one penny, two cents

On the train, I noticed a homeless woman struggling to get off at her stop while hauling an enormous suitcase. She was rail-thin, and looked over 60 years old. I offered to help, but she refused. "It's too heavy for you, sweetie." I felt embarrassed. The homeless in this city confound my sense of empathy. My heart hurts for them, but at the same time, I find myself feeling too little for them. Their lives and experiences, and what it has done to them, are beyond my imagination. I lack feeling because they are such a mystery that I don't know where to begin, or how to respond. What must it be like to be so strong, and yet so weak? They, of all people, must know how utterly vulnerable and helpless they are, even as they brave the underbelly of New York in daylight and in darkness. I wonder what shame feels like to them, how it must taste as they swallow it before every plea. I wonder how they define hope, qualify success. I wonder how their lives must feel. Hungry, hopeless, lost, these words, bereft of meaning after being stamped on so many pamphlets and posters, do little to help my understanding. Statistics about homelessness, self-righteous indignation at their growing numbers, educated explanations about how homelessness happens and persists, are just as useless to me. Hundreds of faces turn away from the sick, the mentally ill, the abused, the broken, the hungry as they literally stand there dying in plain sight. What is it like to view the callous, heartless side of humanity every day, and what does it do to their own humanity? What must it feel like to see that they have no significance, no identity in the eyes of all those living in "right-side up" world, the world of shelter, compensated labor, security, and hope? Do they start to believe it themselves? I don't mean this as a call to arms, and it's not a rant of indignation or even the cry of a bleeding heart. It's just that the more I think about it, the more I cannot know these people, or how their lives must feel. And somehow my incapacity to understand makes me question my understanding of all people, strangers and friends, and even my own self. What does a man become when the world strips him of his humanity? What does the thing look like, extracted from its skin? I need to know. I need to know what is worth this fight. I need to know if the human soul exists.