Last Saturday a friend and I had a lovely breakfast at a very cute French café on the south side of Berkeley. Amid the provincial décor and pleasant service my friend and I dined on brioche with honey and a touch of lavender, served with berry jam, butter, coffee, breakfast potatoes and roasted tomatoes. Needless to say I was pleasantly stuffed. Yet I still needed two to-go boxes for my leftovers. I had a very nice time.
I live on the north side of Berkeley. So, I was looking forward to walking off my meal. In order to get home from the café I walk along Shattuck, a street that is populated by restaurants, banks, little shops, and B.A.R.T. stations. It is also sports one of the most depressing homeless populations I have ever encountered.
The large and ever present homeless population around The Bay area has been a huge thing for me to “adjust to.” In LA my understanding is that the police, for the most part, keep the homeless population out of the “nice streets.” In Berkeley this is not the case. Most of the time it is hard to walk down the street without being asked for change. I have lived here for only about a month and a half, and I think that I might have internalized the work of the LAPD: I avoid streets where I am going to be “heckled.” Normally, I try to avoid streets that aren’t nice, but those who live in Berkeley can attest that Shattuck is relatively unavoidable.
Normally I don’t notice that my brisk walks along Shattuck are punctuated with the stench of unwashed bodies, stale urine, and cheep alcohol. And as long as I am telling little fibs: I have not noticed that they are ornamented with sick, malnourished, and filthy bodies propped up against prim shop windows; I didn’t realize that they are scored with the sounds of pleas for change and the whispers mumbles and shouts of the mentally ill wanderers of the streets; no, I never have never noticed any of those things. That day, as usual, the friction of my feet on the dirty pavement and an ability to ignore my surroundings would have guided me happily home, but a woman asked for the leftovers out of my hand and I gave them to her.
My gut reaction was to ignore her. I was half way down the block before the request had registered. I had moved on to the next block when for some reason I turned around, walked back, and gave both boxes of food to the woman who had asked. The remainder of my lavender and honey kissed brioche and garlic breakfast potatoes went to woman in her late twenties or early thirties with festering sores on her face and stench that could wilt the lavender she was about to eat. I gave her the food and without a word stalked off.
The rest of the way home I really did manage to lose my self in thought. Right now the taxpayers of California and to a lesser degree, the United States pay all of my expenses: from pleasant breakfasts and school tuition to rent and B.A.R.T. trips. I have a full scholarship to Berkeley. I am reliant on the good will, perhaps the charity of the state. Weather I look at my education as a gift, a job, or an investment (perhaps it is all of these), I can't help but wonder what brings some people to Berkeley to beg on Shattuck and others to learn in the one of the best universities in the world.
I have asked around and received a number of different answers. Some people say that I got into Berkeley because I worked hard. Some people insist that the poor are on Shattuck because they are lazy. Some people tell me that I am at Berkeley because I have been lucky. Some people declare that the poor are on Shattuck because they have been unfortunate. Some people say I am at Berkeley because I wanted to be a student. Some people assert that the poor are on Shattuck because they want to be beggars. Some people have told me that I am in Berkeley because I am smart. Some people think that the poor are on Shattuck because they are stupid. But regardless of our wants, the unfortunate, stupid, lazy truth of it is that you should not give a rat’s ass about what some people say, because some people don’t know their asses from cream cheese.
The list of pusdo-explanations goes on and on. But unless provoked, for the most part I find that people don’t even bother to make them. There is as little will to explain the problem, as there is to fix it. It is more simple to just walk by and completely ignore it. But the fact remains that with regards to the above psudo-explanations I can only make one counter claim: that regardless of my wants, my luck, my intelligence, and my work ethic I would be nowhere without the help, and yes, charity, of others. Without the help and guidance (regardless of whether I wanted or not) of my parents, friends, mentors, teachers, and the society in which I live, I would be nowhere.
To say the least, homeless people smell bad and are often ill and dirty. Even walking by them can be an assault on your senses. Admittedly my immediate gut reaction is to have as little to do with them as I possibly can. But, regardless of gut feelings and rationalizations, there is no denying that we owe more to humanity than to allow others to suffer merely because we don’t want to think about the problem or because the intervention would be too dirty. No one is any more deserving than anyone else food, shelter, medical care, and a good life. We do not help people because they deserve it, we help them because they need it, and we all do whether we want it or not. The self-made-man is a myth. It is little more than a fiction used to rationalize away the fact that some people have so much and some have so little.
As I was standing on the corner, a block away from the woman I had just given my brioche too, an old woman with long grey hair attempted to cross before the light. She was almost run over by a car. The car didn’t stop. It didn’t honk. It just drove on.
When she reached my side of the street, assuming that I had actually been paying attention to her near brush with death, she turned to me and said “you know, they will run right over you.” There was a queer look in her eye as she said again, “ I tell you boy, they will run right over you, they will run right over you.” And again, “they will run right over you around here.” Just as the light was about to change, she asked, “Hey, you go to UCB?” I mumbled an affirmative as I stepped off the sidewalk. I walked away and she said, “Good, you have a cool look about you. ”
Until last Saturday I had not given a penny to homeless here, and technically I still haven’t. In that respect I think I am just like the man in the car. People “will run over you”, but even in Berkeley, it involves a choice to not see. The near miss might have been an accident. The woman was crossing against the light. But it was wrong of that driver to not stop and make sure the old woman was ok. That driver knew that he had a very near miss, but he chose to drive on and not see. He could not spare a second to make sure that he had not killed or maimed someone.
How many times do we on the sidewalk choose to not see, to not hear the beggar on the street? They are no less invisible than the old woman. How many times do we not stop to makes sure that some one is ok? Perhaps we don’t stop because we already know the answer to that question. But perhaps better questions to ask are why aren’t we helping, and how can we start?
