Just Be Nice!

Was outside on a city street on a beautiful summer morning. It was pretty early in the morning so the streets were quiet, but I saw a man walking towards me from a long way away. As he got close I said:

“Good morning.”

He ignored me.

Last time out there were only two golfers in my group, and we were playing behind four guys who were playing as if their round was being televised.

They saw us waiting to take every shot, and golf etiquette says that they should’ve let us pass.

They ignored us.

Blared their music, took as much time as they wanted on every green, and knelt down to line up putts that they had zero chance of holing.

It’s apparent that the country appears to be on edge and there is a sense of entitlement around and about.

Kindness is in short supply and it is born of the political divide.

Unity?

Not looking like it’s possible.

On Thursday, President Biden made a political speech, calling out the nastiness of the MAGA, and a strange thing happened.

He was blatantly criticized for being divisive!

By a group of people who have raged at every single group of people who don’t look or think like them.

Weird time to be alive.

It’s all so confusing.

And then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks:

The homeless man asleep by the old Children’s Hospital. The man sleeps on what used to be the ramp leading to the back entrance of the hospital. He has a sleeping bag, a shopping cart filled with cans and clothes and any item he can scavenge.

What stopped me in my tracks was a huge canister of generic creamy peanut butter.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And my heart sank because he’s a human being in the richest country in the world.

He sleeps on concrete, eats from that jar, and walks the street looking for discarded items that he might find useful.

That’s sad enough.

You know what’s worse?

The people who are comfortable enough to ignore him, or worse, those who don’t feel he even deserves to live.

Way too many Americans, who pretend to pray to Jesus, wouldn’t even spit on that poor man.

He was sound asleep yesterday morning.

I eased over to where his inventory of food was staged, and slipped 3 one-dollar bills under the can.

Not much.

But I wanted him, when he woke up, to notice that someone noticed him.