I just had my second total knee replacement surgery. It knocks you for a loop. While I haven’t followed much news these past few weeks, except for national headlines, I did tuck aside a couple of small items to write about when I got back to my desk. These are taken from the local police log, which is published in our newspaper.
The first one is about a woman who called the police to report that her cat was missing. Apparently, the act of calling the police triggered a desire to comment on the local homeless population. She had been giving that matter some thought, and asked to speak to an officer about it (before she reported her cat missing).
“Why can’t all those homeless people go back to living in the jungle?” she wanted to know. “Why can’t they go back to the jungle instead of living in my back yard?”
I’m curious to know the connection this woman is making between homeless people and the jungle. Homeless people in our area are a mix of young and old, male and female, drug addicts and poor people. They don’t arrive here from foreign lands. They are from here. And we don’t have any jungles.
Is the term, “the jungle,” meant to connote something of a benign prison in her mind? A place where the lost and the least can be out of sight and out of mind while the rest of us go about our business?
Her words serve as a concrete illustration of what our brains often do when confronted with a disturbance in the perceptual field: they try to sweep it away. In order to keep our world familiar and comfortable, when something other than the ordinary appears, the brain jumps to the conclusion that it doesn’t belong.
Given a thoughtful pause, however, the brain will take a different approach. It will find an existing category where the new phenomenon fits, or it will create a new perceptual category where this event belongs. In fact, the brain would much rather expand to include a new perceptual experience, than dismiss it as a fleeting disturbance.
In a world made for living as equals, we need to take those thoughtful pauses. They allow us to think of other responses besides shutting down. There are many possibilities, including providing the homeless in our own backyards with food, socks, blankets and information about nearby social services. Or offering a touch of human kindness, as in saying, “Hello. My name is ______. How are you doing today?”
Even when we have no desire to be of direct help, we can pay attention to news stories that explore the causes of poverty in this country. We can take enough interest in the issue to go beyond the small inventions of our own minds (i.e., “the jungle”), and listen to what people who have researched this issue extensively have to say. Many brains besides our own are coming up with creative solutions to the problems we see around us. We need to know how others are solving the problem and how their solutions are working.
The second item that caught my attention in the police log was one of those neighbor-to-neighbor events. Nothing happened. No words were spoken. And that might be the cause of the problem.
The caller wanted it logged in the police record that a neighbor had given her a “nasty look.” There were no verbal threats, no aggressive gestures. Just the look. She told the police she is afraid of him. Although she doesn’t know his name, she knows he is from Chicago, and she knows the murder rate there is high. So she called the police to report him.
When did we become so socially constipated that we fear saying hello to a neighbor, and keep our handshake in reserve for a select few? This incident makes me want to refer people back to my “Weavers” article (3/14/19). The failure to communicate with one another cordially is contributing to the divisions among us.
A world of pleasant interaction opens up when we talk to one another, rather than keeping one another at arm’s length. What does it cost us to look a neighbor in the eye, to say our name, to say hello, to say, “I’m glad to meet you. How are you?” Regardless of what TV news or Twitter or Facebook says about how divided we are, each one of us can repair the breach. Each one of us can create a society of equals just by saying hello.
