everyday when we get up we can make a difference to the world by making a difference to somebody's world.
unfortunately we often fail to grasp these opportunities, which results in continued suffering for people who could really do without it and a little bit of our humanity ebbing away...
i just put the heating on cause im sneezing from the rain last night. we were out walking the streets of belfast and met a few people who were also soaking wet.
but with no home to go back to and our city's homeless service providers passing the buck of who should be trying to get them into a shelter it was looking pretty bleak. Jack was considering an industrial bin as his best chance of some sleep, the streets like us were sodden...
They may not have been angels, pauline had been evicted from a house, jack had been in and out of jail and colin didn't say much but from the way he flinched any time anyone moved around him im guessing his story wasn't so happy... but does that make them any less human? does that mean they should be left to rot on the streets. These were kind and generous people, warm and welcoming souls. Jack's brother had been found frozen to death and his sister murdered in 6months... they are real. I would say not just a statistic but belfast doesn't even bother to try and count its rough sleepers so their not even a statistic here...
and yeah its great to talk to these people for a few hours or give them some food or money or even take them home for a night but it does fuck all in terms of addressing the bigger problem... they still wake up with nothing to do, nowhere to go and huge addiction issues which are relatively simple and cheap to feed...
why do we tolerate it? why when the stockbrokers have a bad day do they get offered 700 billion when about 20 would give clean drinking water to the poorest of the poor?
i think we mostly tolerate it because we don't know what to do and our elected candidates don't know what to do and there are lots of pressing issues which take up more than the time we have. but thats not good enough, what are we going to tell our children when they ask us why we let the more vulnerable members of our society freeze to death outside our workplaces and shops?
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