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April 02, 2005
Bums in San Francisco
To me the most difficult process of human existence is the treatment we afford one another. It tells a lot about ourselves that so many people can pass a dying person on the street without so much as a notice. I arrived in San Francisco mid-evening on a cold mid-December day. A bus took me and other passengers from the airport to various destinations in the city. What struck me more than anything was that amidst the flashing neon signs were so many homeless people wandering along with vacant eyes. They were everywhere and came from all walks of life. Of course, so very few people decide that when they grow up they want to beg change from passersby, set up a box in front of City Hall or a bank and crawl inside to keep out of the wind. The homeless leered from closed store fronts, out from under tattered scarves wrapped around their heads, out of the stairwells to the BART. I arrived at the hostel, slipping away from the driver before he could turn toward me in expectation of his undeserved tip(he berated a fellow passenger and humiliated him in front of the rest of us). I walked past several homeless bundled in doorways in the one block to the hostel with its gaudy green sign glaring amidst the sea of flashing signs of the strip clubs.
In the morning I went back to the hostel office to get a bagel and a cup of coffee and the young woman asked me how I liked San Francisco. So I told her that it looked better during the day. "Oh, what do you mean?" she asked in a somewhat condescending way. "Well, back home we don't have so many bums on the street," I said. "Oh," she said, affecting a superior attitude, "it must be nice to live somewhere where there aren't any homeless people." "We have homeless, we just provide them with a place to stay," I said. She wasn't happy with that exchange so she asked me where I lived and I told her Michigan. "Well, she said, "we don't regard the homeless with fear here. They are just a part of the City." So I gave her what she wanted, condension. "There is a lot of fear everywhere. Maybe that's what keeps me from having fun. I'm going to go out and have a good day," I said, with all the enthusiasm I could muster for the performance. And she urged me on with all of her enthusiasm. But it was all I could do to keep the tears back as newspaper scraps whisked past me when I opened the door to the street, and the heavy energy of sorrow dropped from my solar plexus into the pit of my stomach.
