Exiles in Their Own Country – Observations Among The Homeless – Part 1: A Dark Sadness

     Here, an enormous silence sometimes grows, the hypnotic power of a pervasive loneliness, like a great, prowling beast, a flowering darkness consuming the debris of the past, an endless, inexhaustible movement across an unremembered passage of time, an oblivion that washes away all but the deepest scars of best-forgotten acts and erstwhile delirium. There is a palpable, unseen fog here, the incessant murmuring of weary bodies, the lingering ghosts of wasted opportunities, the encompassing darkness of disenchantment, like someone furtively looking for God in the gutter, the silent horror of being unknown in the world, lonely, without the shelter of walls, without money for the bread of ones table, dwindling from the weight of being friendless and forgotten, filled with a tremendous, terrible hurt, scattered by the vastness of poverty, remote, isolated, adrift in a world where nothing beyond the space around them seems to matter very much.                                                                                                           I watch and examine the bitter, all-too-common faces that engulf me. They are bleached-out, rubicund, scalded, carbuncular, desolate, skeletal, bird-like, prey for the snake of destiny. And, almost always, they talk, self-absorbed; an incessant chattering, like magpies mimicking sounds empty of meaning. With an almost easy, comfortable ignorance, they rant: about God, the Devil, the demons that drove them to this state, their laundry-list of resentments, about the evils of a broken culture, against the machinations of a society that is all too willing to shun them, too at-ease with the idea of forgetting them. All too often, they shrug their shoulders and respond with impolite indifference, or even surprise, at the suggestion they bear any personal responsibility for their present circumstances. There must be someone or something else at fault. Held prisoner in cities, they are strangers and outcasts stigmatized and largely ignored in the land their forefathers built.                                                                                            An old hunger has returned to this country, not the hunger for knowledge, success, or even influence. It is a hunger that has not been seen with such ferocity in America since the Great Depression. It is the hunger for nourishment, for the warmth of sustenance, one that compels the homeless, and about-to-be homeless, to stand in queues for food, clothing, blankets, the simplest of creature comforts. They gather at church-basement doors, skid-row missions, in parking lots and along curbs where Samaritans park offering help. Hunger for shelter draws them to makeshift encampments in canyons, along river-beds, freeway underpasses, filth-strewn alleyways, and abandoned industrial sites. If fortunate enough, tenacious enough, sane enough, or sober enough, they may find their way to shelters manned and provisioned by homeland missionaries and dedicated volunteers who are so consumed by a heart of compassion that they cannot participate in the turning away from the downtrodden. Sometimes this hunger is cosmetically assuaged, often grudgingly, by ‘city fathers’ and politicians who only deal with them out of political necessity, who’d really rather they’d just go away.                                      In America, the homeless are exiles in their own country.