My heart burst open today, walking past an encampment of the unhoused on the Green. There were signs protesting the housing crisis hanging from the fence. I took a photo of each of them, flipping those turned over on the ground.
I guess my nervous system hit overload as I was photographing the signs. Among those encamped, someone seemed to be having a drug-related health emergency. An ambulance was approaching. My heart literally broke.
It was just the final straw, I guess, of all the tears I’d been holding back in the course of the day. I’d earlier spent some time with a prominent community elder at the nearby library hearing some of the gory details passed down to her through her bloodline—survivors of slavery who’d made it to New Haven for domestic work.
I kept thinking, Man…Christ, these are the people You’re calling us to love? I’m still not sure if I completely buy the “love your enemies” teaching I’ve been getting at ECV the last four weeks. I will continue to assess it against the Kristian A. Smith teachings.
My eyes were welled up the entire time this elder shared her family story, my nervous system unsettled for just needing to eat, walk, exercise, I thought.
Stroll Through History
Then I went to the Beinecke to look into the Black Panther Party archives, at least see what they had. Records of Alex Rackley’s autopsy and Ericka Huggins’ trial started to further activate my nervous system, and I reminded myself of the urgency of a meal.
I got out of there quickly and ate in the sun. My nervous system calmed just a little bit after that and my email to Michael Morand. There was an overwhelm about my purpose, the work I’m called to do and not having anybody whose arms to cry into at the end of the day. Not some arms into which I could just totally fall apart while asking, But why does the world have to be so cruel?
I continued to hold back the tears, particularly because my face-beat was not something I was in a position to fix in the middle of the day like this. I hoped that the movement of walking would allow my nervous system to calm all the way down by the time I got to MakeHaven.
I was going to cross the Green diagonally like I usually do, but there was a tremendous dust flying from whatever sort of lawn work or leaf blowing was happening. This is why I ended up walking along the Elm St. side of the Green, glancing over to the ECV sign on my left and saying a prayer of thanks for how Christ used that first service four weeks ago to save me.
I initially walked past the encampment, seeing the people and feeling the sadness as I often do when observing the downtown tragedy of sprawling poverty. I don’t think it was until I reached the last protest sign hanging from the fence that I really had to pay attention.
Look Only at the New World
Here I have to address my inclination to look away. As a super emotional person who feels far too much for the suffering of others—some sort of trauma response they say—I learned long ago that if I was going to pay attention to every injustice that I would ultimately live my entire life crawled up into a ball, weeping endlessly for humanity.
So I had to learn to not pay attention, keep my eyes on the prize. The prize being the New World that I had to believe was possible. The prize being my ability to channel my gifts, vision, and strategies into galvanizing as many people as I could towards the manifestation of this New World.
A world in which it would be impossible for a man, unhoused, to be rocked to his death by seizures, overdosing on meth, while the government charged with his care sends billions to murder poor people on the other side of the globe.
A world in which even the poorest children could find a realistic, material path to the transmutation of their divine gifts into a profitable, impactful life and livelihood.
A world in which none of us could look away at humans just like us having to sleep outside in the rain, or in the freezing, biting winds of winter. A world in which peace, harmony and prosperity truly are the material experience of all of us.
Don’t Hold Him Up
I have to believe this world is possible because the alternative is to go completely numb, to give zero f*cks and allow my soul to dry out, a cold, dry vapor above a body concerned only with the amassing of material wealth for myself and my immediate family.
And so because I still somehow, after all these years, believe that this New World is not only possible, but imminent, I stopped at that last protest sign. Though I’d previously felt like there was nothing I could really do to help, I thought the least I could do was to take pictures of the signs and share them.
I found these signs incredibly poignant.
Photographing, one by one, the many signs hanging from the fence on the Elm St. side of the Green, I heard the ambulance and I could no longer hold back the tears.
Tears for the acknowledgement of a God that is still real even if They allow these sufferings to persist. Tears for all the babies who have never experienced peace. Tears for the unhoused person being held by others in his same predicament as the EMT called out to them with such disdain, “Don’t hold him up.”
He is Us, Us is Him
I guess homelessness strikes a particular chord with me because I know how close I have been to that fate. Because I know that even with my Yale degree, even with my Cambridge stint, I could easily have ended up like that man on the Green fighting for his life. If not for the Godsent grace and generosity…If not for the kindness and vision of strangers like John Motley…If not for my sister, these people who embrace me and look out for me and my daughter, even as I devote each waking breath to pushing the needle forward on the materialization of this New World… If not for this Love, I could easily be that man on the Green.
And so could you.
The line between wealth and poverty is as thin as the stroke of a pen.
We are socialized to blame the poor. Blame the poor for their poverty. Blame the poor for criminality. Blame the poor for their drug addiction. Blame the poor for their homelessness. We challenge the poor to do better, learn more, make more money, get out of the “hood”. And this works a very small percentage of the time. That percentage of people who do make it out of the “hood”.
“An edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
MLK Jr.
But the question remains, as so many social scientists have sought to understand and explain: why does the “hood” still exist, at least as currently manifested? If there’s nothing else I’ve come to accept from my social science research, it’s that people don’t fail—systems fail people.
Because the truth is that societies have existed that were not plagued by the kind of suffering that we have normalized in these recent generations.
There have been working systems in which, at minimum, no one had to die from drug-induced seizures in the open-air, public-space-encampment they’d made home—with nothing to their name.
Homelessness just seems to me like the one thing all humans should agree on as a crime against humanity. I think we could all agree that even the least among us deserve a place to sleep, to rest, to bathe, away from the elements.
Defacing the Mirage
By the time I arrived at MakeHaven, my face-beat was totally made into a mess, the emotions I’d been stifling for so long having erupted in a flood of tears against my will.
As I sit here at Pistachio writing this, hoping no one notices how bad I need a new beat, I’m reminded that there are incredibly powerful forces beyond our control. That no matter how long we seek to hold back the impoverished, no matter how many police officers we mobilize to contain the pain of the marginalized, eventually there comes a day when they can no longer be held back, when nothing we do will stop the overwhelming flood of their sadness turned to rage.
On that day, even our most perfectly contoured visage will be defaced.
I can only hope and pray that enough of us will join hands, that we will build enough power, that that day will not need to come. I can only pray that sooner than later, we uproot all our manufactured bureaucracies and do what it takes to truly end the forms that foster such unimaginable poverty.
I for one am prepared to work with anyone whose heart is as heavy with the suffering of the world as it is compelled to change it.
One love.
“If you have come because your Liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Lilla Watson
