Not Enough

I just got out of the shower.  My hair is still dripping, in fact.

I'm not saying this to be sexy.

I took a shower because I smelled like stale urine and roach spray and, frankly, I felt dirty.

Today I delivered meals to elderly clients.  It's the volunteer work that I do every week, my way of "giving back to my community."  It was hot and oppressive today,  but I felt good:  the kidlets are doing well in school, I'll be working with the school's environmental club with a lady I think a lot of--who incidentally works with a performing arts school at which I'll be taking pictures soon.  I was so tickled with myself, so pleased to be part of a circle that felt like it was coming together.

Then I got to the home of one of my clients.  Her home doesn't have air conditioning, just two fans that circulate the stagnant air.  When I got there, she was slumped in her chair, struggling with something.

I went in and she said, "I need some help, baby."

She needed help to get her pants on.  Her underwear was twisted and tangled around one leg.  Her pants were also twisted.  Neither garment was clean.  She said, "I just need to pull them up."

I tried for a few moments and then I said, "Let's start all over."  And I knelt down and pulled off her underwear and pants and lifted her feet into her clothes and helped her stand up and get everything situated correctly.

Understand:  I didn't do this to be charitable.  I did it because humans have a need to be clothed and I could fill that need for her.  It wasn't kindness.  It was humanity.

Back in her chair, she seemed disoriented.  "Do you need something else?"  I asked.  She needed water.

I went into her kitchen, which was crawling with roaches.  Her freezer was filled with ice:  ice in the broken ice maker, ice in bowls, ice in trays.  I got her ice water and brought it back to her.  She gulped it down, her hands shaking.

"I'm worried about you," I said.  "Are you too hot?"

She struggled to tell me that she was fine, that she could call her daughter if she needed help.  So I left her there to deliver another meal.

I delivered the next meal.  It was hot outside.  It was viciously hot and all I could think about was my other client, slumped in her chair and telling me that she didn't feel hot at all, that she didn't get hot anymore.

I went back.  I did not do this to be kind or charitable.  I did it because she was a fellow human being who needed help.  I called 911 as I did so, because in all honesty, I felt like she might be in dire straits when I got to her house.  The operator waiting for me, I went inside the dark, hot, bug-ridden house and called for my client.  She was in her bedroom.  She needed help with her shirt, because her granddaughter was coming to take her to pay bills.

I got her back to her chair.  "You came back to see about me," she said.

"Yes," I said, hanging up with the 911 operator.  I rearranged her shirt so that it covered her body.  I squatted down by her chair and held her hand, which was so hot in mine that it gave me chills.

"You feel hot to me.  Are you sure your granddaughter is coming?"

"Yeah, baby.  She's coming.  I know what to do if I feel bad.  I'll call 911."

She wanted me to leave.  I could feel that.  And because humans need dignity, I went back to my own house.  

And then I took a shower, to wash the stink of her home off of me.

Here's the thing:  our politicians can talk all they want about "tar babies" and "terrorists."  They can tell us that they want to defeat the president or create jobs or deal with the debt ceiling.  Members of organizations with the word "heritage" in the name can release documents that "prove" that the poor in America have homes with televisions and refrigerators, and so how in the world can the government call them poor?  Citizens who claim to follow a man who said that his followers would be judged by their treatment of the poor and sick and incarcerated can put money in the offering plate to send teenagers on missions to foreign countries so they can see what real poverty is like and they can do their god's work.  Progressives can blather on and on about the New Deal and how the Tea Party is destroying the social contract and blah blah blah.

BLAH BLAH BLAH, y'all.

It is not enough.  It is not nearly enough.  You want to see poverty?  You want to know how people who are poor and sick and alone live? You want to know how those blasted entitlements make people "live like kings?"  You come with me.  You help a woman pull her dirty panties up so she can go pay her electric bill so that the two fans and refrigerator that provide her the only respite she has from the punishing, cruel, awful heat of a Georgia summer can keep running.  Lay off pontificating on Facebook and Google + about all of the injustices you see because of politicians or folks who mooch off the system or who don't understand the system or hypocrites or conservatives or liberals.  Get your body so dirty with poverty that you have to wash it off when you get back to your air-conditioned, roach-free home.

You think I'm trying to shame you or that I'm tooting my own horn?  I'm not.  Because what I'm doing isn't enough, either.  How many more millions of people live like my client, within a stone's throw of a church, within a stone's throw of her neighbor?  How many people live like me, worried about the economy, but tapping away with righteous indignation on my computer?  Many, I'd venture to say.

Too many of us for there to be not enough in our country.