With a brief talk about some ideas of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
[Edit 3/19/13.]
This story is an example of what
you are capable of doing when you’re young and idealistic. But it was less
naïve a “feat” than it may seem to you at first. [Note: See Part 12, March 18 entry, "Prefatory note 1," on the philosophic disposition from which I write on such a "charitable endeavor" as is recounted here.]
Shortly after I first came to GW
in September 1980, I was struck by one thing you couldn’t miss on the streets:
homeless people, who were also what you would alternatively call vagrants,
bums, hobos…. Transient might be another
name, but that could refer to a person who was in some kind of fundamental life
transition (to put it nicely) and not necessarily a stinky, mentally ill
homeless person living in failure mode on the street.
They lived on the street, and
passed through the GW campus, which was essentially arrayed on city streets in
the Foggy Bottom area. They were filthy, might wear a weird combination of
clothes, might talk to themselves…. I still was periodically doing drawings in
those days, as I had during high school at times; I drew one or more pictures
of homeless people—they were like a wonder, a mystery to fathom.
In some sense, they made you
think what often may seem trite: “There but for the grace of God [or chance, or
strength of personality] go I.”
Some became familiar faces. You
saw them come around every so often…. I remember a fellow student talking about
them, and he said one of them was called “Jabber” by some students—not to his
face, I would assume—because of, you guessed it, the way he talked. It does not
surprise me some students had a more snarky way of talking about them than I
did, but that is beside the point here.
How the decision suddenly rolled up
By the end of 1984, I had been
ensconced in my staff MC assistant manager role for more than half a year. I
had been associated with the facility, so that it was in my bones, since
October 1980. I had graduated from college in May 1984. I had a confidence, not
a strutting egotism, than came from getting somewhere after years of steady,
dogged, hopeful work.
So when the weekend for the
second inauguration of President Ronald Reagan came along—I never voted for
Reagan, and never would if he was alive and ran today—I was in some sense ready—motivationally,
in terms of what I was willing to risk, and regarding what resources I had at
hand—for what I did when, that weekend, it was so colossally cold—for
Washington, D.C.—that the inauguration was canceled! Reagan received his
swearing-in indoors. (I think it got to be 10 degrees or less outside, Saturday
night into Sunday morning. This was not impossible to deal with for me, but of
course for Washington, D.C., it was an anomalous, bitter cold
snap.)
I, of course, was working that
weekend at the MC with my usual hours, including Saturday and Sunday nights.
Now, I have recounted this situation at least once—I adapted it to a chapter of
my first novel The Folder Hunt, which
I was laboriously writing at the time. But I think I recounted it later,
nonfictionally, too. Here I am just going on memory, and won’t try to recount
all the details.
I realized how bitter cold it
was going to be, and by January 1985, roughly speaking, I was not as naively agog/sympathetic
to the homeless as I was more likely to be as a freshman four-plus years
before. But I knew they were as much a part of the scene, generally outside the
MC, as ever. (On rare occasions, one would come into the MC, usually to the
ground floor, to rest and get warm, use the food vending machines, and so on.
That provides a story about another of our managerial duties, dealing with
homeless people if/when they came in, and obviously they could theoretically be
a bother to the students in some way, but this was not nearly the problem that
other non-student presences could be, such as the bathroom gays.)
Realities gamely encountered
When I finally decided to go see
if some homeless people would like to spend the coldest night during
inauguration weekend inside the MC, it was a rather brave, unusual decision for
me to make, but I believe I felt it was justified given the extreme cold
weather out, which was the worst I’d ever seen in D.C. Then, the process of
going outside on my lunch break to do this was an interesting exercise in
step-by-step stuff that was amenable to the fictional “existentialist”
treatment—with one-after-the-other phases, depictions of moral wrestling/such,
and accounts of somewhat dicey personal interactions—and thus it got in The Folder Hunt. Because it was so cold,
and I had limited time, I limited myself to locations where I knew I’d seen some
homeless men camp out for the night—one in the entry area of a large office building,
another in the “atrium” of a Metro station, and so on—and this meant traipsing
over several blocks.
In at least one case, all the
homeless person wanted was food. And I took his order, after saying (I guess)
where I could get the food (it was Bon Appetit [sp?], a hamburger place right
near the MC). He wanted a (I believe, regular) hamburger…. (Later, when I
brought him the food, he opened up the burger and said something like, “No catsup?”
A lesson in human nature. Bon Appetit’s burgers were great, and I don’t
remember why in this case there was no catsup, but maybe you’ll think of the
expression “Beggars can’t be choosers.”)
Two men I finally got to come
with me had been standing in front of the Metro station I mentioned, which was
on K Street. (K Street
is sometimes referred to in news reporting, as if it is a big, almost notorious
lobbyist location in D.C. To me, it has just been part of the business district
of D.C. as I knew it then.) There were actually four or so homeless men there,
but two didn’t want to come, or didn’t answer my offer. The two that came fit
what you’d imagine they’d look like: one was a longish-haired, bearded sort,
and I think he wore something, with all else, that hung on him like a cape. It
seemed strange, as far as how I might have looked, to be leading them back to
the MC. I had described for them a building where they could spend the night;
they probably had no distinct idea what the MC was—as we quietly walked along
the street-lighted city streets with, I believe, new snow dusting the
sidewalks.
I had them stay in the theater,
which was not being used for any purpose that night (it didn’t just house
staged plays). The theater seemed a good location because, in part, it kept the
homeless men segregated from areas of the MC where students were. I’m sure I
showed the men where the bathrooms were.
Staying overnight as “innkeeper”
I elected to stay overnight at
the MC to keep an eye on them. There were rooms accessed off an upper floor of
the MC that ran along one side of the upper walls of the theater—they were
mostly offices of the drama faculty—and they (maybe two did) had little windows
that looked out into the theater. I could stay in one of these rooms, where
there was an uncomfortable little couch to try to sleep on, and occasionally I
could look into the theater to see what was up with my charges.
They sat for the longest time in
some of the seats, as if they were waiting for a play to start. I think
eventually one or both lay down on the floor to sleep.
One had food with him, and at
one point he took it out and ate it.
Andy Moskowitz was the theater
manager—he had started in this role as a student job, I think, and later got
the job as a staffer, similar to my becoming assistant MC manager for the
weekends. On this particular night, I don’t remember if I assumed he’d be out
all night, but at one point he did turn up, inconveniently for me. I don’t
think I was able to “head him off at the pass”—to catch up with him and explain
the homeless-visitor situation—but I remember talking to him at some later
point, and he was surprisingly good-natured about it. He made some comment
about one of the men having chicken with him (I think Andy was concerned about
a mess resulting from the chicken).
I stayed the whole night and I
think I was unable to sleep at all. I checked on the men through the window
repeatedly, and eventually they got some sleep, as I recall. It wasn’t much but
it was something. They got more than I did.
The next morning, around maybe
7-something or 8-something—when, as it happened, students were starting to come
into the MC (again, not into the theater) for a normal day—I went down to the
homeless men to prepare them to leave.
One thing I’ve always remembered
is that, as I led the men out a side door of the theater, the bearded one—who
was older than the other man and looked in some surface sense like a Cecil B.
DeMille Jehovah—winced at first as he felt the bitter-cold air outside, then
turned and gave me a hearty nod/smile of thanks for the accommodations. The
other one didn’t say anything, as I recall. In fact, through all of this—my
having them in extended over eight or more hours—we never talked at all, or
very little (which talk perhaps comprised my telling them where facilities
were, like the bathrooms). I think I left it up to them how much they would
talk to me. But the bearded one’s gesture of thanks was such that it touches me
even today. By which I mean that it doesn’t matter how “down” one is in life,
how outside the social pale one is, a person can still show humanity in an
intimation of mutual accord/thanks for such a thing as a stay overnight out of
the bitter winter cold. I didn’t expect this.
Looking toward a general ethics lesson
At some point, one coworker who
was a student manager, whom I told about my plan for this, referred to me with
friendly joking as “Saint Greg” or such. I didn’t want such a remark, whether
you called it a compliment or whatever. And I don’t think I would have again done
a similarly bold thing at the MC, whether or not for humanitarian reasons. That
is, having those homeless in, and staying overnight as I had, was risky along
several lines, but I thought it was a moral risk worth taking. Sometimes you do
this, and may never opt to do it again, because while the risks at one point
seem acceptable, as a general practice you realize it doesn’t make a lot of
sense. So it becomes a learning experience, and you do it once for the moral
value, and then don’t do it again, but it may lead you to find some more
“socially well-provided-for way” to do such a thing again.
This could be said to refer to
my way of exercising charity in unusual circumstances, which in some sense
encompasses (but is not limited to) my work in VISTA
in 1986-87, and my involvement in a support group in 2001-03. I think it all
falls under the Kierkegaardian notion of the (occasional) “teleological
suspension of the ethical,” which is an idea that derives from what some might
consider that philosopher’s rather rigid ideas of what characterizes variously
moral kinds of behavior: there is the ethical,
which means defining what is right to do by certain hard rules, and then there
are things we opt to do out of faith,
which don’t follow rigid rules but which we still do out of what could be
called a higher calling. Through his books, Kierkegaard has various discussions
that address all this, which I’m not prepared to lay out; there were his
notions of the “knight of infinite resignation,” the “knight of infinite
faith,” and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son….
If this sounds like something
from a seminary, in a way it is, but Kierkegaard was an existential philosopher
(which he only got characterized as after his death), and this all has more
relevance and intellectual challenge for young
people forming their values and place in life. When you’re an older fool
like me—whose life seems, as time goes on and somewhat embarrassingly, to
revolve increasingly (more than he has expected) around everyday things like coffee
and chocolate and an occasional good laugh—it seems hard to dust off these old
philosophic concepts to explain them to someone else. But in sum, my helping
those homeless was me, as a young man, engaging in a sort of “teleological
suspension of the ethical” on behalf of a couple of poor men who could use a
night out of unhealthily bitter cold (I give thanks to professor Peter J. Caws for first teaching me about Kierkegaard; here is his GWU Web
site).
(The “teleological suspension of
the ethical” seems like a concept that Woody Allen could make comically-adapting
hay out of, in a joke involving something done rather off-color by a male with
a female. In fact, some philosophic concepts can be bowdlerized this way: Jean-Paul
Sartre, who could apparently be a bit of a goat in his sexual life, referred to
some of his loves as “contingent” versus what in normal philosophic parlance
would, as a logically complementary concept, be the “necessary.” I think this
set of premises, obviously tied to slovenly practices, may have caused some
form of grief for his paramour Simone de Beauvoir. It’s been a while since I’ve
read any of Annie Cohen-Solal’s bio of Sartre. By the way, Professor Caws
also wrote a book on Sartre, published in 1979.)
