Imagine a four-year-old girl homeless
clutching the hem of her mother’s jeans
trampling her morning shadow into the street,
her mother wide-eyed, hysterical, smoldering in the heat.
This world is violent, terrifying, faceless and mad.
There is glass scattered in the pavement scars,
one hundred tiny suns squinting back empty
There are remnants of a living room in an alley,
sofas gutted, wood bodies with splintering spines
There is an abandoned apartment half-collapsed,
hallways choked black by ashy arsonist hands
And along the gutter, there is a loose
cinder-block wall dressed in dirty lost clothes
and the slur-blurry graffiti of angry youth.
This is no home for a mother and child.
…
And what does a child endure in the reality
of such absence, such loss, such vulnerability?
Does it define her, diminish her?
Does it hold her imagination captive?
Have her words and dreams begun to grow
the dry sightless thorns of fear and mistrust?
Have the trees turned to lifeless jagged twisting wire
shadeless and shedding rust in stead of leaves?
Do the mountains shrug their shoulders,
hunch their backs and grumble in their sleep?
Has the endless wishing blue Arizona sky
become just another drained, indifferent face?
In these moments of crisis, she simply
continues to tug on her mother’s jeans,
following the lead of their shadows
and whispering hope to the heavy sun.
“Somebody will help us. Somebody’s got to help us.”
.
It is an outrage that even one child in the United States will sleep without a roof over his or her head tonight. In fact, about 1.5 million children will experience homelessness this year, according to a report from the National Center on Family Homelessness. (Click here for the organization’s stat sheet). According to the report, the United States has the largest number of homeless women and children among industrialized nations. This must change and this vulnerable population should not be so easily forgotten.
Poverty in the United States is much more nuanced than we might initially realize. Not all the homeless are stereotypical “lazy bums” (1/3 of the total homeless population are families)– they can be mothers fleeing domestic violence, fathers working through painful divorce, a single parent struggling with mental illness (and no access to healthcare), families living paycheck-to-paycheck who experience sudden job loss or health issues. They are normal people dealing with various crises–many which our closest family or friends have dealt with too.
No matter how a person becomes homeless, each individual should be treated with dignity and respect. What I advocate is not a naive view of respect that ignores a person’s sins and struggles, but a respect that allows for deeper understanding and awareness by realizing our common joys and struggles. In this, we can begin to see the ways in which our humanity is intertwined and thus work together for the solution to homelessness in our communities.
So I urge you to educate yourself on what resources are available in your community for food, shelter, and counseling. Maybe you can choose to volunteer at an organization serving the poor and walking alongside the homeless. At the very least, I encourage you to consider the homeless, pray for healing and stability, and spread the word about the reality of homelessness in the United States.
Peace,
glenn
