On Moral Injury in Rock Island

Moral injury is the harm that occurs when a person is forced to witness, participate in, or live alongside actions that violate their deepest moral beliefs — especially when those actions are carried out by systems that are supposed to protect people. It is not burnout. It is not compassion fatigue. It is the wound that forms when systems fail to take responsibility for foreseeable harm, leaving individuals to witness outcomes they have no realistic power to prevent.

The gift of spending time with homeless individuals is seeing their humanity — experiencing connection despite a vast sea of difference, and holding shared hope for a better future. Witnessing humor, kindness, community, grief, joy, and heartache turns that vast sea into a river, and compassion blossoms.

The tragedy of spending time with homeless individuals is saying goodbye to someone you care for who is asking for your help — and knowing they will not be safe until you meet again.

I received a call from Darren at 10:31 p.m. last night. He told me his belongings had been taken and that he was scared about making it through the night because he didn’t have so much as a blanket. I’m not sure he would have called if he hadn’t also lost all the gear he’d collected to keep his dog, Little Rat, warm.

When I got the call, my stomach churned. I was warm and cozy on the couch, moments away from announcing that I was going to bed, looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

“So, some of those guys I know are downtown and don’t have any gear to get through the night,” I said to my husband. “I think I’m going to go check it out and probably offer a hotel stay for tonight.”

“What?” he replied. “It’s almost 11.”

“I know,” I said, “but they don’t have any items to help them get through the night.”

“How many more times are you going to do this?” he asked. I could hear the concern in his voice. He didn’t think this was a good idea.

“I’ll be really fast,” I said. “It’s just tonight. Their camp was cleared. It’s sort of a special-case situation.”

“Well, where are you going?” he asked.

“Just to Project NOW,” I said, grabbing my coat and hat, looking for my wallet and keys. “I know all these guys.”

“Where people have been stabbed this week?” he asked. “Ani, this doesn’t seem safe. And didn’t you also know the person who did the stabbing? I’m concerned that you aren’t more concerned.”

I understand his caution. He hasn't spent time with any of these people and may imagine them differently than I experience them. And I may experience them more hopefully and optimistically than the average bear.

And so he came with me. Because it was very late and dark, and he didn’t want me to go — but even more than that, he didn’t want me to go alone.

As we drove downtown in the cold, he expressed his frustration with my life choices.

“I know you,” he said. “You could do this for the rest of your life. Wherever you go, there will be people in desperate situations. It will never end. You could spend all your time and money, put yourself in danger, and you’ll probably help a lot of people — but it will never end.”

A part of me knows he’s right. And a part of me feels compelled to act.

If you see a person about to be hit by a bus, do you push them out of the way? If you see a child drowning in a river, do you jump in? If someone is choking or having a heart attack in front of you, do you render aid?

Yes.

In fact, I’ve actually performed the Heimlich maneuver before — while a dozen other people stood by, frozen.

But what if the danger isn’t a single moment? What if it’s ever-present, unfolding in a billion small places across the world — famine, war, displacement, injustice without end? We’re told to narrow our focus. Focus locally.

That should feel simpler.

Care about your city and find thousands of people living in crisis an arm's length away. At least when they are across an ocean or on another continent, you haven't looked into their eyes and learned their pet's name or their favorite color or that you liked the same music in the 90's.

Imagine this: People are passing out on every corner. The first person you see, you offer aid. And the second. And the third. But the problem is increasing and services are decreasing so the phenomenon of people dropping on the sidewalks is skyrocketing. What if you start performing CPR — and then that becomes your life? You look around and start to wonder: am I the right person to be doing this?

I see this pattern in my work as a therapist. When parents fail to fulfill their role, a child often becomes parentified — overfunctioning to hold together a system that isn’t working. Not because they want to, but because allowing harm feels impossible.

Moral injury forms when that overfunctioning is blocked, or when the responsibility grows so large that the child is left standing in a tsunami of trauma with nothing but an umbrella — forced to witness what they cannot prevent.

Larger systems have abdicated their responsibility, and in doing so, they have quietly pulled ordinary citizens into unsafe, unqualified, impossible roles.

By writing ordinances that make emergency shelter effectively impossible, the city has created a vacuum. And into that vacuum step neighbors, volunteers, faith leaders, healthcare workers, and anyone with a conscience — sometimes late at night, often without training, protection, or support. The City creates an untenable circumstance not only for the unhoused, but for the compassionate.

By suggesting that churches could simply absorb this work — without funding, staffing, liability coverage, or clinical infrastructure — the city has asked well-meaning people to perform professional-level crisis intervention with none of the systems that make that work safe.

And by simultaneously hamstringing the professionals and organizations that are capable of doing this work — through policy, funding decisions, and regulatory barriers — the system ensures that help becomes informal, fragmented, and dangerous.

This is how moral injury spreads. Not because people care too much — but because caring becomes the only remaining response when systems choose neglect over protection.

In a town known for its heart, the irony is sharp: we have made compassion dangerous, and then relied on it anyway.

As we got closer to Project NOW, I saw Tom (using a pseudonym) sitting on a bench, staring into space. He had a coat and a sleeping bag.

“Oh,” I said to my husband. “We may need to get him too. He's either 67 or 72. I can't remember.”

Tom (pseudonym) sitting in the same place with the same gear the next day

My husband introduced himself to my street friends outside the new entrance to downtown Rock Island. They agreed to meet us at the Holiday Inn. We circled back to Tom's bench.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“I was sleeping at the hospital,” he said. “But they don’t let us do that no more. They trespassed us.”

A new development.

“The police told me to go to Davenport,” he said. “So I took the bus. But there’s nothing over there, and I don’t know anyone. So I came back here. I’m scared. At least some people here might know me.”

He told me homeless people had been hurt. That it wasn’t safe to fall asleep.

“Well,” I said, “why don’t you come with me.”

I got three rooms at the Holiday Inn. I paid the pet fee for Little Rat.

Tom said he couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a shower. He told me his dog — who has passed away and whom he talks about constantly — would be happy knowing his dad wasn’t going to die tonight.

"I don't think you can keep doing this," my husband repeated on the mostly quiet drive home. I know he's right. Not just a part of me. All of me.

"It's just so awful," I whimper.

The next morning, I reached out to a friend who does this work and asked for support. I asked how to sustain myself. What to do. I told her I want to write and tell stories — but my days are filled with thinking about land trusts, renovating buildings, buying plots of land, a yurt I found on Amazon, the liability of putting people in hotels, and checking the overnight forecast.

She talked about boundaries. About offering a set number of hours each week. About giving money to solutions instead of responding in emergencies. About learning to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

The police department sees the reality and still has to take blankets and the hospital can’t sustain acting as an ad-hoc shelter and has to trespass people, and people can’t stay on private property or public property — and you know there is nowhere left for them to be —

And I will say No as they walk into the void of the night.

That is moral injury.

It is happening to neighbors, healthcare workers, first responders, faith leaders, and community members who keep showing up in the gaps or feel their insides twisted in powerlessness.

This is what it feels like when a city chooses rules over oxygen, enforcement over care — and then quietly relies on its citizens to keep performing CPR on a system that refuses to stop the bleeding.

In attachment theory, there is a foundational idea: a parent who is bigger, stronger, kinder, and wiser creates safety. That safety regulates a child’s nervous system enough for growth to occur. When a child trusts that someone competent is holding the environment, they are free to explore, to learn, to create, to develop a sense of purpose.

Good leadership feels the same way. It feels like relaxing into the knowledge that things are being taken care of — not because you are passive, but because the container is solid. When the basics are handled, people can pursue creativity, connection, contribution, and growth.

When things are not taken care of, the opposite emerges. Anxiety spreads. People overfunction or underfunction. Division deepens. Callousness and self-centeredness increase. Not because people are worse — but because nervous systems under threat don’t organize around generosity or long-term thinking.

Good systems prevent moral injury when they are bigger, stronger, kinder, and wiser. That does not mean they do all the work. It means they set the container — the structure in which care, responsibility, and effort can be shared safely and competently.

When systems fail to do this, they don’t just create hardship for those most vulnerable. They destabilize everyone downstream — pulling individuals into roles they are not meant to hold, and leaving them to witness harm they cannot reasonably prevent.

That is how moral injury takes root — not from caring too much, but from living inside a system that refuses to hold what it was uniquely built to carry.

Here's a video of me talking to Darren after he checked out of the Holiday Inn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DjzmmyoS2g