Last week, my partner and I went to the movies in Telford. Having booked tickets for about £34 on nearly a whim and driven 40 minutes on a wet night to get to the theatre, I can suggest that we're not hurting. The same cannot be said for a woman we passed between the parking lot and the entrance to the multiplex. She was underdressed for the weather, was missing a front tooth, and sat under an umbrella with a cup. She told us she was trying to raise £18 to get a bed for the night. We could have covered that amount without thinking twice. Partner gave her two or three pounds as she had change which I did not. I bought her a sandwich and a cup of coffee from the Starbucks inside, because I could feel good about buying her some sustenance.
There's a subconscious mental juggling act in which I think I'm supposing she should work harder to get a roof over her head for one December night rather than just having it.
I've equivocated that sentence because I'm afraid of articulating just what goes on in my head when I give a homeless person less than what they need to get to the next step. The personal calculus is that as an individual, I don't have the ability to adopt every person on the street. And I extend that to 'or even one person on the street'. And in the family that consists of my partner and me, the calculus is that we don't want children of our own or even to adopt or foster. There's a selfishness to it, to be certain. And an unwillingness to examine just what it would take to abandon our plans to pay off our house and have the retirement plan that we want. We both know how very lucky/blessed we are to live the way we do, but not to the extent that we extend that luck too far from ourselves.
I vote and I donate to campaigns of politicians who seem to think the way I do about how the future should look, but in the end, they're politicians and they vote in favour of much larger sums of money than I represent. And in the US and the UK the ones who profess support for the underclasses are in the minority. Again. (Note: When the left holds the majority, they're only slightly less mendacious. I'm not blind in this regard.)
My job is still fish. (And your job as well, I trust.) The problem is still how to get fish to people. I give irregularly to charities that seem to be doing this work and every year I say to myself that I'll make this more regular. Every December a local food bank does a drive at my local supermarket for one day – my guess is that they go for one day to each of the big supermarkets – and on that day I buy 30 or 40 euros worth of stuff off of the bank's want list. While that's definitely regular, it's not enough. (Note: I'm in England at the moment and spending pounds, I grew up in the US, and I live in the Netherlands.)
In between, I send some money to this charity or that charity as the whim hits me and pledge each January to make it a more regular. So I write down some random thoughts on the matte and make a note to make a note to do something about it. As soon as I finish writing this, I'll create a calendar entry that will repeat on the first of each month to give some group or other some money or fulfil something on that group's amazon wish list. (One group I support sometimes is London's Breakfast In A Bag who have an ongoing list of things they provide to those sleeping rough.) As noted, this kind of thing is really easy. There's much harder work to do and I don't have the slightest where to begin.
I visited Oakland, California where my sister and her family live (and where I lived about twenty years ago) and the homelessness has gone off the charts. People who have spent decades in public service probably have some ideas about the solutions needed, but as noted above, there is no political will to help people who don't vote with deep pocketbooks. These are the folks with no pocketbooks at all left.
Our jobs are not judgement. The jobs are fish. Some of us have fewer fish than others, but I have a feeling that everyone reading this has more fish than they need. Give more fish.