Hungry

Friday on the way to my weekly lunch with old friends. I pulled up to the stoplight at Owen O'Leary's. In the tiny island was a young man with a cardboard sign that had one word "Hungry." Like almost every other self-absorbed member of my generation, I've seen homeless people before and ignored them (while making sure to donate to the appropriate charities), but this guy was dressed in worn, but clean work clothes. He didn't look like he was someone who had learned to work the system. Standing where he did almost guaranteed cars would zoom by him. The expression on his face had that same look of pain and dignity that one sees in the photographs of Dorothea Lange from the 1930s.

I drove on trying to convince myself that I couldn't have pulled over and given him money, hoping someone in the other part of the intersection would help. More convinced than ever that something is terribly wrong with this country beyond the supposedly improving economic conditions. Let's be fair "the country" is an abstraction, there is something terribly wrong with us when someone can be hungry in a land where so many are, like me, obese.