Homeless and living on the margins

Sometimes the invisible ones come out of the shadowy spaces to which they've been assigned by those who walk in the light. 

I was driving out of the parking lot of a big shopping plaza, and a homeless man was standing at the corner on my right. I looked to my left to see if the road was clear. The need to look left also saved me from making an eye contact with the man. I wasn't planning to give him any change, and not giving it to him made me feel guilty (regardless of my lack of information about his particular situation). He stood there, an alien, marginal being, and cars kept passing by, drivers looking everywhere but in the man's eyes, as if scared of the homelessness "disease"... As if looking at him could somehow contaminate them. 

In every society people have a set of ideas about the clean and the dirty. This varies from place to place although certain ideas might be universal. We, westerners, the children of the "civilized" first-world country, have our own untouchables. We frown at the Indian caste system, but fail to make note of our own behavioral and thought patterns here, at home, when we come across those who do not fit into our quite rigid concepts of
normal". 

I understand. We fear the different, the unknown. We don't know what to expect from those who live on the margins of our world because they may not live by the same rules. When you are a marginal being, your behavior may change along with the changes in your mode of existence, your perception of reality, your physical health, your value system. 

I've had a very unpleasant experience with one homeless man one day. I was walking down the street, and he walked toward me, talking to himself. He was a dark-skinned, tall man in his late forties. When we passed by one another, he threw our his hand and hit me in the head, mumbling something about "bitches". It wasn't hard enough to hurt me really bad, but I did  get a bump afterwards. I was so shocked that it didn't cross my mind to call the police. 

Are all homeless men aggressive? Are they all alcoholics, drug addicts, schizophrenics? No, of course not. But they do live in a marginal space of existence where more "fitting" members of our society fear to go. Very often the first inclination of a "normal" human being is to separate from the marginal one, to increase the distance between one another, to avoid all contact whatsoever. It's safer that way, and there's no need to think much. Just don't look and keep driving. 

The homeless man at the exit of the parking lot held a sign in his hands. I thought it would say something like "hungry" or "disabled vet", I wasn't really interested in knowing... But he wrote his sign in huge, dark letters that stood out, practically screamed at me. The sign said,

SMILE, GODDAM'IT !

I smiled. I gave him a huge, genuine smile. I wanted to laugh at myself when I imagined how I looked to him - a thirty-year-old woman with a dead-serious, grim expression on a tired face driving out of the shopping plaza. How did I really look? Exhausted, sad, pressured, irritated, unhappy? I avoided looking at him, but he did look at me. The "no looking" game is one-sided, you see. The homeless are invisible to us. We look away or through them because looking directly at them makes us feel uncomfortable, but they don't seem to have a problem watching us. 

Smile, God damn it. 

People in their cars, tired after work, worried about bills, kids, husbands, wives, tomorrow, and who knows what else. Tired after standing in line in WalMart, not looking at another human being in the corner because he is not really one of them. He is alien. Almost nonhuman.

Some people might feel offended reading this post. "We? No, never!? We don't judge the homeless, we see them as human beings, we give them change, we even talk to them!!" Maybe. Maybe some of us do. But the majority doesn't. The majority avoids looking at them because they are a threat to what is perceived as normal. 

I don't blame people for not feeling comfortable looking at other people. I am just pondering on the subject of  perception of reality. 

Have you ever wondered how the world looks to a homeless man? We know how the homeless look to us. Have you ever wondered how we look to them? 

I met a homeless guy named Henry a couple of months ago. Henry is about 50, he has a black lab and a bicycle (although I saw him without the bicycle about a week ago, maybe he doesn't have it anymore). He asked me to use my cell phone when I was passing by, so I lent  to him. He called his brother or sister, I can't recall now. He said he loved them. He smelled like a drunk. He had skull rings on his fingers and a heavy silver chain on his chest. I saw him a couple more times, my daughter played with his dog.

He called me "sister." He stopped being invisible when my daughter played with his dog and we talked about simple things. Instead, all the others became invisible to me for a brief period of time when I stood next to him. And I became "the weird one" to those others. After all, who in their right mind would stand next to the stinky homeless drunk and let her toddler play with his dog? 

What are your experiences with the homeless?
Are you afraid of them? Do you feel comfortable looking straight into their eyes? Do you perceive the gap between your world and theirs? Do you divide the world into "us and them"?