Above is a sight we see all too often in our cities today. An old homeless man walks down a busy sidewalk, clutching a paper bag. He's probably headed for a city park nearby, to sit on a bench and drink before going back to panhandling to get the money for his next bottle. In a few hours, when night falls, he'll be too drunk to be admitted to any of the Skid Row missions, so he'll have only two options. He can sleep in an alley, or he can talk someone into calling detox for him, and he can sleep off his drunk on their hard concrete floors.
Did I fool you? Did you really think that old guy was homeless? He was actually my grandfather. It was a shot of him shopping for hardware for his farm in the big city, Springfield, MO, a year or so before he died. The shot with the cat shows the same man in his most flattering context, on his farm ten or fifteen miles from that city.
What does it do to our culture if an unfashionable old man walking down a city street is automatically assumed to be homeless? And what if he were? What if he just lost the farm and was homeless. Would you be able to see the farm behind the man when he walked the streets of the nearest city? Would you have any way to find out about his past, if you never asked him about it, and assumed you knew more than you needed to know about his present and future?
The prevalence of homelessness in our cities is distorting our views of the people around us. We are telling our own fellow citizens' stories in our heads over and over again, instead of letting them tell their own stories.
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