*Living in Moral Poverty

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This comes to us from one of our Contributors. It’s a powerful piece. Please read, enjoy, understand and carry his words with you.

There is more than one way to measure richness and poverty. One way of course is wealth. Money, income, financial security come readily to mind. One step up on a sort of Maslow’s hierarchy, love and relationships are also very tangible to most people. This morning I had a glimpse of another level in this hierarchy: it was a connection with someone I didn’t know, wasn’t like me, would never see again. A guy with a problem or two. A guy who told me he’d been on his “journey” for 3 years. A homeless guy.  He had stopped to look at an art piece of mine. When people do that and if I’m not too busy, I’ll step outside and tell them about it.  Who was this man I wondered?  30s, bearded. lots of layers of clothes, a tattered backpack. A bulge in the coat pocket that could have been 5 pounds of oranges from a neighbor’s tree. No gloves: tough, strong-looking hands. It was about 45 degrees out–unseasonably warm–and I knew the moment I saw him that he’d spent the night somewhere outside. So, even as poor and desperate as his life probably is, he was inspired by my art, and happily warmed his heart a bit listening to how I made it, how it’s all made from scrap materials, etc.

So, as you might expect from an experienced, enterprising homeless guy, he asks me if I could spare any food for him to eat. I’d just toasted–and then forgotten–a bagel, so with a quick re-heating, a liberal spreading of butter and jam, it was almost a breakfast for this guy. Presto. Easy. …Way easy. Damn though, poor guy’s spent the night in the bushes by the freeway onramp… It’s been pretty foggy and cold lately… Can’t just give him a bagel. Ok, while that’s toasting… milk, cocoa powder, sugar, microwave: hot cocoa. Way easy. Feels good. Oh, there’s that bowl of the kinda funky walnuts from our tree… into a bag. I apologize for the fact that some of them are going to have a little mold–he deserves his dignity, but hell, *I’ve* been dodging the moldy ones and the rest of them are great. Still, it’s the dregs. I mean, it’s also organic butter, whole wheat bagels, home-made jam from our own tree, organic milk, walnuts I harvested myself, but this is all meaningless nonsense to a man who’s just spent the night in a moldy sleeping bag in the bushes by the freeway. It took all of 3 minutes.

Why is this man homeless? Alcoholism, drugs? Mental illness? No job skills? Fell through the cracks in school? Can’t come up with first and last month’s rent + security deposit? No phone or address or shower for job application? I recall reading about one homeless guy that simply had a really bad back.

Why can’t we–as a society–take care of people with problems like these? What kind of barbarians are we that we can’t provide the most basic universal health care, can’t adequately fund social services, drug re-hab, job training, public education? A lot of these things pay back many times over, but no, don’t take any of my money for your “Obamacare”, or “socialized medicine”*, or “welfare moms.” Don’t give poor people basic health care–instead, wait till they show up in the emergency room needing dialysis or an amputation or are dying of pneumonia. That doesn’t even save money.

But it’s not simply about money is it? It felt really good to give that guy a meal, to treat him as an equal–equal in human dignity anyway. To brighten his day. To warm his soul with hot cocoa on a foggy, homeless, moldy sleeping bag morning. It made me richer, made me feel good, made me feel worthy. When we abandon someone, when we abandon a whole class of people, when forget them by rationalizing about their conditions, when we do this as a society, we live in a pitiful moral poverty. My personal feeling is that we live in fear and hoplessness and squalor when we only look after ourselves, when we can only stand back and make selfish excuses when we could so easily spread our material wealth. I pity the person with the trophy house, the gas-guzzling luxury car, the $100 bottle of wine, the 5 acres of tax write-off “farm” land. Gonna keep it all to yourself ’cause you “earned” it? Well, you’re as poor as the guy I gave the funky walnuts to this morning. That bearded man with strong hands felt like my brother for a few minutes this morning and I felt a little richer after feeding him.