Summary: The sound of helplessness in a city. AKA, the Homeless. | Word Count: 981
The sound of scraping metal against concrete rattles my nerves every time I hear it.
These days, walking along the streets, it is often. Today it is underneath the bridge that I pass by on the way to work. The sound stabs at my ears and conjures up thoughts of all the bad things that happen in life that are out of my control.
I walk with a haunting feeling building in my heart.
This sound was far more irritating than shrill nails to a chalkboard because it was not only the sound, but the consequence from which the sound meant.
As I go under the shadow of the bridge, I see a growing pile of garbage: empty suitcases, paper bags, plastic bottles, blankets, and clothes all thrown about without care. They were tattered and dirt-soaked in the mud laying next to an assortment of knick-knacks. The city workers wore uniformed reflective vests, work boots, and a hard hat. They were working men only doing their jobs. One of them was swinging his shovel at the top of a concrete hill knocking trash from underneath the bridge. The steel beams once gave shelter to those with nowhere to belong.
It is an expected outcome.
Why should people loiter on property of the city?
They had no right to live, breathe, eat, and shit there all day long.
That societal reason is justified that they should not be living there. However, it is and will always be a bitter consideration that this was not a good deed. There was no apparent alternative and that is why it happened as so. The person was displaced or forcibly removed and their stuff was discarded. We all sacrifice our time to someone else to pay back into society, but that first requires us to have some payment to put forward.
It is a rubbish idea in which a collective of humans tries to clean itself up without any idea of how an individual – a fallible human – psychologically works and without regard to the needs of the mind, the health of the body, and the opportunity to achieve a better outcome. People can not fathom being so desperate as to beg for help on the side of the road, holding a makeshift sign. The adherence to honor and self-sufficiency creates an invisible wall to their empathetic vision.
From the other side, I pass the bridge in a sorrowful reverie about those who have lost it all. I must continue to my workplace, motivated by the same reasons as everyone bound by the restrictions of a job that pays little and is worked too hard; it’s better than being homeless.
Later on, I saw the signs of the move. There were people ragged and dirty, pulling carts and pushing buggies taking all they had in life to a new temporary location. With no surprise, they moved to a public park that I also pass on the way to work.
Where else were they expected to go when there was no place for them to go?
Like a game of tag, it would happen again – over and over – forced to move after sticking around for too long. Unsettled to another spot in the city where the squatting would resume to no end.
No one wanted them.
No one believed in them.
When you have no backer to vouch for you in society you are truly alone.
Under a sweltering, blistering sun, frigid wind-breaking nights, and in the middle of desolate rainy days, they will hardly find permanent comfort as the sun rises and sets. They will bounce from place to place and all around the city with no relief, finding no ultimate help other than a free meal from a local charity, small change from drivers, and small gifts made in a sincere gesture.
I shook my head as it appalled me that people who have the power to change this think they are lazy.
They are broken-spirited.
How can one get a job without a home; how can one get a home without a job? Few will hire the homeless, none will rent to the homeless and there is no free insurance to cure maladies that make being homeless an indefinite status. Terrible luck, bad choices, overwhelming problems – all of these play a part in their misfortune, yet somehow those who have no one to turn to, a relative or a friend, dooms a person to a slow death under the world’s unfair sky?
There is never a silver bullet to re-establishing a torn-down life; there is no one simple answer. It is a complex web of interwoven solutions that requires public support for long-term care: how do you create a method that can nurture the will of others to accept a new path?
The answers in this country are apparently too hard to think about, let alone all agree to and reasonably implement, which is such a shame because society itself causes its own problems. It was not like I was offering up an iota of a plan, worse than that I had not even gotten onto a soap box yet. I left the dirty work of grassroots efforts to others who converse with the ones who need help. Those that petition for change will bring about that change, along with the assistance of those willing to risk money, time, and reputation for concrete measures that objectively work.
I don’t have that type of clout, although I do have a nagging sense of justice, which is why I think about this at all.
I walk all the way to work and leave the noises of the city behind as I enter the door of the building, but I still hear that sound of scraping in my mind; it reminds me that this is America, the great country of the free, the wealthy, and the paradoxically trapped.
Off Beat Off Kilter 