Give them Bread

His hands were rough and worn, his face made raw and red by wintry winds. A tattered coat hung limp over melancholy shoulders, and ragged spurts of icy breath materialized before his face and lingered momentarily in the air before fading into the white of winter. I barely understood him above the hissing of the winds when through cracked lips came a stuttered, "Do you have money for bread?" I peered at him, fixing my gaze on the black beads, huddled beneath a forlorn brow; though he stood but a few feet from me, his eyes were miles away-- a glimmer at the bottom of an eternal well. "Are we not all beggars?" I smiled wistfully to myself and nodded to the man, and we walked together into the nearby corner store.

Before Ukraine, I never understood what it meant to be poor. Sure, there had been times when money was tougher to come by, and I had certainly read about abject poverty, but there was never a day where there was no food in the pantry, no money to pay the electric bill. There was never a day when I had to pawn my dishes so that I could buy bread or when I stood alone and cold in a frigid gale, begging from the apathetic and hurried handful of people crazy enough to still be out on the streets. We just happened to be passing by, but that experience and hundreds of other similar ones have got me thinking a lot about the plight of the poor.



With the election soon approaching, I've been thinking a lot about the different approaches to caring for the needy. The conservatives, it seems, believe that we help the poor by allowing them to help themselves and that monetary contributions to the poor ought to be made according to the free will and choice of the individual. Liberals, on the others hand, feel that the government ought to be directly involved in mandating aid for the poor through social programs funded by tax dollars. While both of them sound pretty good, I've spent time on both sides of that fence, and the way I see it, the grass isn't green on either side.

We spend so much time arguing about how best to help the poor and so little time actually doing it. We spend so much money campaigning for 'the people who will best care for the needy' and spend so little in actually accomplishing that goal, both on a personal and a national basis. The methods that we're using to ameliorate the problem of poverty are just not working, as evidenced by the fact that the poor still roam the streets. Bread, water, a roof over one's head. What can they hope for in tomorrow? The solution to the problem, however, isn't in the courts or the legislature; it's not in mandates or taxes or social programs or party platforms but rather, it resides within the confines of a single human soul. And we don't need new laws: we need new hearts.