Homelessness

  I saw a man today.  He was riding a bike.  It wasn't a motorcycle.  It was a bicycle.  He wasn't an athlete.  He was riding the bike because he had to.  He was a homeless man.  I don't know because he was holding a sign or because he was begging for money.  He was doing neither of those.  I know because he had his whole home, his whole life strapped onto that bike - down to some stuffed animal cow strapped onto the back.
 
  I moved over to the other lane so that he would have room to ride on the side of the highway, and I watched as several other people just drove right on by him, blowing the air into his face and threatening to tip his already top-heavy vehicle onto its side.
 
  It made me sad to see a human being with no four walls around him, no security - just everything he owned piled onto two wheels, heading for who-knows-where.  I thought to myself, "Well, at least he's heading south, so that it will be a little warmer in the wintertime, wherever he ends up."

  Thinking about the homeless didn't really occur to me when I was younger.  I'd see people walking along the highway on occasion or sometimes outside of our small town McDonald's, holding cardboard signs and hoping to catch a ride to anywhere-but-here.  Awareness finally hit when, one day, my dad stopped in front of a ragged looking man who was holding one of those signs with black magic marker scrawled across it, and Dad rolled down the window, leaned out, and handed his sandwich to him.  Other than "thank you," no words were said, and I suppose none needed to be.  At the time, though, I was very naive and couldn't understand what my dad had done.  As we pulled away and headed toward home, I looked at him and said, "Daddy, why did you just give that man your lunch?"  My dad told me that he didn't need it, but that man did.  He also told me that you never knew who people were or what they had been through.  My own sandwich grew cold in my lap as a tiny part of what my father had said made some sense to me.  I felt a bit guilty in my warm bed that night, my belly full and my favorite toys close by to protect me from any monsters lurking about in the darkness, just as my family could keep me safe from the monsters of poverty, starvation, and homelessness.

  Now, as I think back to the words of my father, I stop at his description of homeless people's unknown identities.  This makes me wonder: can anyone be homeless?  What does it mean to be homeless?  How can we define "home" in the first place?  I believe that these are secondary questions to a bigger one.  Why do we tend to ignore the homeless?
 
  Those people who just drove right on by that homeless man on the bike probably thought they could speed on by him quickly, leaving both him, and their guilt, on the side of the road with as little injury to themselves as possible.  Just like people who walk by the homeless begging on the sidewalks of cities or the highway edges of smaller towns harden their faces and direct their eyes elsewhere, maybe even feigning a cell phone call or crossing to the other side of the street, in order to escape the burden of helping their less fortunate peers in this life quickly and painlessly.  The guilt doesn't linger as long if people choose to ignore instead of turn down.  To acknowledge or, especially, to actually help is to admit that 'home' can be taken away - that our security in this life is quite fragile.  The answer to that bigger question then leads to those secondary ones. 

  "Home" means different things to people.  Songs, quotations, cliches, etc. all try to define it.  For me, I think "home" isn't the physical structure, and maybe it's not even "where the heart is," as much as my hopeless romantic self would like to believe that it is.  Maybe "home" is just that feeling of safety and security.  Maybe that means that "home" is much more temporary than we humans would like to believe.  In that case, anyone, at any time, can be homeless, even if it's not as obvious as being forced to live under a bridge or shake a Styrofoam cup.  Frankly, that's quite frightening to me.

  I think that we all have a lot more in common with that homeless man on the bike than we think.  Perhaps that means it's time for people to stop crossing to the other side of the street just to avoid the guilt that comes with turning down a desperate person's plea for some change.  Myself included in this.  I know that the argument that every person can't afford to give money to every homeless one isn't wrong.  I am well aware of the arguments revealing suspicion that not all homeless are, in fact, homeless, and that maybe it would be possible for some homeless to get jobs to support themselves.  I am not denying that all of these arguments exist and that some have validity.  I am simply putting forth the idea that to ignore the homeless is to ignore the fact that we could all be in the same situation.  We could all be homeless.  Maybe offering one tiny shred of security and safety to those homeless individuals could provide a home for them - temporary, but lasting in the reality of showing a little bit of humanity.  Maybe even if it's only in the form of a handful of coins or a lane change.