Deaf to the Cry

“When a hungry baby cries, it does not cry black or white, (Muslim or Christian or Jew, documented or undocumented); it cries hunger.”  Kwaesi Mfume was participating in a conversation about race in today’s society.  His comment supported yesterday’s posting here about getting compassion being blocked by our differences from the person in need.  But I recognized in his statement a principle of compassionate response: we are more likely to help the innocent.  I reflected on that statement, listened to the cry, felt my response.  But as soon as I began to visualize the baby, I realized that I began to be distracted from pure compassion.  A chubby baby was not as deserving of my compassion than a skinny one.  Were subtle tones of my emotions changed by subtle tones of skin color?  I must admit that they may have been. 

On Tuesday evenings we sit at a table in the small but neat dining room at the shelter.  We’re taking Chutes and Ladders and turning it into a way of helping non-homeless people like me understand what the homeless go through.  C. is a brilliant, insightful, calm, logical woman who is homeless because of a disease that made it impossible for her to drive to work.  L. placidly knits while we wait to begin, her wisdom contained, quietly available as needed.  D. massages the fingers of his left hand with those of his right and then reverses hands, telling me about the pain that is emerging as the nerves reconnect in his hands, just as it had in his face.  He knows that his time in the shelter will end before the pain does.   As we begin to set the board out on the table, B. comes over. 

“What’ya doin'?”

C. replies: “We’re taking Chutes and Ladders and turning it into a homelessness game, so people who aren’t homeless can get to know what we go through every day.”  B. sits down.  The game is a kids’ game, simple to play.  You roll a die and move the number of spaces that the die shows.  If you land on a ladder, you get to advance quickly “up” toward the finish.  If you land on a chute, you slide backwards.  C. and L. and D. have been naming the chutes for bad things that happened to them, to others in the shelter, which led to their homelessness.  Death of the breadwinner is one of the bigger slides, taking the player halfway down the board.  Near the finish, Company bankrupt takes the person almost all the way to the bottom.  Loss of job leads to foreclosure, and you’re sleeping in your in in-laws’ basement with your wife and kids.  B. joins the others in labeling the smaller chutes, the ones that set you back.  “Drinkin’ again,” she says. C. shakes her head no and clarifies the cardinal rule of designing the game: nothing bad that happens can involve blame, like drinking or getting angry at work or getting there late. 

C. says “We gotta be sure that everything bad that happens is not the person’s fault, because if we include stupid stuff or even mistakes, the non-homeless player will just say homelessness is our own fault.”  B. chimes in, voice rising in pitch.  “Yeah, they think homeless people put themselves here.”  After three weeks, the game board is shaping up.  It hasn’t been hard to fill name all of the chutes on the board for bad things that happen to the innocent.  Three huge chutes that wander down the board and suck the player in each have numerous entrances, dumping the player way down toward the bottom.  Each has a major cause of homelessness: family, (death of a parent, divorce, new twins, etc.) health (catastrophic illness, no money for medication, car accident), finance (stocks crash, death of the breadwinner, rent is increased). 

The homeless are not all blameless.  Alcohol addiction is as common as mental illness.  Foolish decisions have put some here as well as just plain bad luck.   But when we invite non-homeless people to join C. and B. and L. and D. to play the game, we’ll have denied players even the smallest blame-handle to grab, to prevent us from hearing the cry that is not black or white, drinking or sober, wise or foolish, but homeless.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.