Gibburt

Last weekend, I was walking around St Albans, right by the abbey and ran into a bum. Not the drunk or the crazy-eyed amphetamine type, but the down-on-his-luck type. Alright, he might have been slightly crazy-eyed, but not in that speed-freak kind of way. Anyway, he asked me whether I knew whether there was a shelter anywhere in this town. That threw me off-guard, somewhat. Normally, if I would want to know where a shelter was, he looked like the type of fellow I would go and ask.

Anyway, I told him that I was oblivious to most of the facilities and landmarks of the region. I gave him some change. No, that does not make me feel like I’ve made a significant contribution. No, I don’t always give money to bums. No, I’m not sure that he doesn’t go off and buy booze or smack instead of food or shelter. This guy had something earnestly lost about him, though, so I decided to have a little chat.

It turned out, that I also threw him off-guard. He wasn’t used to people actually giving him any more than a bad look in passing. “How is it,” he asked me, “that people are so mean?” If you read it on a blog page like this, it’s barring on cliché, but the real life version of it, had him saying the words with a profound sincerity. It was almost as if for ever so slight a moment, he had his full bearings and had a clear and focussed mind. The question was a rhetorical one, expressing an absolute certainty.

He told me that he, on occasion, asked restaurants whether they had some food to spare and that they quite often gave him some. “You know, some rice and curry sauce and sometimes vegetables. What would that go for, normally, fiver? I don’t have that sort of money, see. A fiver for food, naw, I can’t afford that, but they give me some, see.” Obviously, when you get lucky somewhere, you tend to return. He didn’t sound very surprised or let down when he told me that upon a second visit, the welcome tends to be less warm.

It’s what he told me next that made this something I wanted to blog about, though. He told me that he also went by the churches, but they had all turned him away. To get a little feel on my perspective of things, we were standing in front of this. I’m getting an ever increasing feeling that the bible and the organized religion called christianity have little or nothing to do with each other. I thought Matthew 19:21 was pretty clear on the matter. If churches don’t take the slightest heed of the downtrodden when nobody is looking, then what good are they?

Why do I still cling to these naive ideas about people meaning what they say? It seems that the bigger an institution gets, the further it is removed from its own teachings. My friend was getting rather nervous by this time, saying “… and ya have to keep an eye out for the Bill, and all. They don’t like it when you stay in one place too long, see.” I wished him the best of luck on his ways onward. What else can you do? Mind you, however appalled I was with the unwillingness of the local churches, I still can’t quite get over my own inaptness to do something useful. It’s not just that I couldn’t help this one individual, but that I can’t think of a way to fit this in properly to a socio-political philosophy:

How far does a societies responsibility go? For me, ‘fair’ is not that everybody gets the same, but rather, that everybody gets at least enough. That’s all dandy, but what happens when someone is too far out of it to ask for help? When does respecting individual freedom stop and intervening for someone’s own good start? As a convinced liberal humanist, my answer defaulted to “never!” However, I’m beginning to doubt my convictions.

Filed under: Politics, WtF by Philip Hölzenspies | Social tagging: humanism