It's a drive from I live to where the research is conducted but I tell myself if the folks striving to learn something actually do and can help someone else, it was worth the ride.
Waiting at a red light in New Haven to hang a left and get to the clinicians' offices, I watched what I have to assume was a homeless man standing on the sidewalk during a lull in the traffic flow where he'd have his cardboard begging sign up soliciting change.
At that moment he was opening up a bottle of water and emptied it over his head as a makeshift shower. The temperature was just south of fifty degrees Fahrenheit and there was a light breeze that in a city of concrete and steel buildings that turns streets into wind tunnels, was cutting and intense.
The truck driver behind me leaning on his horn brought me back into the now as my signal went green and we all moved deeper into New Haven and all I could see of the man was a diminishing figure in my rear-view mirror, to be replaced at the next intersection by a woman of indeterminate age holding her own sign, and behind her on the corner facing in the other direction another person and another sign.
I was raised to believe we can do anything in this country we put our minds to. I cannot understand how so few can have so much when so many have so little but I have decided to no longer simply accept what I have yet to understand. We must be better than this and should be, especially to each other.
I know cannot save the world, but I can try and so can you.
-bill kenny
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