Wednesday’s Worries

Today, I don’t feel like giving advice. Today, I just want to go off on things I’m worried about in the world.

Maybe we will make this a recurring post?

I have been seeing an increasing number of homeless folks. Is it that I am paying more attention all the sudden? I don’t think so. I think there are an increasing number of unhoused people. This is deeply concerning to me, because our country is only as good as how we treat the lowest among us. How can we expect to teach our children to treat people with decency when we step over or around folks who are covered in filth and probably haven’t eaten?

And yet…

There is a man in my neighborhood who has been begging for years. He used to see me every day, the same exact way. We’d run in to one another on the same exact corner during our respective commutes, and we had done this for almost a decade. When he’d see me, he’d always begin with the words, “Ma’am, I don’t mean no harm. I don’t mean no disrespect.” And then, he’d give me a reason for why he needed money from me. The first year or so, he stuck to almost the same story about his wife who was ill and he was on the way to pick up her medicine, but didn’t quite have enough. Then, he needed a meal. Then, he had to take a bus out of town and he had the ticket, but didn’t have enough change to take the city bus to the commercial bus station. Please remember, this went on for years. I only ever gave him money the first time he asked me. One time. I gave him one dollar. I wish I could go back and pay him one million dollars to never have the same interaction again almost every day for what would seem like the rest of my life.

I don’t really have a point to this.

I don’t know the man’s name. I usually am in such a hurry, that I don’t even bother to give him a full “I don’t have cash” type of sentence. It bothers me that he still asks me, but that he seems not to recognize me. Though, I don’t ever greet him with recognition.

These days, I actively avoid that corner. I haven’t stepped there in almost 5 years now. But I think of this man every time I leave my house, because I see more and more just like him lining up down the streets. The bridge near the local high school is like a breeding grounds for them, and it gets dangerous at night. Cars get broken into. You sometimes hear gunshots, and you wonder if it is an aggressor or someone trying to protect their home. I don’t live in a bad area. I live in a middle-class neighborhood in a suburb of San Antonio, Texas. I don’t live in what you’d think of as a ‘third-world country’.

I don’t know enough about the economy, or politics, or employment rates or housing rates or anything like that to make any kind of informed statements about this. I can only say that it bothers me, and I don’t know how to help.

I don’t know if I should go back to that corner, and give him a dollar every day. I don’t know if helping one person one time will do anything at all.

I do know that I don’t hear anybody talking about it. I know that it seems like everyone is okay with the world around us changing from our green pastures to barren wasteland. I know that it feels like we need some deep, deep mothering.