Sixty-four seems a pretty insignificant number. And yet it struck me mightily when the Press Herald reported that was the number of homeless people who died in Portland in 2020.
What the devil is wrong with us? It can’t be that we are unaware of tragedy, that we are unmoved by such a happening among us, that we have forgotten “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Maybe it’s just that we wish to close our eyes to such awful reality.
More than one in every 10 Americans are poor, a significant number of them homeless. Just over the last half-year, nearly 8 million have joined the ranks of the poor.
Some quarter-century back, a group of us anti-poverty workers in New Hampshire met on a blustery Christmas Eve to recite the names of the homeless who had died during that year. We mourned the promises unkept to the poor, the homeless, the unwanted, the forgotten
All this time later, the promises remain unkept. The poor remain poor. Homeless folks remain on the street. Hungry Maine kids are unfed.
In this season of love and sharing, let us consider how we failed the 64 who died. The youngest was 22, the oldest 80. Two froze to death on the street.
As a new year dawns, it seems we all have a lot of work to do.
Norman Abelson
Moody
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