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Homelessness
By yaman | June 30, 2007
I had a strange and enlightening experience this morning while having breakfast with my father at The Posh Bagel on Sutter Street in San Francisco. A woman in her thirties wearing a short but professional looking black dress (solid color) was seated with a woman similarly dressed but twice her age (no wrinkles, expensive earings). Both had short, modernish hair styles (natural coloring, artificial shape), and obnoxious sparkle-studded shoes (bare legs). From nowhere, it seemed, a little girl approached their table and began begging the younger woman for attention. The girl turned out to be her daughter–and the mother, busy and annoyed.
But then the daughter said, “it’s really important, I saw something!”
And the woman gave her that now-perfected gaze of concern and asked, “what did you see?”
The daughter whispered: “There’s a man wearing no shirt across the street, why is he doing that?”
As the younger woman looked out the window and stumbled with her words for several moments, I turned around and spotted a homeless man across the street, his chest bare as the girl had reported, grasping his own arms.
Still uncertain how to answer the question, the woman paused a moment–looked to her side at the older woman–and finally said: “Well, honey, he’s sick. He has a brain problem.”
I frowned to myself for a moment, wondering what would become of that little girl who grew up on the lie that the homeless were insane–another naive child trying to understand the world.
At that moment a smirk on the older woman’s face caught my eye, and the thought occurred to me that perhaps the little girl was not the naive one at all.
Can it be that the world’s problems fester for such simple reasons?
Topics: Journal |
July 1st, 2007 at 2:20 am
I remember babysitting the daughters of a countess in Geneva and when I told the darlings that (at the time) in Spain, people did not eat much, they opened their wide beautiful eyes and asked : why ? They have no appetite ?
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:54 am
to be fair, one of the main reasons behind the homeless problem in sf is the gutting of the mental health system. the man pretty likely did have mental problems. or he was just poor and getting some sun.
July 11th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
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July 29th, 2007 at 7:15 am
No matter how someone perceives the world, his or her perception is naïve.