A homeless man charges across Broadway against the light, causing cars to squeal to a stop and horns to stutter. The drivers see him, I think uncharitably, at least well enough not to hit him, well enough not to incur the sort of aggravation that comes with running down a human being with your car. He makes it to the other side without incident, though someone leans out of a window and yells at him. He doesn't look back.
Why yell at a homeless man? Karen, who is driving, asks rhetorically. What good does it do?
I think what she means is that he is, for whatever reason, separated from our society and as unbound by our rules as a squirrel or panicked deer or any other feral creature. To scream at him is self-aggrandizing, just a way of advertising our indignation. She's right and I understand this--I have yelled at people and other animals in my time, sometimes for offenses less onerous than jaywalking, and there was nothing kind or potentially instructive about it.
I have no idea why the man plunged into the street; maybe he was not in his right head, maybe he had misjudged the speed of the traffic, maybe he arrogantly assumed that the death machines would stop for him. (They usually do.) It's probably a stretch to think that he didn't care whether or not they hit him; deliberately stepping in front of a moving vehicle is an uncommon (though not unheard of) and potentially painful way to commit suicide. Still, recklessness may be inversely tied to self-esteem. Maybe some people think nothing of throwing themselves away.
It is the time of year to think about these mysteries; why do so many of us seem so desperate? We live in a rich country and a great many of us have more than enough. We also have the highest rate of poverty and wealth inequality in the industrialized world. We accept as normal the idea that some portion of our population will live on the streets, under our underpasses and in our parks.
And they are not invisible, some of them even become characters in our folklore. When I mention "Hillcrest Jesus," the "white-haired bum" and "dirty walking man," some of you know precisely the individuals I mean. Some of you know their real names and part of their backstories. That poor man was a schizophrenic, we might think, his family did everything they could to keep him housed and on his medication, but he just wouldn't have it.
We might understand, in some small way, the reasons that some people slide off the grid and fall all the way to the bottom. Maybe we know all about issues of addiction, and how, despite the rhetoric of those who seek to punish the poor, relatively meager our social welfare programs are. Our social safety net is loose and full of holes. We allocate a smaller portion of our GDP to social welfare programs than virtually any other industrialized country.
It's as though we want to believe that character is somehow determinative of fortune. That being poor is a moral failing.
One of the reasons a lot of us tend to blame the poor for their predicament is that we believe we somehow escaped the fate that befell them. That we might have, had we not been so able and clever, found ourselves subsisting in hotel rooms rented by the week, eating convenience-store burritos, working hard for very little money and always being tired. A lot of us think we know what it is like to be poor. Some of us think we were poor for a while.
Maybe we lived on a tight budget when we were in college or grad school, maybe we kited a few checks when we were young and stupid. Maybe we lived for a time on ramen and generic beer. That's not being poor. That's what a lot of us do while we're deferring adulthood, while we acquire whatever credentials are required before being pinned into society. Maybe we look back on those days with something like nostalgia.
I could tell you that I lived poor for a while, that I remember how in law school my friends and I counted out pennies to buy groceries, that I remember weekends when I'd have no money at all to spend. But the truth is, I always knew there was a check on the way and a number I could call if things got too shaky.
When I went off to college, I was determined not to take any money from my parents and didn't: I had a scholarship and a job and a car I'd paid for. While I thought of myself as self-sufficient, I still brought my laundry home every few weeks. I'd eat my parents' food, and stay in their house. I always had someplace I could go, someplace with a pantry and electricity.
I always had plenty of reason to hope.
When I was in college then was working my first couple of jobs, I knew plenty of people who messed up their lives with bad decisions. Most of them came out of it all right. Maybe they ended up in rehab, maybe they had to reboot their lives elsewhere, but because their families had a good foothold in the middle class they were saved. They fell, but the belay line caught, limiting the damage.
Sure, there were tragedies (there are people compelled to gleefully slice through whatever lifeline they've been thrown) but many of the unholy drunks and dope fiends I knew in college are judges and financial analysts now. They've got families, they live in big houses and their kids are applying to Ivies.
They probably all imagine that they're overcomers. Maybe they've got a right to be proud.
All I know is that not everybody has had the advantages we've had, and it might behoove us to remember that before we congratulate ourselves too much. Too many of us accept the social Darwinist precept that if you stripped away all the wealth from the rich and gave it to the poor it might take six months or a year or two, but eventually everything would be returned to equilibrium.
I don't know about that.
I have a limited ability to empathize, but I can imagine throwing off my cloak of invisibility and darting across traffic, daring the world to be as done with me as I am with all hope proffered and false.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.