By Dawn McMullen, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – One afternoon I was on the phone with a friend in upstate New York. In the course of making my bed and small talk, I glanced outside. A homeless man with a baby carriage full of - well, whatever homeless people carry around - stood in the street just in front of my house.
This isn't surprising. We live in an East Dallas neighborhood where old money meets new poverty - with a lot in between. What surprised me were the two people standing in front of him, one taking his picture.
The next day I find said homeless man, Alonzo "Can Man" Graves, pictured on the front of the Metropolitan section of the Dallas Morning News. In the space between his legs and his baby carriage sits my yellow Victorian house with a pitched burgundy roof and a white picket fence.
The accompanying article gave an update on a new ordinance passed by Dallas city officials, forbidding the use of shopping carts off business premises. The ever-creative homeless like Alonzo have apparently started using baby carriages as their mobile suitcases.
The next week, I was on vacation with my New York friend. A man on the street asked for some extra change, and I gave him a dollar. My friend looked at me quizzically. The next few minutes found me defending my habitual giving to the homeless, and my friend defending her United Way donations and belief that the man on the street probably wouldn't use my dollar for food.
True, but I don't care. For two reasons:
If I were homeless, I might also appreciate a beer to take the edge off. And I want my children - who also are usually strapped in their car seats in my SUV on the way to private school when I make such side-of-the-road donations - to be compassionate and to realize that everyone doesn't live in a pretty yellow Victorian house with a white picket fence.
So far, my boys - who are 4 and 7 - seem to get it. On various holidays, our church organizes a bunch of kids, piles of donated food, and stacks of brown paper bags. The children decorate the bags and fill them with bottled water, pop-top tuna cans, granola bars and peanut butter crackers, making little sack lunches for the homeless. We usually have one in our car and recently gave a bag to a guy with a baby carriage much like Alonzo's. He looked at my husband quizzically - almost the same look my New York friend gave me - and graciously thanked us. My 7-year-old said he bet that man was hungry and happy to have that lunch.
Statistics show there are about 6,000 homeless in Dallas on any given night. The executive director of the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness was in Dallas earlier this year to congratulate city officials, private groups, and businesses for working together to craft an 85-page plan to end homelessness in Dallas by the year 2014.
My kids can't understand 6,000 homeless people. 6,000 gummy worms, maybe. Unless this 85-page plan is translated into a Magic School Bus story, it has no impact on their lives. And by the year 2014, they will be driven by puberty - not poverty.
But they can hand a person a quarter on the corner. They can pack someone a granola bar.
Does the picture in the newspaper of Alonzo and our house feed my white, middle-class guilt? Maybe. Will it be an interesting keepsake for my kids, to be found among the guitar recital programs and soccer team pictures in a box when they're cleaning out my attic 50 years from now? Probably. Will they remember that we actually did something for someone on the street with a cardboard sign instead of relying on someone else to do it? I feel certain.
So, if Dallas hasn't solved the homeless problem by 2014, maybe my kids will.
Dawn McMullen is a writer from Dallas. If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us.