So, I work downtown, and one of the issues that we all have to get used to when we work downtown are the homeless people begging. I have mostly gotten used to it, particularly how the numbers seem to go up and down which I find to be a much more predictable indiciator of the economy than whatever the hell a politician or economist is saying on TV or whatever the dow Jones is.
Of course the homeless people, occasionally give me feelings of guilt and I may try to hand one here or there a little bit of money or buy them a sandwich before I remember that despite how I am dressed, I actually can't afford to take care of myself much less feed every down on his luck person you see downtown. I am telling you it gets really rough near the end of the days because there will be at least two to three per block. However it is jsut one of the things about work and like I wrote in the last time its all about keeping your eye on the ball of our long term plans and what we want to actually do for the people.
However, there is one thing that did shake me today. I got approached by a homeless person begging for food that was just about my age. I know it may not seem like much, but for me it is very rare to see someone who is still quite young but adult who has nothing else to do but to ask for more money on the street. The saddest thing about it was that you could see that he was quite young because of the way he was dressed and worse of all was that he hadn't quite given in to begging on the street because you could still see his pride was choking the words, but he was hungry. I couldn't help but think about how different paths can take us. I mean just over the past couple of weeks I have seen so many of my old friends from high school and such doing well. Hell even most of Whitney Young's "problem" students are doing pretty well right now, but with a few changes life can turn out so different. See this dude wasn't extra thugged out, he looked like anyone that I could have known from anywhere. He picked out the people he approached carefully, so when he walked up to me at first I thought it was someone I knew from somewhere around the way, until I got a shot of the reality. Not like there is anything I could do but I just couldn't shake it... It killed me...
Unfortunately, I only had a twenty, so I couldn't even help... Not even sure that I should have... it's just damn...
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