"You Got a Little Something for Me?"

Perception is reality.

The big city is the land of milk and honey. A lot of wealth and opportunity are concentrated in the shadows of high rises and business centers. Walking down the streets of Atlanta I percieve a lot of homeless people. Barely getting by in our capitalist society. They stroll up and down the streets eeking out their livings on donations of food and "tips" from performing menial, sometimes degrading, tasks.

My friend has grown immune to them. She like most other people have walked by the street dwellers multiple times a day, everyday she goes to work. It's a shock to come from a small town and see a man not living at an acceptible level. You look at his clothes which he's probably been wearing for a while, they are filthy. Unshaved. Ungroomed. You figure he's uneducated from the way he talks. Unsocialized from the way he approaches people. When I first saw that I was put off. I asked myself what could have happened in his life to lead him here? I concocted all kinds of scenarios in my mind to explain it.

Maybe he was one of those factory workers that dropped out of middle school to refine steel when he was ten. He worked for years in the mills 12 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week. After 20 years the factory closes leaving him unemployed, unable to use the one skill he had developed in his lifetime, and suffering from years of exposure to dangerous toxin that have ravaged his body. After losing his wife and kids in a horrible accident, and lost in a world that has passed him by several times over, he turned to his best friend Jack and has been unable to recover. How could I not help my brother after everything he's been through? I give him 2 dollars and say "Stay up, brother"

The next time I see him it's the same thing. Same clothes, same smell, same knappy beard. I'm not as shocked this time. So maybe his wife and kids didn't die in a horrible accident. Maybe his wife left him after he lost his job. That's still bad. I give him a dollar and say "Be easy, man."

Remember perception is reality. Perception is warped by experience. My pops always told me you have to do for yourself and never give up. My mother showed me you have to work and do what you have to do to make it in life. My life has been struggle after struggle. Hard choices and long, harder days but I kept going to get what I have. In my perception of the world everybody should be doing the same.

Everyday I see this guy, same clothes, same breath, same ashy, dirty hands, I feel less and less sympathy. In my mind he goes from a victim of life and circumstance looking for a little relief from the storm to a lazy, drunk with no desire to do anything with his life harassing me for money...again... for the 1000th time.

It isn't right to feel like that. I should have more tolerance for people. I should open my heart to the less fortunate. but when I see dude, at the Underground, at Lennox, outside the High Museum, in Decatur, in Buckhead, he's damn everywhere! I blame him for his situation. He should spend that same energy he spends begging to get a job and do something with himself. He should have enough self respect and pride to get it together...I would.

I read once we are all the same and to see weakness in the next man is to see weakness in yourself. Until you can accept my own human short comings, you can never be truly connected to or sympathize with anyone else.

For good or bad, I haven't gotten to this magical point of oneness with humanity. The sympathy I had (or was that shock?), has been eroded away. When I see this dude (like I always do when I'm out trying to enjoy myself), same clothes, same hustle, same eyes fully of hopelessness and despair, I tell him the truth. To my own shame I say, "I ain't got it, man."