Cold Ice-Hard Truth

Nine degrees below zero Farenheit ( -- 22 C) for the high on Wednesday; 30 degrees zero Farentheit (-- 34 C) for the low, with windchills reaching 55 below zero Farentheit ( --48 C). Roads are cleared but slippery because it’s too cold for salt to melt off the glaze. Schools closed, businesses closed, people told to stay home. Our semi-tame rabbit friend sits under the bird feeders out back,fluffed to almost double his usual size. The birds are huddled on branches or scrabbling for food. All of them are desperate. Not all will survive.

Weather like this almost boggles the mind, but more than that, worries the soul. I was driving daughter back to her apartment Sunday night and she asked me, (knowing, I think, the answer) what will the homeless people do? Our city does not have a lot of them, due I think to the winters, but we do have some, too many for the few shelters to take in all at once. I told her some churches will open up for them, primarily for the women and children and the police will be trying to get people into whatever shelters are available. Those who don’t get in must find somewhere to somehow stay warm enough to survive for another day.

That’s a hard truth, and acknowledging that puts us face to face with the basic question, what is our role in this, and our duty? Complicated answers, especially because a large part of that population seem to be homeless because of their own actions, addictions, and so on, complicated again by the question of whether blame is relevant. What sort of demons do these people struggle with, and how many, if any, of those demons are caused by present and past social injustices? Does that even matter?

I don’t know my answer, much less “the” answer. I do know I am reluctant to do more than I do already.

I don’t want to take any of those people into my own home. Even though our house is, by ancient and third-world standards, ample for many more people than we are (three adults in a three-bedroom single story home). Theoretically we could house people in the dining room or the living room or the family room, my college daughter’s vacant room, or in the finished basement. Many years ago when I was an exchange student in Afghanistan, our cook found it so hard to understand why I lived with only one other person back in the States, in a moderately-sized apartment; he thought it a waste of space. I had no answer then, and I have no answer now, other than, in our society, at least in the main, each family likes to have, needs, its own space. I know we do. Is that wrong? Selfish?

Lenny Bruce, the once-radical stand-up comedian, said that if one man has two coats while another has none, that first man is selfish. I don’t agree exactly, but I do know we donate our old and excess clothing to charities. So I do that.

I could also argue that we worked hard to acquire this, and we are fairly economical, and we don’t spend money on cigarettes or drugs or fancy things. We pay our designated taxes, so the government could, if it chose, allocate more money to the homeless. If anyone should sacrifice more, or at least give up some lucre, it should be the billionaires, the Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts of the world, who have so much money they could never spend it all if they wanted to. We could give more, but we want a security blanket, a nest egg, some assurance we and our children will be adequately provided for. Is that wrong?

Fact is we are safe and warm in our house (our daughter in the apartment we pay for). We have a new and adequate furnace. When we go out, if we go out, it will be by choice and we will bundle up. We will survive this as an inconvenience, not as a life-or-death struggle.

Those other people? God knows what will happen to them, and if He is like the storybook Christian God of love, He will save them. But not all of them. I know that.

As in the Children’s Blizzard of 1888 (also known as the Schoolhouse Blizzard). When I was in elementary school I knew old people who had survived that event, a January storm that swept into the pioneer farms and towns of the American Great Plains. There were no weather prognostications back then, and the storm rose up unexpectedly in the afternoon of an unusually warm January day. So mild before noon that people at home went outside to enjoy the weather, and children walked or rode horses to their one-room prairie schools, wearing only light coats. That afternoon it suddenly grew cold and the sky filled with blinding, wind-whipped snow. People outside in the fields or tending livestock got lost, sometimes between the house and barn. Some teachers let the kids out early to go home before it was too late, but it was already too late. Other teachers tried to lead kids into the safety of town, or at least into a nearby house (usually the teacher’s own house), and got lost in the storm or simply didn’t make it..

As with this current storm of 2019, the snow was followed by days and nights of bone-crushing cold. People had to stay where they were, and try to keep warm, and pray. Didn’t work for everyone. The death toll was approximately 235.

I don’t know where God was then. Perhaps there was some greater good being served. But I don’t see it, either in this weather today, or that weather in 1888.