The other night, I saw a prophet and had a thunderbolt revelation. As I tried to hand a homeless man a bag of food, truly from the depths of my heart, I realized my hypocrisy and my ugliness. Shame washed over me: I saw that there was nothing that I could actually do to help this man. I saw that, cruel truth though it may be, in attempting to help him, I was doing many unhelpful things. The very act of charity degraded the essential dignity of this man...as a human being who is past childhood, it is an unnatural thing to be fed by someone else. My attempt to give him a dinner, while perhaps kind, highlighted the fact that he is not respected enough by society to be able to feed himself. No, more than that. My charity was symbolic of our society's rotten foundation. I never felt more helpless than at the very moment when I tried to help this man.
Another thing that resulted from this crazy night was a heart, sickened, unable to console itself, unsatisfied with the way things are. My heart beat, disgusted at itself because it was this night that I realized that I am just as much accountable for the way things are as those people who actually made the world this unfair by virtue of existing within the system--I am what makes the system unbalanced, girls like me who have every advantage in the world and no real worries. I saw in a flash of horrible insight that all the things I was doing that night were more about making me feel better about the plight of the masses. Charity all of a sudden became revealed for what it is: a way for the "us"es of the world to feel better about the way things are.
I withdrew that night, losing my usual optimism. I'm not sure how to describe this to you. Really, it was the kind of night that I can't talk about because in so doing, it becomes about me again. Which would be untrue the story. The story's about me realizing how little of this is really about any of us, we the groomed and fed, even as we have a created a society where it's only the "us" that has any value. It's about something that for once did not have any sort of subjectivity and was simply just what it was: the truth.
I do not know the name of the man that I approached. I do not know his background or how he came to be standing on 9th Avenue, right behind Port Authority, or who had affected his life up to that moment. All I'm sure of is that there was something in his voice when he answered my own ridiculously, patronizing and politically correct question of "Do you know someone who might need a meal tonight?" was frustration and weariness. When he replied, "Yes, I do. That man over there [indicating a well-dressed person] or how about that woman [a lady similarly well-dressed]? Everybody in the city needs food." He was so frighteningly honest, so frighteningly unafraid to look me full in the face with his golden-brown eyes that were so surprisingly void of emotion or accusation, those eyes that just looked straight into my soul, that he shocked me into realizing that I know nothing. None of us do. We assume, we take advantage of, we project. And I realized that we are the only creatures who could have created a world where an act of love could actually turn into a selfish one.
I'm sorry.
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