County Coroner Brian Gustafson today. The toxicology report is not public. The autopsy is not complete. At this time, we do not know Mama’s official cause of death or contributing factors. Her family has less information about her ongoing death investigation than Kai Swanson, apparently.
Any public certainty—especially certainty that assigns blame to Mama—does not meet the standard of accuracy and caution being claimed.
What is known is this: Mama was unsheltered, and she was found frozen in an abandoned building by someone who loved her.
There is firsthand reporting from city officials.There is firsthand reporting from people who were present at the scene.
Both matter.
That is not “baseless.”That is not “political gain.”That is lived reality.
And it matters because when a death like this is narrowed into a morality tale about addiction, the policy question disappears:
Why was a Rock Islander unsheltered during winter conditions without access to a low-barrier option?
Misunderstanding Shelter Reality
Mr. Swanson’s remarks also reflected a misunderstanding of how shelter access works in Rock Island County.
Mama would not have been able to access a high-barrier shelter, such as Christian Care. Like many of our most vulnerable neighbors, she required a low-barrier setting—one that accepts people who may be intoxicated and facilitates transport to medical care when needed.
Mama did seek shelter when appropriate options were available.
She stayed at the Lift Now low-barrier shelter in Rock Island earlier this year. She shared a Thanksgiving meal days before her death with friends and family at The Third Place QC. Those same people later held a vigil for her and mourned her death—while political discussion shifted toward managing optics.
To suggest that Mama chose not to avail herself of shelter services is to impugn her reputation and erase the reality of how services actually function. It places responsibility on individuals navigating medical conditions, language barriers, and fragmented systems—rather than on repairing the systems that produce predictable harm.
Passion Is Not the Opposite of Policy — Apathy Is
Kai framed the community response as youthful passion and activist misinformation, suggesting that meaningful decisions should be left to “serious” policymakers.
But the MLK Center gathering was not planned as a political moment. Homelessness emerged because it is present—on the streets, in the air, in people’s lives.
And it was not only youth who spoke. It was elders. It was community leaders. It was faith leaders, including Pastor Corey C. Parker, Sr.
Pastor Parker quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
The civil rights struggle of unhoused people shares uncomfortable similarities with other civil rights struggles: the demand to be seen as fully human, not treated as a problem to be managed or a life to be overlooked.
Apathy—unlike passion—does not produce effective policy.
Rewriting the Shelter Story
Mr. Swanson argued that last year’s Lift Now shelter was, by any reasonable measure, a failure: unsustainable, chaotic, and harmful to downtown.
There is room for critique. Any emergency shelter must be evaluated honestly—capacity, staffing, safety, outcomes, and neighborhood impacts all matter.
But two things can be true at once:
A shelter can be imperfect and still be a lifeline.
Critiquing imperfections cannot become an excuse to abandon the need for low-barrier winter shelter altogether.
Project NOW presented reports on outcomes, plans to address downtown concerns, and a good-neighbor agreement. The City of Rock Island has not publicly released comparable data—no crime metrics, no damage assessments—only images of poor people standing outside.
You can view a presentation on Project Now's Lift Now Shelter outcomes by clicking here:
Mr. Swanson set the record straight that the shelter was not closed early last season, but left out that Mayor Thoms, according to a Project Now staffer who wished to remain anonymous, met with Project Now and asked them to close the shelter early and that an alderperson called Project Now leadership and stated council was considering an emergency vote to close the shelter early. The shelter remained open because Project Now leadership refused to bend to the will of council and abandon their commitment to the people they served.
During the period Lift Now operated, no one died, and many individuals were housed permanently and remain in that housing today. Mama remained alive during that time.
You do not solve homelessness through apathy or avoidance. You solve it by building something better—stable, humane, and real.
Rock Island still has people sleeping outside.
Regional Credit-Taking Is Not Leadership
Mr. Swanson also leaned into a narrative that Rock Island’s council “set boundaries” and forced neighboring cities to act.
That narrative does not withstand scrutiny.
For over 20 years, Davenport operated a low-barrier emergency winter shelter. Rock Island operated one for 90 days—and began efforts to shut it down at the first sign of community challenge.
Moline established a housing task force in 2023 and has been planning shelter solutions for over a year. As Mayor Rayapati has said, her administration acted because they were committed to “doing the needful”—not because Rock Island applied pressure.
East Moline operates a 24-hour warming station during extreme cold, housed in their police department. Humility Homes in Davenport has consistently allowed its shelter to operate over capacity and has not turned away Rock Islanders brought there by law enforcement, even when full, including this winter.
Rock Island, meanwhile, has no housing task force, despite repeated requests from residents and nonprofits, and has passed one of the most restrictive—and potentially discriminatory—social service licensing ordinances in Illinois. An ordinance so unique within the state that it's being used as an example of why lawmakers need to take protections for unhoused individuals even farther in state law.
Is that what deserves applause? Being a model for violating human rights?
Good news in neighboring cities should be celebrated. It should not be used as a victory lap while Rock Island still lacks a low-barrier winter option for people sleeping outside here, now.
Yes, the City is generally supportive of organizations like Christian Care and The Third Place QC in that, when they apply for Community Block Grant Development funding, they may receive it. But insisting that a suffering population be grateful for what exists—and not expect better—is not leadership. It is resignation. And to be clear, the money that the City spends on homelessness, whether through ARPA or CDBG funds, is the absolute basement floor of what they are expected and directed to do with those federal funding sources.
You Can’t Applaud Yourself While Endorsing Dehumanization
Mr. Swanson dismissed “crowd cheers and Facebook likes” as endorphins and warned against “bowing to the loud.” He suggested that public outcry for human dignity was political behavior rather than moral urgency.
But the same performance happens in boardrooms and council chambers—where officials congratulate themselves for “staying the course,” managing optics, and reducing visibility.
There are two rooms.
One measures success by absence: fewer tents, fewer complaints, fewer unhoused people here.
The other measures success by humanity: whether people are alive, sheltered, safe, known, and loved.
Dehumanization does not require cruelty. It requires distance. It shows up when people are reduced to categories, when suffering is buried under technical language, and when policies are evaluated by how effectively they make vulnerable people less visible rather than more safe. It allows leaders to talk about people without listening to them, to frame harm as unfortunate but necessary, and to treat lived experience as emotional noise rather than essential evidence.
That is why Kai’s remarks mattered.
What he offered City Hall was not a serious policy path forward, but a round of applause for dehumanization—no plan to repeal a discriminatory ordinance, no plan to form a housing task force, no plan to address the people still sleeping outside, lacking access to sanitation, and trying to survive on the streets of Rock Island.
Just praise for “staying the course,” and an insistence on looking away from an ongoing human rights crisis playing out in real time.
That is not leadership. It is abdication.
I anticipate members of council will insist that by writing this response, I myself am engaged in dehumanization.
Dehumanization is what happens when people with less power are stripped of dignity, complexity, and moral worth so that harm toward them feels acceptable or invisible. It targets downward. It shows up when people are reduced to categories (“the homeless,” “addicts”), when their suffering is treated as an inconvenience, when policies are designed to make them disappear rather than be safe, and when their voices are dismissed as irrational or unreliable. Dehumanization has material consequences: people lose rights, protection, safety, and sometimes their lives. It is not about feelings; it is about whose humanity counts in decision-making.
Discomfort, by contrast, is what elected officials experience when they are held to account for decisions made in positions of power. It targets upward. Discomfort is the emotional experience of being questioned, criticized, or asked to justify choices that affect others. It can feel unpleasant, unfair, or destabilizing—but it is not harm. It does not remove rights, safety, or dignity. In democratic systems, discomfort is a feature, not a flaw. It is the pressure that keeps power responsive rather than insulated.
The danger arises when officials conflate these two—when they treat their own discomfort as equivalent to the dehumanization of others. When criticism is reframed as “attacks,” when accountability is cast as harassment, or when calls for justice are dismissed as uncivil or excessive, the focus shifts away from those being harmed and toward protecting the emotional comfort of those in charge. That inversion is not neutrality. It is a misuse of power.
And it is precisely the logic Rock Island Line exists to challenge.