I always had this bad feeling every time I passed by a homeless person and saw them asking for spare change. I would see people ignore them and continue their conversations, and honestly, it left me wondering what they felt like. Ernest Hemingway, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was 18 years old when he volunteered for the Red Cross as a driver in Italy during World War I. He was seriously injured, but his comment on that incident was quite interesting: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you ... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you."
When disasters, atrocities, and unpleasant events happen to people around us, we first get frustrated and think about how we can change that. But later on, our mind starts to use any reasoning to shut up our conscience, and then our minds get accustomed to these scenes and start believing that it is okay, and that “stuff happens,” as Jeb Bush commented on the tragic shooting in Oregon! We get used to atrocities, disasters, death and poverty around us. We get the same feeling as Hemingway had before he get wounded in the war. Stuff like this won’t happen to us. Suddenly, it hits us when it happens, and we start realizing how our minds were messed up. Do yourself a favor, and whenever you catch yourself dealing with humanitarian issues with this mindset, stop and remind yourself that people who die here and there, or go broke and become homeless, are just humans who had life drag them down. They are humans in need of help, and most of the time they need attention and respect more than anything else. I came across a video of a guy giving money to a homeless man. So far, it is a quite normal story that most of us have witnessed before. However, what the homeless man did just blew my mind! He asked the guy to wait for a few minutes, and then he went and bought food for both of them and asked the guy to sit and eat with him. His exact words were, “You know it’s lonely out here.”
Homeless people need our help. We reject them every day and keep humiliating them every time they beg us for money, and we treat them like they are invisible. When we do this, they lose part of themselves, and that pushes them away from life. Providing shelters is part of the solution, but it definitely needs more work and care. According to an NPR broadcast, homeless people don’t like shelters for different reasons; these include abuses, stealing, obligatory religious meetings, and restrictions. Your little nice chat with a homeless person might show how you genuinely care and respect them, and in doing so, give them hope. I recommend that you visit the “humans for humans” campaign website and watch short videos of homeless people's reactions and responses to our thoughts and stereotypes.
