Today I walked past a man wrapped in a blanket sleeping on the sidewalk. I walked past him. I can't imagine what his night was like. My ears hurt from having to walk a few blocks to work.
Did he have a tent at some point and our police cut it with razors and threw it away? I don't know, but I do know that they do this. They take homeless people's tents away from them, and cut them, and throw them away.
We have money to bomb other poor people but not to house our own, and then we go and we take their tents away and destroy them.
And I walked past him.
He was next to a gas station. Just a few yards away were houses, warm cozy houses like the one I woke up in this morning. If he broke a window to climb into one, he'd likely go to jail, and then be fed and housed. Instead he wrapped a blanket around himself, and lay on the cold sidewalk overnight.
And that's where he still was this morning, when I walked past him.
I don't know what to do. We complain, we demonstrate, we vote, we volunteer, but he still had nowhere to go last night, and it keeps getting worse and I can't keep walking past him.
And tomorrow, I'll walk past him again.
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