INSIGHTS…

Early today at a weekly Wednesday morning “date”  with a small circle of special friends,  talk began around what we would be doing for Thanksgiving before our conversation turned from personal to political issues. We often talk politics on Wednesday mornings, and today someone wondered out loud if the cut in food stamps for poor families will make a difference in many San Diego families and to people who are homeless. Will they be able to go to food banks and rescue missions to get a special meal?  I was on the edge of mentioning that Margaret and I have agreed to prepare and deliver two dozen deviled eggs to Joshua House for Thanksgiving lunch, but I stopped myself before I said something that would have shown me to be the shallow, thoughtless person that I can be sometimes. I suddenly realized that what I was about to say would have been more what I will do to make me feel good than about my doing something meaningful and long-term for people who are trapped in homelessness. 

As we often exclaim from inside the very small world where we live… mostly, “Don’t get me wrong...”  I’m not saying that little acts of kindness and small responses to immediate needs of others are not helpful and shouldn’t be done. What I was about to say was something much more personal than that and should have made me blush even to think it.  What I suddenly saw in myself was a man who can afford to have all the deviled eggs and turkey and any other food he can conjure in his dreams on the edge of boasting about making and delivering to homeless people forty-eight halves of boiled eggs filled with egg salad. Wow!  How noble is that?  While it’s a “nice” thing to do, it doesn’t begin to address the very real problem of homelessness or hunger in our city and in our country.  So I’ve been thinking lately about how enormous the problem is…  and my thinking was brought more into focus in conversation about Thanksgiving with my coffee mates this morning… and also by Simon Holzapfel of New Lebanon, New York, with whom I had lunch. The scope of world problems is wide and includes hunger and other deprivations, especially for children.  Simon and I share a special interest in providing appropriate education for the young.

Simon, whom I met for the first time today, is headmaster at Darrow School, a post I held more than a quarter of a century ago. We have a lot in common.  Although we had just met today,  I came away from lunch with the feeling one often gets from spending time with a longtime friend. On his iPhone he showed me a small video of his children, taken inside familiar Whitaker House, the headmaster’s residence that was built by Shakers in 1784.  We talked about our concerns for high school kids living in boarding school away from homes all over the country…  all over the world, actually. I told him about Cody, the big dog we had when we lived in Whitaker House… Cody who loved the kids at the school as much they loved him.  We talked about what a special place Darrow was then and is now. We had a good time.

None of us today came up with solutions to world problems… or, for that matter, even for problems of any one person among the poorest people in my city… people whom I don’t know and whom I am not likely to know the way I know my coffee buddies and Simon.  Our separation from “the others” by invisible social fences keeps us clustered together with people who are very much like us. We have little reason to break out from our clusters of neighborhoods and jobs and churches. Living comfortably in our clusters keeps us from knowing how devastating poverty is for the desperately poor… the people who don’t know anything at all about cheerful baristas who ask if we want dark roast or blond… tall, grande, or venti as we hand over the gold card which has on it our money and our prestige.