“Sorry man, we’re all just poor musicians.” Sean-Michael said, gesturing to the other band members standing around him.
“Oh, is that right?” The homeless man asked, glancing down at the clothes that we were wearing. He wasn’t upset; he’d just heard excuses a thousand different times from a thousand different people. We were no different, even though I wanted to be.
“Well, have a good night.” He said as he stood there. His skin was blistered from exposure, sunburned and cracked from his forehead all the way down to his neck. On his back was a familiar sight: a duffel bag stuffed with miscellaneous clothes, trinkets, and the tiny little items that most people would have thrown away without a second thought; but not him. To him, these were not trinkets. They were memories of a life long gone, but never forgotten. They were lifelines to sanity.
He gave a last look at the six of us, and wandered aimlessly back in to the heat and shelter of his small camp beneath the freeway overpass.
We continued gathering up photo equipment, all of us wearing suits that easily cost several hundred dollars a piece. In my wallet I had a couple of bucks that I could have handed the man; he said that all he wanted was a meal, but I didn’t believe him. None of us did. And more than likely, nobody else that he would run in to that night was going to believe him either.
If he really was hungry, he was going to stay that way.
We began walking toward the location that we’d chosen for our band photo shoot, but I was no longer trudging along listening to the inane banter between my band mates. I was reliving a moment in time, five years previous, when I was homeless and living beneath a bridge. I remembered the hunger and the pain of sleeping on hard concrete, and the way I gasped in horror each time I looked in the mirror.
There was never a time in my life that prepared me better for human nature, adversity, and the ugliness of the human condition than when I was homeless. I remember the lies people would tell me, or the way they looked down on me as if I wasn’t quite human. People would spit on me, kick me in my sleep, or beat me up for no other reason than nobody would care what happened to a homeless guy.
I glanced back to see that the man had laid back down in the shade of the overpass. I felt for him. I felt guilty for denying him the possibility of a little bit of comfort before lying down for the night. But in the back of my mind, there always lies that suspicion that whatever money I give him will go to something that I had not intended: drugs or alcohol.
But something that’s easy to forget is that part of being human, part of giving, and part of helping out your fellow man, is giving him the benefit of the doubt regardless of what the outcome is. If I were to hand that gentleman $5, it is not my responsibility if he buys a bottle of vodka with it. My intentions, regardless of the outcome, were good. My intentions were to help, and that should be what’s most important.
Or if I put it in a different way, what if a homeless person wandered by and I refused to give him money. Because of that, he’s unable to buy a $5 bottle of vodka and he suffers horribly from hallucinations and DT’s because of his ongoing alcohol addiction. In the midst of his crash, he becomes violently delusional and ends up killing a 12 year old child.
It could be just as equally argued that he will go buy his vodka, become violently drunk, and hurt someone as well. But no matter how you spin it, the better outcome, the better chances, the more possibilities for a happy ending all come from doing good and giving.
What’s sad is, for the most part, any person that has ever said, “No” to a homeless person has never been told “No” in the same situation. I have been on both sides of that coin. It’s difficult regardless of which side you’re on.