The old, the diseased, the impovrished masses - they line your gutters and fill your asylums. With minds as lost as their futures, the forgotten pass by like subtly flickering wraiths. Barely seen, barely noticed and no more noteworthy than the trash littering the streets.
Just as filthy.
Just as discarded.
Yet in their shattered psyches, secrets are held. A meaning, an answer, a cure. And in their shopping carts to the brim with aluminum cans and old newspapers, treasures are stored. A holy grail here, a lost Shakespearian manuscript there.
And we pass them by. Not because they are beneath us. Because they are above. They hold the key and it terrifies that mortal child inside. Better to live in darkness, better to name them dirt, than to know the truth.
Because once you know, there is no going back.
Hurry past. Toss a few coins, even a dollar or two into that rattling tin cup, and stay blissfully unaware.
Is one of my favorite topics. We live in a society that is basically built to anticipate and ignore the millions of homeless. There is a dehumanizing effect here that is wholly repugnant. Granted, it's tough for any one person to do something about it, but awareness is a first step. You have to acknowledge their presence before you can help them and I applaud any work that gets us that far.
It is much easier to ignore the things that bother us than to confront them and, in the end, realize that we aren't as powerful as we've led ourselves to believe. If anything, we are stuck somewhere between responsible party and hapless bystander. So it's more comforting to the average person to hum a little tune and walk away.
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“I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”
Winston Churchill
And if they actually force someone to look at them and take notice, they're relegated to the status of "animals" (thanks to the "healthy" status quo and so-called mental health "professionals," who can really do their darnedest to attempt to break a person's spirit when they have been labelled "abnormal," to keep the mental health racket going). I've never considered it "professional" to look down on others with disabilities as "less than human." All those mental health "professionals" who don't have hands-on experience with the homeless mentally ill (including the doctors themselves) should spend a day out in the field with the homeless and gain some understanding and compassion. I might consider them true professionals then.
If the majority of the world saw the grass as purple and the sky as green, it would be you and I labeled insane. We would be abnormal by consensus and that, at least in civilized society, is wrong.
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“I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”
Winston Churchill
To lighten it up a bit, maybe most people would just be considered color-blind!
