Homeless

15 Jul Homeless

Lately, I have been traveling across the USA. This journey has been a wonderful learning experience from many aspects. But the most glaring experience has been living a Nomadic life, without a home base, just moving from one town to the other, not knowing where I will go and where I will stay. But in this process, I learned how privileged I have been to have the capability and the resources to move and live wherever I wanted to live within reasonable means. That triggered this thought in my mind, what if I didn’t have the money and a car to go with me. What would I do? What if I had such limited resources that I couldn’t afford a comfortable air-conditioned place when it’s 110 degrees F outside?

Sometimes what we take for granted, doesn’t come easy for many people across the globe. Life is very difficult for billions of people around the world. And for millions, life is filled with so many comforts that they don’t know what to do with it. What if we can share or swap the abundance with scarcity? Will poverty and homelessness go away? I seriously doubt it.

I am sure there are thousands of research papers written on this topic and obviously, no one has been able to find an answer to this question. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and thousands or millions of smaller local organizations like Friends of Sparsh and people like us have spent trillions of dollars to eliminate poverty around the globe but we hardly see any impact at the macro level. I see thousands of homeless people all across the US, in every big city and small town. No place is spared.

Answers are very complex and I am sure this problem will not be solved in my lifetime, but imagine if these millions of philanthropic organizations and people didn’t do anything, where would these people go. I believe there will be utter chaos, civil unrest, and human suffering at a scale that will jeopardize human existence. So in effect, organizations like Friends of Sparsh and common privileged people like us are doing what my initial thought was about sharing and swapping the abundance with scarcity.

Homelessness and poverty so far are maintained in the US at equilibrium, to prevent it from reaching a tipping point of chaos and unrest like we have seen in some poor countries like Somalia, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Ethiopia, and many others. Wealth and poverty have to equalize each other and maintain a balance where people at both ends of the spectrum can survive until we find an answer. We all have a role to play in keeping this equilibrium. This is not an ideal situation but at least let us do our part at the micro-level of this social nightmare caused by us humans.

It is imperative for the human race to survive, we have to be willing to lift the lives of others who are not born in or live a privileged life. If we abandon them, we will no longer exist. And that’s my take.