A Worthy Conversation

It happened again on Sunday, as I was driving to my local grocery to pick up items for a Labor Day cookout, my mind was pulled into a complex personal debate that I have never been able to reconcile. The final approach to the store is a long, flat road, that gives visibility to more than a mile ahead. About halfway up the road I noticed an electric wheelchair heading in the same direction as me; not on the sidewalk but driving on the road like any other car. Getting closer to the wheelchair only served to heighten my sadness; the driver was slumped over and looked more dead than alive. As I slowly passed the man, I said to myself, ‘this is the greatest, wealthiest country in the world and we can’t/won’t take care of our own.’

Like most people, I had that caring thought and then proceeded to go about my chore of picking groceries. Fifteen minutes later, at the checkout line, I noticed the very same man at the register paying for the single item he had gathered; a pack of cigarettes.

Suddenly, and without meaning to, my sympathy faded a bit. With all the problems he clearly had how could he be buying cigarettes? The very natural trait of being a human kicked in and I began to think about his behavior and not his situation.

And therein lies the dilemma. I hope you will allow yourself a moment to consider what I am talking about. I know it isn’t easy and it damn sure isn’t fun to challenge how we feel about unpleasant realities (my apologies for being a downer on this wonderful first Tuesday of September), but I think it is worthy. Considering what we are to do with the less fortunate, has, and will likely be fraught with emotions and opinions. It can quickly become a discussion of money and ideology about economic systems. I hope you will step away from that tendency and look at the topic from another angle; do we have a moral obligation as people and a nation to care for all our citizens?

The example I referenced above is the perfect illustration of the deepest embedded problem; the readiness to judge others and assume they are always to blame for their misfortune. As a young person, I was guilty of this; ready to make a complex problem easy to categorize, so I could proceed without any concern for what the person was going through and whether I had any responsibility to care. As I have gotten older my tendency to judge has faded and I now understand, but for a few good breaks, many of us could be in a similar situation.

This new perspective has come from life and the observation that you can make all the “right decisions,” and still have real problems, or can do the opposite, and be a poster child for bad choices and still have things turn out well. Said differently, life is more random than we want to accept. I get it is scary to think we don’t have as much control as we like to assume, and so, we avoid the negative and pat ourselves on the back for all the things we did to get where we are.

Yes, the man bought cigarettes, and they are bad for him. What do we expect, he went to the store to get bananas and peaches to maintain his weight? None of us are without traits or actions that viewed in a different light would be harshly judged. We are human, we make mistakes, and we do dumb things; always have and always will. I have a lifetime of things that I was lucky, didn’t derail me. Too many times, in my younger days I drove under the influence of alcohol. By the grace of God, I didn’t hurt anyone. It wasn’t because I was a talented impaired driver, no, I was lucky and had I not been lucky, my life would have been different. If we are honest with ourselves, we have all done things that aren’t impressive.

Why do we then so easily judge someone who is down on their luck? I have shared this story before, but it is worth mentioning here. I remember a time when I gave a homeless man five dollars. The person with me chastised me for doing it, saying, “He is just going to buy alcohol.”

My response was then and is today, “Who cares, we are friends. Can I not buy a friend a drink.”

Why was it my place to judge what the recipient to my five dollars was going to do? If I handed my neighbor five dollars, I wouldn’t do it on the condition that I knew how he was going to spend it.

I think this discussion shouldn’t be about how someone found themselves in their situation and more about what our moral, ethical, responsibility as people and a country should be. That is much harder and uncomfortable, but more appropriate. If we come at it from the perspective that we all have opportunities, and made sacrifices, blah, blah, blah, blah, we avoid tough task of accepting the truth. We are the richest nation in the world and too many of our citizens are in deep trouble.

Homelessness is bad and increasing and it isn’t just in big, liberal cities; it is everywhere. If you do a search for the leading causes of homelessness you will find that homelessness in America is due primarily to the lack of affordable housing, economic instability (including poverty and unemployment), lack of access to healthcare, mental health and substance abuse issues, and domestic violence. Nowhere is laziness cited as a reason for homelessness. And yet, too many Americans harbor the view that homeless people are there because they aren’t doing what they should or have chosen this existence.

Most people go through life without ever interacting with homeless people and yet seem to be certain of who they are. I was in this category until I moved to downtown Knoxville. You can’t live downtown and not interact with the homeless; they are a part of the scene. At first, I was very apprehensive to talk with them, but curiosity got the best of me, and I began to speak to them regularly; to even hear their stories. Now don’t get me wrong, some of the people I met are not good people and are to be avoided, but the overwhelming majority didn’t fall into that category. The large majority were suffering from mental illness. They struggled to process the world around them and needed help.

I wasn’t qualified to help nor offer counsel to these individuals, but it was eye opening. People I would have previously avoided and cast aside were in front of me and they clearly needed help. Help I couldn’t/didn’t offer and our government, and its citizens, is unwilling to provide.

Sadly, it doesn’t stop there. In this country, poverty is rampant. Roughly eleven percent of the population fall in that group; that is over thirty-six million people. Again, we can point fingers and blame them for their choices and to some degree it is true. Choices do matter, but bad choices compound in a society that punishes failure. When we conclude bad choices are the cause of the situation, it becomes easy for many people to immediately obfuscate responsibility and ignore the plight of those in need. Somehow, we convince ourselves that because we made good choices and they made bad ones, we don’t have to worry about them and frankly, it is their problem.

But is that true? Is that what we believe; people need to lie in the bed they make? I know many people who are right now pushing back hard on this and saying they don’t believe what I am saying is true nor reflects their attitude and how dare I even imply it. I am not pointing a finger at any specific person; I am asking a question for all of us. Again, is it okay for us as a country to have so many people fall through the cracks?

I honestly don’t know how to draw a firm conclusion on this topic. I accept the imperfect nature of the discussion, I know that to help others we must be willing to make tough personal sacrifices and the likelihood of that is slim. However, I can’t help but feel like we should at least be honest about it. This nation, which has so many people espousing their strong faith in a higher being, doesn’t act very Christian. In fact, capitalism seems to be a bigger driver than the teachings of Christ. If that offends you, I am sorry. I am not trying to be offensive; I am hoping that in the privacy of your own mind you will consider the complexity of this topic and allow yourself to consider what it means to you.

I could be wrong, and I am in no way an expert on religious teachings, but I somehow feel a disconnect every time I see the downtrodden get walked past so someone (who never hesitates to express their strong faith) can make it to their important event.

In many respects this column reflects my sadness and uncertainty in how we have evolved as a nation. We have become so trained in our mindset of exceptionalism that we seem to have forgotten to acknowledge that we don’t care for many of our own. I have a hard time squaring that circle. And yet, it is who we are.

I recall not too long ago standing in Kolkata, India, in the building where Mother Teresa worked and is buried. It was an overwhelming experience. The poverty in that city and the struggles that society faces are hard to describe. To be sure, poverty in India is more extreme and desperate than the US and so a comparison of the two is unproductive. However, as I quietly stood outside the room where she died, I wondered about all the people I pass by back home and all the people in our country that we ignore.

Which brings me back to original point. What is our obligation? Do we even think we have one? The resources exist in this country to uplift the almost one million homeless people and the over thirty-six million people in poverty; but do we care?

I have concluded there isn’t much I can do to change what is happening. I can do two things: I can ensure that I am compassionate and helpful to all I touch and who need it, and I can accept the truth; this nation talks a good game, but we don’t show up.

You might not think this a worthy conversation, and that is fine. What I would ask is next time you see someone who is struggling, don’t immediately judge them and conclude they are to be dismissed because of something you see or their behavior, allow yourself a humble moment to acknowledge, but for the grace of God, you could switch places with them.