I looked a little rough, coming from deep in the Cascade Mountains only an hour before. My boots were caked with mud and I had a three-day growth of beard. My sweatpants were stained to the knee, and I was wearing a shirt I had slept in. A sweat stained cap covered my matted hair. That is to say, I looked like them, this young couple and their son, except that I was on vacation, and they were in the midst of their daily lives, sitting on a corner near the Fred Meyer store.
The couple was about my age, maybe a little younger, and had a boy with them who was perhaps 7 or 8 years old. I had just finished stuffing my face (as only an American can), wolfing down a giant burrito from Taco Del Mar, and contentedly sipping my Diet Pepsi, driving out of the parking lot when I first spotted them.
Almost instantly, I was pissed off. Sure, everyone’s seen street people before, in fact, we seem to be seeing more of them all the time these days, but my emotions suddenly stirred with the appearance of this family, one of thousands that we routinely ignore, as though the mere avoidance of eye contact somehow gets us off the hook.
The father was sitting on the grass in the slim shade of a newly planted elm tree, skinny, dirty, and from the look in his eyes, broken. I thought about how far I’d have to fall before my ability to eat would be reduced to three words scrawled on a cardboard sign, subject to complete reliance on the good will of others or worse, on their pity. Humiliated day in and day out, confessing publicly, and to strangers, that I could no longer care for my wife and child. To endure the repeated stares and the judgment from Americans that condescendingly view poverty as a character flaw, an abject failure. To witness the scores of people passing me every hour that pretend not to see, that deny me even the simplest of acknowledgments. To realize and admit that I have no hope beyond the end of today.
The wife just wants to get by, sitting beside him and forcing a smile. Just wants to make everything all right for today. All right for her son. Wants to restore the husband’s pride, and maybe give them some sense of normalcy, having long ago forgotten what that might even look like. Wants to end the worrying for once. Wants to tell her son where they’re going and how they’ll get there, and that things will be better tomorrow.
And the kid with no chance of getting out of this. The kid who had nothing to do with getting into this. The kid who wonders if all 8 year olds live this way, and then, reluctantly, learns the truth. The kid who, by all rights, is completely and permanently fucked.
So I park my designer car at the Fred Meyer and go inside to buy a couple of bags worth of stuff. Salve for my guilt to be sure, but mostly just so I can be doing something, anything to somehow make up for this.
A few sandwiches. A bag of oranges. Peanuts, chips and iced tea. $15 worth, maybe. That was my feeble gesture. I walked over to their corner, said hello, handed them the bags, and told them there was something for lunch now, and a few things for the road later. She thanked me profusely, but I was so mad I couldn’t even make small talk.
The salve didn’t work. The guilt and anger are still there. It seems I can’t come to grips with a society so steeped in avarice and ignorance that it willingly ignores the most glaring of problems, or with the very idea that anyone could ever go hungry here, in the richest, most well-fed nation on Earth.