By David Wilkinson
This week our 22-year-old daughter watched President Obama’s second State of the Union address from an interesting vantage point — a men’s shelter in the Southside neighborhood of Tucson, Ariz.
Two evenings a week Meredith assists the small staff at the Primavera Shelter that every night houses more than 100 men. Many have jobs, but most are underemployed and the majority are at least temporarily homeless. Some struggle with addictions; some with mental illness. They cope with broken dreams and broken families. A surprising number are college-educated, some with advanced degrees. Some have had professional careers.
Meredith’s experience in Tucson and elsewhere is that the “homeless population” is no more homogeneous than other subsets of American society. Their stories have common themes, but the stories are as complex and unique as the individuals who have lived them.
I don’t know how the President’s address played in Peoria, but I was interested in Meredith’s perceptions of how it played at the men’s shelter in Tucson.
The experience was “kind of bizarre,” she said, but not for the reasons one might think.
Some 50 or 60 residents of the shelter watched at least portions of the president’s address on the flat-screen television in the dining hall. A few watched the entire speech. Most wandered in and out.
The level of interest ran the gamut, but the tone was largely respectful. A few offered an occasional comment on what they heard. Following a few presidential pledges about steps toward economic recovery, Meredith had to chuckle when one resident shook his head and announced sarcastically, “Hell, I feel richer already!”
Humor aside, Meredith couldn’t help but look around her and wonder what difference grand ideas in the nation’s capital really would make for these men. “Most of them have no reason to believe that anything in their lives will change tomorrow or the next week or the next month,” she said. “The system — by whatever definition — has always seemed to work against them rather than for them.”
Sitting next to her was an 89-year-old military veteran Meredith has been working with for three-and-a-half months. A large percentage of the men who stay at the shelter are veterans. When Obama spoke movingly of the need to honor the men and women serving today in the armed forces, Meredith looked at the weathered face of her friend and wondered about all those like him who fought on yesterday’s battlefields, who struggle every day with the physical and mental consequences, yet are largely forgotten by the country they served.
Later, as she and a couple other interns bicycled through the darkness back to their apartment, Meredith reflected on another “bizarre” dimension of that evening’s experience. Watching the State of the Union address with 50 or so homeless men “it didn’t feel at all like it was ‘them and me’,” she said. “It felt like something we were just doing together on a Tuesday night.”
That might have something to do with the rapport she has established with people she refuses to call “clients.” My guess is that Meredith is one of the few people these men encounter week in and week out who looks into their eyes and actually listens to their stories.
I forgot to ask how the men at the shelter reacted to the president’s comment that while spending cuts are necessary to help trim the national deficit, “Let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.”
That led me to wonder about some other things: How they might respond to the prosperity gospel proclaimed from many television pulpits? Would they get a sarcastic chuckle out of the mental gymnastics on display as middle-class professionals try to maneuver around one of Jesus’ very pointed comments about money and material possessions in a Sunday-school class? How easily would they see through my own prejudices toward people who are poor and marginalized?
I doubt the residents of the Primavera Shelter for men in Tucson, Ariz., are likely to be asked their opinions about politics or religion by anyone in positions of leadership in either of those categories. On the other hand, they would make a really interesting focus group.