Misappropriation

I was startled early yesterday morning when a man digging through a sidewalk cigarette canister dead ahead of me went a wee bit bonkers, kicking the pavement with his incongruously clean work boots and shouting in short, nonsensical bursts.

He didn’t look well, either. 20s, maybe, but ossified. White T-shirt dingy to an uneven shade of gray. Scabs, or scars, I couldn’t tell. Low-slung, baggy pants defying the laws of physics. A dreadlock biohazard cascading massively almost to his waist.

That same day, I discovered that a friend’s yard man, full of energy and initiative, 50-something, a military veteran, lives in his truck. Houseless, as we say now, which does seem more accurate than “homeless.” Home is where the heart is, after all, be it ever so humble, be it on the range, in the extended cab, or elsewhere.

Yet downtown Greenville is overtly prosperous. The miracle mile on Main between NOMA Square and the baseball stadium smells so strongly of money one can imagine hardcore capitalists mounting each other like dogs under its influence.

So perhaps you can appreciate my confusion, people dying on streets paved with gold. The random meals I buy them, the bus fares, the pro bono work I do for modest counseling initiatives, all well and good, but a drop in the bucket. Where are the civic groups, I wonder? Or the City? Or the people whose names top donor boards at fine arts facilities? How do we as a community, in triaging our communal needs, justify enlarging the parking lot at our minimal security animal prison or erecting a bronze statue to a local legend when the money used to pay for those things might be spent instead on food, shelter, medical care, and education for the near-feral human beings among us?

When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse, and as soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.
– Anna Karenina