At first glance, what do you see?
I would not have noticed but for my daughter. She was driving me to the Portland Union Train Station to catch a train to Seattle. Going up Burnside, she suddenly stopped in the middle of the street and her hand reached across my face, angling back a tiny bit, to take a photo. My first reaction was to look behind me to see if her stopping in the street was interrupting traffic or might possibly cause an accident. And then, feeling a tiny bit irritated that my space had been violated with her hand thrust in front of my face, I asked, “What are you doing?”
She said, “There’s a person in that pile of garbage.” My response was, “Nooo. No there isn’t.”
By then she had driven on. She handed me her phone and said, “Blow it up.” When I increased the size of the photo, indeed, there was a person sleeping in that pile of garbage. Oh, my. Oh, my! In that moment, questions flashed past me. Is she (or he) alive? Had those been her possessions and her place to sleep the night before, and had the city officials torn it down, like they did repeatedly, and shoved it to the side of the road to be picked up by the garbage collector? Or had that simply been where, in desperation and exhaustion — or in a drug-addicted haze — she found a moment of rest? I even had the horrifying imagining of a backhoe or Bobcat scooping up this pile of trash and throwing it into a dumpster. Oh, my.
When I first saw this picture on my daughter’s phone, the writing was not yeet on the wall. But let it be on your wall.
DO NOT THROW ME AWAY!
I don’t know the story of this person buried in a garbage heap. Nor the stories of the thousands of other homeless folks who sleep on the streets across America, a country whose richest could provide food, housing, medical care, and mental health care for every individual in this country. But I know in my heart that that person did not choose to be in this heap of trash. But they’re there, and they’re suffering. And my daughter sees them. She sees them when they’re invisible to others.
Do you know her story, this person buried in that trash heap? Of course you don’t. Have you passed judgment? Possibly. Could it be that maybe she’s only 15 years old, and she finally fled the nightly rapes by her stepfather, only to find herself on the streets of Portland, homeless, with no resources. Or was she so desperate to escape constant emotional or physical abuse that living on the streets was preferable?
Or did he have chronic pain from an injury or congenital defect for which a doctor prescribed him Oxycontin? And then his doctor’s license was yanked or he himself couldn’t get relief from the prescribed dose, so he turned to street heroin which took him down.
Does she have a severe mental illness, no fault of her own, just the run-of-the-mill chemical imbalance in the brain that exasperated her parents and school personnel to the point that her parents kick her out for her obstreperous behavior? Did she suffer from severe clinical depression?
Was she simply experimenting with drugs, never thinking she’d become an addict?
The list of scenarios is endless for how this person ended up in a trash heap.
Should the story that left them homeless matter? Does it matter if it’s a boy or a girl, a old man or a middle-aged mother? I don’t think so. What matters is they are there on our streets. That’s the current chapter of their story that you can see. And it is a symbol of the state of our society.
But possibly a more important question is what is your story? How we perceive things alters what we see. How did you end up blinded and unable to see society’s pain? How did you lose your compassion, your empathy? How did you come to hold your possessions and riches so close to your heart and give them more value than this young person’s life? How did you come to be afraid to look at society’s discards?
Are you aware of where your beliefs and prejudices came from? Are you aware of the historiological slant to information provided to you? Are you aware of the agreements you unconsciously made from birth to think the way you do? How many of your beliefs are based on assumptions? Or centuries-old myths? At what point did you start to lose sight of your feelings, your empathy, your compassion?
I don’t know the story of that person in the trash heap. I do know how and why my daughter saw this person and why she notices those who have been overlooked, why she notices the ones who are invisible to others. She notices the ones who are dope sick and the ones who are clean and sober but mentally unstable. She doesn’t discriminate. She notices the pain in our society when too many of us look the other way.
She notices because she used to be a drug addict living on the streets of Portland. As the chemical cocktails rearranged her brain chemistry, she began to hear voices (which she continues to struggle with today), she says, that told her, “Don’t stick that needle in your arm.” She is one of too few who got clean and sober, by a miracle or through grace and a few caring people who gave her a kind word and emotional support.
From that experience, she started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Mudblosm Connections (https://mudblosmconnections.org/) to help the homeless and those financially distressed in the Portland area. She collects donations of clothes and food and distributes them regularly, sometimes person to person, tent to tent, sometimes in organized events in downtown Portland parks.
She finally convinced just one local grocery store to let her pick up their expired and almost expired food instead of throwing it in the dumpster. Every day, seven days a week, she picks it up and drives it to seven different organizations including a senior housing project, several nonprofit organizations providing transitional housing and counseling, and organizations providing a cooked meal to the needy. Last year alone, she collected and distributed 100,000 pounds of food just from that one store that would otherwise have thrown it away! As an example, her first-ever pickup included 102 gallons of milk, four cases of frozen meats, boxes of bakery goods and piles of plastic food trays of various fruits and cut vegetables.
It costs her $600 a month for gas and car insurance to do this selfless job which is paid for by small monthly contributions from caring folks and from recycling cans and bottles. Still a fledgling organization, no one is paid a salary. They hope to eventually receive grant money to expand and to pay for the selfless labor involved in saving good food from the landfills and providing that same food to those in need. Mr. Bezos? Mr. Musk? Mr. Gates? Anybody want to help?
I’ve accompanied my daughter on a wet winter day, handing out socks, food, and jackets to the homeless huddled in their tents under the bridges, the racket of cars thrumping overhead and the echo of cars traversing the darkened streets below those bridges. I’ve been with her when she’s noticed a young couple huddled on a curb, shivering in the damp Portland winter. She took the time to stop and talk to them. She reached into her trunk and gave them jackets, and then before leaving, she took off her own boots and gave them to the girl who was wearing thin, wet canvas sneakers.
I know the stories of the richest of the rich by observing how they live in mansions large enough to house a small town; that they have their private jets and yachts and limousines in which to travel in luxury. That they have closets bigger than the room I rent in a four-bedroom house, because I can’t afford my own house. That they eat the finest foods only at the finest restaurants and drink $1,000 bottles of wine. I know they don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
I know that our federal government spent $916 billion in 2023 to fight wars in other countries or to provide military assets to countries to attack other countries and render their lands unlivable. I know that finally in January of 2024, $3.16 billion was allotted to programs to help the homeless, of which the state of Oregon received approximately $60 million. I know that too much of that money will be spent on more studies.
I know the largest contributor to homelessness is affordable housing. I know that corporations are buying up properties to bolster their bottom line, and I know homeowners are choosing to rent their second homes as Air BnBs. I know poverty is the number one cause of homelessness. I know that the largest number of homeless are African Americans. Thirty percent of the homeless are families with children. I know these facts.
I understand the circumstances that can un-house a person and how it is so very difficult to get into a new apartment: one needs a first, a last, and a cleaning deposit, coming to as little as (or as much as) needing $5,000, depending upon where you live. When a person’s total income after taxes might be no more than $2300 a month, if that, and now with a history of eviction, it becomes insurmountable to get into a new apartment. I know 30% of the homeless are families.
I know there’s a sense of hopelessness, not only in our country but around the world, heightened by climate change and war.
What I don’t know is why humans treat others the way they do. Other than I know that historiologically, the dissemination of human history continues to promulgate fear, hatred, and otherness. The self-destruct button is hit with each iteration. Drugs, wars, gangs, homelessness. Bad actors in multiple countries around the world are murdering and subjugating their citizens or, like Netanyahu and Putin, are trying to wipe their neighbors off the face of the earth. None of it’s new to human history. Wars and murder and subjugation are what constitute history. It is the human legacy, precipitated by greed, hatred, and delusion. We seem to be an evolutionary species gone haywire and heading to extinction.
Generosity, loving kindness, and wisdom are not measurable attributes to be found in a government study, but I believe they are the cure, already present within the human heart. It requires each of us to notice the invisible. It requires each of us to love our neighbor who is, like me, a spiritual being having a human experience. Within my human experience, I can choose to experience the joy of loving kindness, generosity, empathy and compassion.
This photo is a symbol of what is extant in our society. To the drumbeat of certain politicians, we are separated by fear. We are separated by greed. Stories for millennia have supported this scenario. Our Constitution was written by and for white landowners, those with money, to protect what they declared to be theirs alone. To this day, its interpretation is supported by the same biased group of individuals to protect the interests of predominantly white and monied citizens, but not the poor, the colored, the disenfranchised. Those who want power and live in fear, defend their right to possess firearms, an amendment enacted to protect the rights of slave owners to subdue a rebellion. They defend the Electoral College, again, an archaic amendment that gave greater voting power to slave owners. To this day, the Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified to give women equal rights, and now, those in power are stripping away even more rights of women.
We suffer under these laws to the point of being numb to the egregiousness of their perpetuity and frustrated against the power of those in control. Maybe for our own sanity, we stop listening to the news depicting the murder and destruction of people by stronger, greedier, more evil country leaders. Maybe we turn away from the garbage heaps on the side of the road because … because why? Because you fear or hate what you see? Or because you feel there’s nothing that can be done? Because you’re waiting for a government (controlled still by the wealthy and white) to take action? Maybe you wonder why you should even care?
I believe you should care because this young person hidden in this garbage heap on the side of a downtown city street is a symbol of the state of our society. It’s a symbol of a collapsed society. Maybe that knowledge produces too much fear and helplessness to look at it straight on, so we drive on by. Oh, my.
I believe when we shift our perceptions and beliefs to be inclusive, to be nonjudgmental, to be compassionate and caring, that only then can we find the path to heal the suffering of others and ourselves. It’s within each of us to heal the ills of our society by healing ourselves.
My daughter took this picture. She printed it. And she wrote across the top of it: DO NOT THROW ME AWAY
I also plea: Do not throw away your ability to feel compassion and empathy and generosity and loving kindness. Do not throw away your ability to question authority. Do not throw away the ever-present need to investigate where your prejudices and beliefs have come from, especially when they diminish or discard another’s rights to enjoy basic human rights. Do not throw away your ability to discern good and bad. Do not discard or diminish the will, courage, and heart to change those beliefs and to right perceived wrongs.