Earlier this week, I was reading an article about recycling in the parks of the City and County of Honolulu. The article stated that only five of the city’s 290 parks have recycling bins. Lester Chang of the City’s department of Parks and Recreation was quoted as saying the city has a “passive recycling” program. I though this odd. Mayor Mufi Hannemann has been busy beautifying parks, focusing on those that have concentrations of homeless and those who choose what I will call “alternative living arrangements” (they actively choose to live at beaches and other areas rather than being forced to do so by circumstances). In other words, the city goes through all of these efforts to displace the displaced but by not having a recycling program in the parks (which has always bothered me) encourages some of those displaced individuals (passive recyclers) to areas the city didn’t want them in to begin with.
It didn’t make sense to me as I read the article. Now, I'm not so sure.
It’s easy to read an article like that when it really doesn’t strike a chord, when there is no face and because there is no face, it is that much easier to walk away and pretend there is no problem. It’s not that the emperor has no clothes, no the emperor is wearing dirty, filthy rags!
Today, I ran into a good friend from college. He was smart, wanted to be a physician. Very intelligent and hard working. When I saw him today, he was dirty, disheveled. He smelled. He was getting prescription drugs when we ran into each other. To be honest, I didn’t know what to do. Oh, I wasn’t ashamed to be talking to someone who was clearly homeless and who readily indicated he was homeless. No, I am ashamed to say that I was worried what kind of commitment it would take on my part if I recognized he was homeless. Before my friend developed all of these problems, I knew he had obsessive-compulsive tendencies. As he grew older those tendencies combined with bipolar disorder and was then mixed with alcoholism. This in turn led to a steady decline in his mental health. This started a cycle which I saw and as a friend, I tried to help but none of it worked. I knew until he stopped the destructive behavior (the alcohol) and started taking the drugs to restore the chemical imbalance in his brain, there was nothing I could do. I like to think to myself, when I allowed contact between us to fade, that I knew he needed to hit bottom and hopefully something in the cycle would break. (Being honest with myself, I know this is a rationalization. I simply did not know how to deal with the situation and because I didn't know what to do, I hoped by ignoring it, the problem would go away. It did. Just for me.)
Even while I wanted to deny the knowledge of my friend’s homelessness I couldn’t deny his homelessness either. Dealing with his situation would be bad, but being selfishly altruistic gesture, I admitted to myself that not doing anything would be worse for I would have difficulty living with myself.
What do you do? I don’t understand the issues enough to be able to offer concrete solutions to homeless. It’s hard enough in Hawaii to watch out for your own homed situation let alone watch out for someone else’s homelessness. I’m not sure what I can do for my friend. When I asked him what he needed he said, “A true friend.”
It would still be easier to turn my back, to think to myself how unfortunate he is and how lucky I am. Easier yes… but that kind of easy, the intellectual recognition of an intractable problem coupled with an emotional distancing from that very problem (which was my own attitude before tonight) creates the kind of society that we have today. Again, I don’t know if I can offer any real solutions. I do know that I can try to be a true friend.
