It’s getting colder in the Midwest. Even if I couldn’t feel the chill or watch the leaves fall from the beautiful trees, I would know. Sometimes when I cannot sleep, I wander down to the riverfront where our riverboat offers 24 hr. "fun" for insomniacs like me. As I pull up to park my headlights shine across the park and through the picnic shelter. In warmer weather the indistinct but obvious mounds of sleeping homeless people are illuminated briefly. I quickly and self-consciously cut my lights. I feel like I am intruding on the privacy that the night provides the souls who slumber there. Despite the fact that, like so many others, I am literally one paycheck away from serious trouble myself, I feel guilty for having $20 to spend in fruitless pursuit of the jackpot that is statistically impossible.
As I walk the short distance to the light and shelter of the casino I wonder about the circumstances that brought those people to the point that they are homeless. I think about what their lives must be like carrying everything they own on their backs, in grocery carts, or plastic crates bungeed to the back of decrepit bicycles. I have seen them individually about town during the day, collecting cans or washing clothes in a drinking fountain and hanging them in young trees, but at night they congregate together. I remember what my mother always said about safety in numbers and I’m glad to know there is a place for them to go at night to network and to watch over each other. For all the nighttime traffic in the area, I have rarely been approached by them except on occasion to ask for a smoke. I always speak when we cross paths – it’s what my mom and the nuns told us was the respectful thing to do. Sometimes they are surprised but mostly they just respond like anyone would when greeted in passing.
Now, though, winter is approaching again and their numbers have thinned. This morning there were only a couple of lumps on the picnic tables. On my way back to the car I saw one hooded shadow moving toward the shelter from the public restrooms and I wondered yet again, "Where do they go in the winter?" There are shelters here but there is never enough room. I can’t imagine what they must be like and I am sure that these relatively free spirits wouldn’t feel as comfortable there as in the park, but there is a time when surviving outdoors here is not possible. My church collects paper products for the poor and homeless each month. Other churches collect other things and they are all distributed from a church that is located where the homeless can get what they need. Sometimes there are fund drives for specific needs but it bothers me that in this country, in my midwestern town, people take the homeless for granted. How long has it taken for us to believe that the homeless are just another fact of life here? Why would we accept this as normal? Why can’t the programs that are supposed to help these folks not designed or funded to meet their needs? And where do they go in the winter?
Some less than helpful links for homeless information:
Annual Homeless Assessment to Congress
National Coalition for the Homeless
National Alliance to End Homelessness