Opinion: A gesture too small, a crisis too big - oregonlive.com - 0 views
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I am sitting on a chair outside a restaurant in Salem. Perhaps 10 feet from me is a woman who is standing in the middle of the sidewalk peeing in her pants. I see the urine turn the cloth of her jeans dark, then drip out from her trousers to the ground. The woman is perhaps 60 years old, but you know how it goes—hard lives make for hard faces, so perhaps she’s younger. What is certain is that there is a deficit here: a person not only without a home, but now without a dry pair shoes or pants.
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None of them look at the woman. There are a few grimaces as they catch her scent, which even from where I sit is quite strong.
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I wonder about the growing chasm between rich and poor, the choices people face between hunger and medicine, the growing parade of the ragged and downtrodden pushing carts filled with cardboard and rags.
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According to the statistics, 1309 of them were unaccompanied young adults, 1363 of them were veterans, 1108 were families who could not find affordable housing, and more than 4000 were considered chronically homeless: people who have lived on the street for years without the resources or wherewithal to find their way into a home. It is hard to escape their makeshift shelters. It is harder to escape the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong
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Set it beside her quietly, not so that I don’t wake her but so I don’t have to speak to her. I don’t want the responsibility of that interaction. I don’t want the obligations it could bring.