At 6:30pm on James Street last week,
with a bellyful of cheap Indian food, I came across a young man
sitting on the pavement with a cardboard sign at his feet. 'Homeless,
please help'.
If you're living in Mumbai, I imagine
that might seem unremarkable -- but I'm living in Perth, Western
Australia. A very spacious modern city that is having, so we're
constantly told, an economic boom. Big companies are digging up bits
of Western Australia and selling it to other big companies that have
factories, mainly in Asia, making Ipads and roofing sheets and
jewellery and mining trucks. Apparently we're rolling in jobs and
money. The place has a severe rash of construction sites building
houses, apartments, shops, offices, hospitals, highway flyovers and
railway underpasses.
And we have more homeless beggars now
than ever before.
Many
of the beggars around here look pretty fucked-up. They have a
jumpy junkie look or a wasted wino look, or they're mooching around
near the betting shop. Or they hang about the train station asking
for money for fares but you just know they're going to spend it on
their habit. Some people give them money anyway, out of pity, but I
prefer not to. It's not that I don't care about them, and I certainly
don't think their problems are their own fault. However I think
giving them cash only supports their addiction to whatever kind of
trouble they're in and doesn't really do them a favour. It isn't
money they need, it's something more basic: love and care.
But the young man sitting on James
Street seemed different. Something about him made me stop and bend
down to look at him. He
had a clear face, clear eyes and a red graze on the
side of his face as if he'd been hit or fallen. As I rummaged for my
purse, I asked him how he was.
'Hungry,' he said.
'Hungry,' I echoed, hoping he might
tell me more.
'Yes, to be honest, hungry.'
'Would you like me to buy you something
to eat?'
'Yeah.'
'What would you like?' (A really stupid
question, in hindsight.)
'Uh...'
There was an awkward moment. Then I
said, 'I don't really have time, anyway -- there's somewhere I have
to be,' which was, more or less, the truth. I gave him what change I had and said,
'Will that help?'
'Yes,' he said. 'Thank you.' He
gathered up his cardboard sign and faded backpack.
'Good luck,' I said, and walked away.
I didn't look back to see where he
went. Along to the kebab shop or the food hall, I hoped. I'd looked
him in the eye and felt he was for real, but maybe I was wrong. Either way I
hoped that if a few people were kind, it would give him the strength
to find his path.
Why am I not a beggar? How come, at
least for the moment, I have what I need? Even if the bankers and
dirty-energy peddlers somehow manage to avoid cooking the ecosystem as well
as the books, my future is pretty uncertain. I really don't know how
my life is going to turn out. Anything could happen. I could
end up on the streets -- but I'm pretty sure I won't.
Why not? Because, luckily, I
have a caring family who, although not perfect, do love me, and
more-or-less accept me as I am (as difficult as that may sometimes
be!). Because, luckily, I'm smart, well-educated and healthy.
And because, from this
fortunate base of love, security and knowledge, I've been able to
reach out to others to make and maintain friendships. Because of all
this luck, I've never gone hungry, never had nowhere to sleep, never
had no-one to turn to. If my family or friends were in need I would
take them in, and I'm pretty sure they'd do the same for me.
I don't think 'homeless' is the right
word. Not having an owned or rented permanent shelter isn't the
point. The real problem is that these unlucky souls are people-less.
They don't have anyone to give them a home.
Maybe they have no family and, even
more sadly, no friends. Or maybe they do have family but living rough
seems a better choice. When I consider why someone would choose to
shun the care and company of others to that extent, I don't think
there's a real difference between that and being forced onto the streets. Maybe their family are abusive or neglectful or can't
accept them as they are because of prejudice. Or maybe their family
believe money is the only measure of value, and whatever it is the person can contribute (which might
not be money) is not acceptable to their family, let alone to those
who own or rent the roofs.
And I guess some homeless people do
have loving family or friends who would give them a home,
but they're too ashamed to ask, or too worried about putting
themselves in the other person's debt. We're brought up to think it
shameful to be anything other than self-reliant, and that to have no
possessions is to have the lowest possible status, to be powerless.
Some people -- often they're young,
vigorous and childless -- choose a form of homelessness, sleeping in
communal squats, dumpster diving, scavenging the stuff suburbanites throw out on
the kerbside, maybe appropriating supplies from the
big corporate stores. Maybe growing vegetables, too. They're trying
to create an alternative community that exists outside the economy
and will survive the possibly imminent collapse of civilisation.
There's part of me that wants to join
them. Living that way could be a lot of fun, and if civilisation does
collapse it might be the only way to survive. But it doesn't feel
right for me, somehow. I want something more stable, more peaceful.
I'd like to live in a collective house, but I'd want it to be warm
and comfortable, not a chilly, decrepit squat -- and, maybe this is
selfish, but Virginia Woolf would back me up -- I'd want some
privacy: if not a room of my own, at least a cubicle in which to
arrange my few personal things and in which to write! And I have two
kids, so any living arrangement would have to meet their needs too.
Anyway, I don't want civilisation to
collapse. I want it to morph into something sustainable that works
for all kinds of people -- parents and children and old people,
people with disabilities and illnesses, people who are good with
their hands and people who are good with their minds. People who can
contribute ideas and services as well as people who can contribute
goods.
I like living in a civilisation. I'm in
favour of technology -- especially communications and medical
technology -- and I'm in favour of change. With change comes the risk
that some things will get worse, and a computer factory is not a
garden (but maybe it could be!), but, let's face it, if not
for technology I would be dead several times over. I wouldn't have
survived childhood, let alone my daughter's breech birth, and even if
I had lived, being a 46-year-old woman I'd most likely be illiterate,
unenfranchised, in continual pain, married to someone I don't like,
and knowing nothing about the world outside a radius of twenty miles
or so.
Technology has created, at least in
industrialised countries, the conditions necessary for the average
person to think, at least some of the time, about the fate of the
whole world instead of just worrying about how to fix their toothache
or get their next meal. Because of communications
technology (from the printing press to YouTube) everyone -- even in
America! -- knows that there are people living in other countries,
and in doorways, whose lives are different to theirs.
But we -- humanity, you, me
-- we've got a plague. We know what it is. The clear-eyed young
man begging on the street in a boomtown is one of its symptoms.
The plague is called greed. But
where does greed come from? Why are we sick with it?
Greed is caused by fear. We're
afraid -- and given our evolutionary and social history we have good
reason to be afraid! -- that our needs for food, security,
affiliation, etc, will not be met. We're afraid that if it came to
the crunch no-one would look after us, because our past has convinced
us there 's no-one who loves us unconditionally.
But unconditional love does exist. As
a mother, daughter and friend, and as an occasional helper of
beggars, I can vouch for it.
I try to put it into everything I write.
I try to put it into everything I write.
Can you feel it? Not in your head, not in your genitals, not in your belly. In your heart. Can you feel it there? A warm thing? A sense of connection, or of wanting connection?
If so, ask yourself, as I'm always asking myself: what am I using it for? What does my heart (not my other bits) tell me I should be doing? Am I doing what I should be doing? When am I doing it, and when am I not?
And when will I stop doing the things that feel wrong, the things I'm doing out of fear rather than love?
