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Committed to the hard way
Nobody has to deport them back to Guyana. They are there. Already right here in the midst of a tight capital city. The numbers are more than is realized and troublingly so. Too often they are observed only through individual nearness, or in very small handfuls. But without a doubt, they are hungry and huddled and hurting. Try a random walk with them; maybe more than just one, if only to register the gravity of a situation right before the eyes. Can’t be missed. Cannot be avoided nor denied nor ignored.
There they are: a prime gathering spot and location is up and down Regent Street, but particularly east of Camp Street. Almost corner after corner and around into the secondary side streets, it is a lengthy cardboard congregation of the collapsed and the forlorn. For a thin sheet of discarded cardboard box is what suffices for a bed. A bed on the stone of the street. That is what substitutes as a feathery, dreamy, sometimes rainy, many times steamy cushion of tortured, nocturnal haze.
Circle around the corners amidst the glass towers and latest machines that purr a sweet satisfying engineering rhythm, and there are only the human relics of dissipation, misfortune, and wastage; and of those who have stumbled and fallen by the wayside on the downside of life’s bitter treacheries and disappointments. They are more than those seen or believed to exist.
There they are: legless, mindless, foodless, homeless, and all hopeless. They wait and hope for the next compassionate passerby, some kindly Samaritan to keep them going. And this is the way it is: uptown, downtown, and crosstown, an army of young, old, men, women, diverse as the rainbow, but lacking in its glow. Hollow eyes, crazed eyes, desperate eyes, longing eyes. Enough to bring weeping. The skin crawls as the pores cringe in involuntary reflex.
So much is needed by these many: a roof, sometimes a shirt, food for those ravaged by ailments, age, addiction, and wanting but having nothing. It is a scavenging existence. Hostile, competitive, ugly, stomach-churning. They need more than a hand and a handout; they need medicines and care that can be sustained, and which could nurture them to someplace other than where they are.
Many of them would not want to leave the mean streets; too much discipline; too much confinement and restraint. They are too much in love with the loose, wayward freedoms of the street, the wide-open sky of reckless liberties tasted, savored, relished.
The challenge is how to find a way to help them beyond a paltry dollar; most times, it is a dollar used for the worst purposes: to feed a habit, to extend that rush hour of ecstasy, to perpetuate an existence that knows not family nor support structure nor bottom. There is only the jostling, taunting, tripping camaraderie of those who have lost at the loser’s game. And who keep going back for more of the gutters and unending terrors. There are no winners: not the stricken, not community, not family, not society.
Something has to be done; something more; something more programmatic and structured and comprehensive and inclusive. There is a need for more than the trained and academics, and wonderful helping hands and hearts. In addition to all of those, there has to be those who know that road, having traveled it and pierced by its horrors and haemorrhage of the spirt, the mind, and the will to live. And who are now willing to coordinate and pilot the lost flock with some substantive assistance from the state. There is that, though it is never enough.
The biggest problem is that most of the inhabitants of the streets are committed to the hard way. They will refuse, fight, and evade hands extended. That is part of the tragedy. The sum of the tragedy itself.
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