I stepped on the bus and worked my way through the crowd at the front nearly getting knocked over as I tried to find a single opening to stand when out of nowhere a massive opening emerged and not only was I able to stand but there were several empty seats right in front of me. (This isn’t a normal occurrence during the morning rush hour on the 10-bus to the Financial District.) I paused for a moment, looked around and took a seat. It wasn’t until I settled in that I realized why these seats around me were nearly vacant.
To my left sat a man hidden behind a newspaper. As he lowered the paper in a jerky, almost spastic fashion he revealed his unshaven, unkempt appearance, complete with a slight odor. The spastic nature of his movements continued on as he began to mumble, speaking to himself, laughing, grunting, moving from side to side in a random, twitchy sort of way. This is why no one was sitting down, this is why everyone else chose to stand and be randomly tossed about as the MUNI driver made his sudden stops, starts and bus tipping turns.
As I looked around at the people’s demeanor it was quite obvious that although no one was looking at this man, they certainly felt his presence: clutching their briefcases a little closer, closing their jackets a little tighter and tensing their body a little more. One man stood chuckling to himself as he glanced at the man from time to time. As I sat a mere 12 inches from the man listening to his grunts and mumbles, I held my bag a little closer, tensed my body a little more and looked as straight ahead as possible until my stop came and I quickly exited the bus.
As I walked the few blocks to the coffee shop I would inhabit for the rest of the morning I wondered about my reaction to this man and questioned what love looks like in that situation. Could I have treated him differently, responded to him differently that would have created an in-breaking of the Kingdom?
San Francisco is home to over 15,000 homeless people. It’s not hard to step over them every single day, ignore them as you pass them by and treat them as invisible people. When inundated with such poverty in the midst of such beauty it’s easy to overlook the ugly, the downtrodden, the hopeless and focus our attention on the spectacular and beautiful things of the city. This is a daily situation that takes shape in different forms and yet each day I feel farther and farther away from knowing how to respond. Poverty, homelessness in the urban environment is a systemic problem that requires some sort of revolution in order to change. Until we learn to see the people behind the poverty, change is far away.
How does the Kingdom break into this kind of system and how does an individual affect change one day at a time by learning to see the people behind the poverty?
