Just like Counting Crows are the band by which I remember my Spain semester, Matchbox Twenty has become my band of JVC. I know what you’re thinking—What is this, 1996?—but I see no reason why nineties music should stay in the nineties. I’ve liked Matchbox Twenty for a long time, but this new kick actually began with Spirituality Night back in November or so—the one where we each played a song that was meaningful to us. Lorraine’s song was “Long Day” from Yourself or Someone Like You. As we listened I realized that I had never really heard the lyrics before.
“Reach down your hand in your pocket,
pull out some hope for me—
It’s been a long day,
always
ain’t that right.”
This song has sort of become my anthem of the year. There are many days when I blast it on my headphones on my way home from work and just give myself over to the music. I feel like it contains some important truth in it for me… like, yeah, there is a lot in the world that just plain sucks, and that’s not something you can just gloss over. Sometimes you have to embrace it for what it is—surrender yourself to the madness all around you, until someone comes along with a pocketful of hope for you again.
And there are days when all I see is the madness, every way I turn. People call me at work sobbing because they’re being evicted and have nowhere to go, because they have nothing to eat, because they’re convinced someone is after them and no one they talk to believes them and they have to jump through endless hoops to try to get help, if help is even out there at all. And I have to act as a messenger of the system that’s strangling them, trying to explain that we’re limited in the types of cases we can take because we have limited resources and funding. They yell at me, they cry, they hang up. They never really understand. I’m not sure I do either. There’s so much wrong with the world and there’s so little I can do about it, and nothing I do can possibly be good enough.
On my twenty-minute commute home from work, I pass an average of about three panhandlers a day. Over and over again, I’m faced with the impenetrable quandary of giving homeless people change. I often try to rush past them or pretend I don’t see them—taking the coward’s way out—because they make me feel guilty just by standing there. Then I start to get angry with them for making me feel guilty, which is followed by more guilt for feeling angry. Sometimes I give them change, and for a minute I feel marginally exonerated, having given someone a lousy dollar that might buy them a greaseburger at McDonald’s. Change, in the material sense, is not enough. (But what is enough?) And how do I decide who to give the change to? If I gave a dollar to every panhandler I saw, I wouldn’t have any money left. The line has to be drawn somewhere. But who am I to decide who should get my change and who shouldn’t? Who am I to try to assuage my guilt by giving people meager handouts, and conversely, who am I to cling so tightly to my privilege that I haven’t earned any more than they have earned their poverty? Who am I, that there should be any lines drawn between me and anyone else on this planet? I don’t have the answers for any of this, and I’m confronted with it every day. I have no idea what it’s like to be you. I have no idea what it’s like to sleep in doorways, to be denied access to indoor bathrooms, to be treated as if my very existence were an offense to society, to have acid poured on me while I’m sleeping, leaving scars that tear viciously across my skin… to be addicted to a substance stronger than caffeine. I’m insulated by my privilege, and the thinness of that barrier scares me sometimes, because we share the same humanity, underneath it all.
Not to make it warm and fuzzy, because it isn’t. People are not warm and fuzzy, and life certainly isn’t either. There’s no neat, simple way to tie this up. That’s why I deal with it by withdrawing—by retreating into the music surging through my headphones, trying to drown out thought. Even withdrawal is not a viable solution. The world doesn’t leave people alone; it will intrude on your solitude in any way it can. It will cat-call you on your way home, sometimes more aggressively than others. It will run up behind you as you fumble for your keys, walking alone at night. It will scream obscenities at you standing on street corners and on the bus. It will tell you what a piece of shit you are, that you’re a sex object, that you’re the oppressor, that you’re going to hell, that it could kick your fucking ass. The world does not leave people alone. The world is not friendly or hospitable much of the time, and the world will not let you love it the way that you want to.
There’s no real ending to this post, because there are no easy solutions. I’m no better and no worse for having written it. It’s just analysis. Just a few more paragraphs added to the digital din.
“And no, Lord, your hand won’t stop it,
just keep you trembling…”
