Every Person Counts

Yesterday I spent some time recycling, and I voted, and I helped at the homeless shelter.  In each place I met a hero, and in the company of those heroes I felt less overwhelmed by the call to a life of humanity and compassion.

When I’ve met people who talked about “sustainability” in terms of natural resources, I saw in their enthusiasm for our stewardship of stuff a distraction from our stewardship of people.  My work with the homeless in Detroit placed the needs of discarded humans over discarded plastic and urban sprawl.  But I learned it was different.  Recycling is big here, and Andy, who arrived at my first gig of the day with his two sweet kids on the worksite, is one of the effective champions of recycling as part of a lifestyle responsible to what we are given, a sense of stewardship of nature.  He brought his two sweet kids, Jacob and Jenna.  Gretchen, another volunteer, arrived a few minutes later, finding in my University of Detroit Mercy tee shirt a connection we shared, a faculty member who was a lifelong friend of hers since their youth in downriver Detroit.  Jacob and Jenna busied themselves emptying the contents of the water and pop bottles that Andy and Gretchen and I sorted.  (Their dad let them each “explode” one of the pop bottles on the cement behind the garage to light them up, get them going.)  Then I took a pile of the returnable to Oryana, the local hub of healthy and responsible groceries, and cashed in the bottles for Bay Bucks.  I found that in supporting this stewardship of stuff, I was in a community of people who had a sense of mutual stewardship.   Guys in tie-died shirts counted and sorted my returnables.  Smiling women at the checkout counter took my return slip and gave me the local currency with raccoons and morels on the front, and not Dead Presidents.  A gray-haired couple pedaled up on their bikes as I drove off.  I found recycling as connected in every activity to social relationships, a stewardship of society. 

When Kathy and I went to vote, it was not the poll workers that struck me.  It was the stickers.  There on the table where we were given our ballots was a pile of them, little oval stickers with an American Flag and two little words: I Voted.  I smiled as I picked one up, peeled off the shiny backing, and stuck it on my shirt.  I smiled because I was thinking about Pat Eaton, the man I met in Detroit who went out on the streets in his van to try to talk the people who lived on them to get off, to get into shelters, into programs that would help them face their addictions, their anger, their ghosts.  And Pat was a man on fire the months leading up to elections, telling every homeless person he knew, and everybody else for that matter, to vote!  “You may not have a home.  You may not have a job.  You may not have a family or even a friend.  But you have a vote.  You matter.  You COUNT!”  His passionate statement morphed into the motto “Every Person Counts” that engaged hundreds of people to go out on the coldest night of the winter and try to count every person outside of shelter, to let HUD know how many homeless we have in Detroit.   But what made me smile is that on the night of every election, Pat coordinated an “I Voted Dinner Dance” for the homeless and their advocates on Belle Isle.  It was a dressy affair, with great food and music.  And every homeless person knew that they counted, because they had those little stickers that said I Voted.”

I thought of a scene in the film “Garbage Dreams” a film about the Zaballeen who for generations have collected and recycled the garbage of Cairo, Egypt.  Adham, one of the young men who saw the recycling of plastics as God’s calling, his vocation, was invited to see what a multinational recycling company in Wales did to make money recycling.  When he found that they were only recycling 20% of the waste for the sake of maximizing profit, he was aghast.  He reached onto the conveyor belt that carried the non-recycled plastic and started picking up pieces, as he did at home, saying, “What about all of these!  Why are you not saving THESE?”

I suspect that this return, again and again, to Howard  Gray’s call to the Good Samaritan Story may be wearying, this call to see, to feel, to help, to change things and change ourselves.  I suspect that you, as I, think it is just too much.  But then I think of yesterday, Andy and Oryana, and Pat Eaton, and finally of my two final heroes at Goodwill Inn.  I go on Tuesday afternoons to serve dinner, and to facilitate a “Goals Group” of seven or eight guests who are trying to get back on their feet.  My job is to encourage them to keep hoping, to keep working on finding income and affordable housing, to get beyond the thinks that put them on the streets. I feel responsible to come in prepared, and to use their time well.  But yesterday instead of leading the session, I turned it over to Catherine and Lynn, two of their peers who designed a game based on “Chutes and Ladders” that uses the ups and downs of the game to simulate the ups and downs of homelessness, the slides from security into the gutter, and the ladders that seem so hard to reach.

One of the Zaballeen voices over the trailer linked above, the words “Can I really say ‘No’ to God?” as he considers the possibility of letting the multinational company replace his labor.  His God calls him to see every bit of garbage as having value.  How can every one be saved?  In Cairo, the answer is 60,000 Zaballeen, who are often treated as garbage themselves.  In Traverse City, it is Andy and Jacob and Jenna and Gretchen and the guys at Oryana with the tie-died shirts and the smiling women with the Bay Bucks.  And it is the Lynns and Catherines who help us understand that those lifted up join in lifting up others.

When it comes to stopping to pick up what some see as garbage, or who some others see as garbage, Can I really say “No” to God?  

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