Feeding Friends

Last night I volunteered at the local homeless shelter. I helped serve a spaghetti dinner, stayed the night and then prepared bagels and juice for breakfast. It's technically a 'heat shelter' not a formal homeless shelter, but it's all that's available in my community. Persons with nowhere to go get a place to sleep out of the cold, but they have to vacate in the morning, which is just as well I suppose. I hated forcing everyone out into the cold freezing rain, but force them I did. One person even tried to hide in a closet to avoid lockup. Of the homeless in my community I was surprised to learn that most of them have jobs. Not great paying jobs, but at least many of them are working somewhere. Nobody appeared mentally ill or pathologically hopeless, but I have to admit I didn't make any big effort to get to know any of them. I passed out bedding materials, answered their questions, but mostly I just left them alone. And I expect that's how they wanted to be treated.

I was provided a cot to sleep on too, but I stayed up all night in a back room and read all of Cormac McCarthy's The Road cover to cover.  It's a great book, recommended to me by a friend, and I'd recommend it to anyone.  It was dark to be sure - a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which a man and his son simply try to survive in a world where the final remnants of society have devolved into cutthroat gangs of slavers and cannibals.  It's a world where every action is a contest for survival in a zero-sum game.   Share a crust of bread with another, and you'll probably just starve to death sooner - and that's assuming that the other doesn't try to kill you, take all you have and eat you just for good measure.

It makes me think about humanity, society and what holds us together.  As ugly as the world seems whenever you turn on the news, it's truly amazing how much we actually get along.  It's not that I wouldn't kill you and take your stuff if I believed I had no other option for survival - I would.  It's just that as humans we are amazing in our capacity to find other options.  We usually invent non-zero-sum strategies wherever possible.  Given all of our differences and disagreements it certainly could be a lot worse out there.