We Meet Again!
A little over two years ago I wrote a newsletter essay entitled “The Homeless Guy Who Wouldn’t Take No for an Answer” about an aggressive homeless person I once gave money to and then ran into repeatedly. I ultimately found him unpleasant and a little intimidating, and then at some point he just disappeared and I never saw him again.
For years.
Until just recently.
I was at my ATM by my bank and suddenly there he was, getting right in my face, offering me a fist bump which I reflexively returned even as I realized, “Oh my god, it’s this guy again!”
He didn’t look any worse for wear. Still swarthy, still grungy, still demanding. “I’m from Viet Nam!” he growled in that loud, hoarse voice of his, eyes wide. “I need MONEY!”
“I know you do,” I said, and turned away, thinking all kinds of unpleasant thoughts about the guy. I didn’t feel safe using the ATM with him standing there.
A day or two later I was walking again near that stretch of Hawthorne Blvd. and decided to stop in Powell’s bookstore just to browse a little. I passed a different homeless guy sitting on the sidewalk against a storefront, looking hollow-eyed and dejected and filthy, quasi-catatonic with hopelessness.
Inside the bookstore I thought, “Wow. Here I am contemplating spending 17 bucks on a book I won’t have time to read for months. And that poor guy … I guess I can at least give him a dollar, and not pretend he doesn’t exist.”
So when I exited the bookstore I walked the few steps back toward the indigent guy sitting so listlessly on the dirty sidewalk, leaning back against the wall of a storefront, and when he saw me approach, his eyes brightened sharply. He looked intensely pleased!
Then I reached forward and handed him a dollar and his face fell again and he seemed completely deflated, perhaps even sadder than before.
That’s when I realized it was actually the same guy, the aggressive one, and his eyes had lit up because he’d recognized me. He really did!
And then when I simply gave him a dollar, the light in his eyes went out because (I think) he had been imagining I was actually coming over to acknowledge him, to say hello, to act like I knew him as he felt he “knew” me.
One of the things that had always bugged me about this guy was his forceful presumption of familiarity. Always expecting a handshake (or, as the other day, a fist bump) and coming up to me so close. I had always deemed this to be a manipulative (if ineffective, with me) tactic on his part, probably something he tried with everyone.
But now I had to wonder. He had looked genuinely ebullient for just a split second as I approached. And then the illumination in his eyes went dead again when I handed him the dollar.
I have no idea really what to conclude, but if I had to bet, I think he really recognized me, and he momentarily assumed I was approaching him in some kind of a friendly, not merely charitable way.
Oh the depths of loneliness in our midst. I can’t even imagine. I am not sure I want to imagine.
Braver Angels Report
I mentioned in the last newsletter that I’d be attending a Braver Angels meeting in my neighborhood, where I’d have a chance to talk to people who voted for Trump. So, to follow up, here is my report:
I had three 30-minute one-on-one conversations with three different people. The first woman I spoke with described herself as a lifelong conservative. We had a sheet of paper with prompting questions for us to discuss (if we chose to; it wasn’t a requirement) and the first one was “Do you think government is too big or too small?”
I shared that I felt there was something simplistic about how the question was framed, and it made me uncomfortable. On the one hand, I understood that the federal government was indeed like some huge ungainly lumbering beast with massive inefficiencies, but also that we’re a huge country and there is so much to coordinate and we need a strong large central administrative government. So I had always been very discomfited by the whole idea of the government somehow being our enemy, a meme which first took root (I believe) with Reagan’s famous “quip” about the feds: “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
My companion pointed out that where there is no competition, there is no motivation to be efficient, and hence she favors smaller government, and sending a lot more decision-making power down to the local level, rather than having far-away bureaucrats create one-size-fits-all policies such as No Child Left Behind. I kind of agreed with her that most education policy might be best left to local government, because of the vast differences between local cultures and their respective educational needs. I wasn’t prepared, however, to make the leap from there to saying that it would be fine to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education, or that no nationally standardized tests were necessary, nor did she ask me to go there with her, and I am sure she would not have expected me to, despite my rhetorical concession.
She further opined that she wasn’t sure why we need to have inspectors general because, after all, don’t we have a Government Accountability Office and an Office of Management and Budget? Isn’t that ENOUGH oversight? Doesn’t it sound like there’s redundancy? And as for USAID, why SHOULDN’T that be absorbed into the State Department?
I pointed out quickly that people have already died around the world as a result of Trump and Musk’s abrupt cuts to USAID and she nodded sympathetically. She agreed.
I said that they were taking a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel/surgical approach to “inefficiency cutting,” particularly with USAID and she agreed completely that what they are doing is wrong.
I noted that President Kennedy had established USAID in the early 1960s, not only for humanitarian purposes, but as a way spreading American “soft power” throughout the world, in a way that was distinct from international diplomacy as conducted via the State Department.
She said yes, but that was during the height of the Cold War, and a lot of CIA activity was interwoven then through USAID projects, and THAT was a significant aspect of its historical purpose too. “And,” she acknowledged, in a kind of musing, reflective way, “I think that’s still a part of it.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, because it was, and I hadn’t ever thought or known about it – that is, about USAID’s utility for intelligence gathering.
Then I said, “Isn’t it ironic though that, to make government more efficient, Trump creates a whole new agency with DOGE?”
“Oh well, I doubt Elon is getting paid much; he doesn’t really need it,” she said.
I laughed. “Okay, I take your point.”
Later, after I posted about this conversation on Facebook, friends pointed out that Musk is the recipient of billions of dollars of taxpayer money from government contracts.
I also learned a bit more about what our federal Department of Education actually does. It does not dictate curriculum. It helps to fund things like classes for the disabled and Pell grants.
My second Braver Angels conversation partner deemed herself “purple” – i.e., neither Democrat nor Republican – and she had never voted for Trump, though she talked at some length about a good friend of hers who did. This friend, she said, just somehow did not trust Kamala Harris, just didn’t find her authentic; something about her personality made him distrust her. “Oh yeah?” I said. “And he was more comfortable with Trump’s personality??” “I know, I know,” she said. “Do you think maybe misogyny and racism contributed to Harris’s defeat?” I asked her. She said, “Maybe, but that’s not why my friend didn’t vote for her.”
My third and final conversation partner was a self-identified “red” voter, a man I’d estimate to have been in his late 30s, a very gentle-seeming person. We never did talk about national politics. Somehow we wound up talking about the local homeless problem instead. He opined that drugs were the reason why the homeless population had increased, because drugs like fentanyl destroy people. And he felt that the brief period during which Oregon had decriminalized all drugs was a major reason why there were so many more homeless people in Portland now than there were several years ago.
I mentioned that at the Friends Meeting House where I help serve lunch to homeless persons once a week, they have a “sharps” box in the bathroom so that if people shoot up in there, they can leave their needles safely, rather than try and flush them down the toilet. He didn’t think that sort of accommodation was ultimately a good idea.
I told him the story of a homeless man I had met in the park late at night years ago (which I also wrote about in this newsletter at the time) and about how I’d guided this man to a porta-potty, but then in the end the guy just told me he wanted to do his meth, and then we’d amicably parted ways.
He said, “I would have tried to get him to not do the meth.”
“You mean, you’d have tried to stop him physically?” I asked him.
“Oh no,” he replied. “I would have said, ‘Come on, let’s just talk for another 15 minutes, and don’t do your meth yet.’ And then if he’d gone along with that, I’d have told him, ‘See, if you can not do meth for 15 minutes, you can not do it for the next 15 minutes, and the next 15, and little by little you can stop doing it altogether.’ I’d have encouraged him to get off the meth. But I’m not saying what you did was wrong. I think what you did was really good. You did a kind thing, just by talking with him like that.”
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