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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