Time to stop looking away

We’ve all seen them. And we’ve all walked away, given a wide berth, crossed the street.
We’ve all shut our eyes.
Sometimes they’re smelly, and passing by would offend our senses. Sometimes they’re loud, loquacious, offending our sense of propriety.
Sometimes they do nothing but sit, looking vacantly ahead. We know something is wrong with them, so we turn our gaze, glance beyond them, and then forget about it, forget about them.
Or at least, that’s usually how it works.
Sometimes, however, one grabs your attention
The other morning a colleague walked in, mentioning that she had seen one of them. She hadn’t turned her head away from the sight, she’d looked straight on.
And what she saw upset her.
On her way to work, traveling east on the Lougheed Highway this colleague saw a woman who had planted herself in the dirt, in the boulevard outside the Salvation Army’s Caring Place shelter.
That woman looked to be about 40, but she could have been so much younger — it’s not always easy to gauge, as life comes and goes rather quickly for some, and the years mark themselves on their faces more readily than it does on yours and mine.
Planted there, in this boulevard, rather than sink into the muck, the woman riled against it. Grabbing handfuls of soil, she chucked it heartily toward the roadway, cursing it, giving it hell.
There was no one on the sidewalk to bear the brunt of the attack. The only ones to see were those held safe inside the confines of their vehicles, stopped at the nearby traffic light. There was no one listening to her cry out, no one to take offense to her mudslinging.
But she threw on regardless of a lack of audience. And nobody noticed, perhaps, save one.
And that one who saw came to work feeling heavier, one would think, feeling upset by the incident. She did not look away as so many others had, and as a result she couldn’t help but feel sad.
If she hadn’t seen, if she hadn’t heard, she might still be ignorant to the woman’s plight, and she’d feel better.
But feeling better comes at such a cost.
Was this woman throwing dirt a drug addict?
Maybe.
Are drugs — meth, crack — her biggest challenges?
Hardly.
This woman is mentally ill. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to make this diagnosis. Watching her rail against an invisible enemy, toss dirt into the street in disgust — there’s really no other explanation.
Is this mental illness a result of drug use? Could be.
Did this woman turn to illegal drugs to escape her mental illness? Possibly.
Does it matter why she sits here, what brought her to this place?
I don’t think so.
There are so many in this community from whom it is easier to turn away, and we assuage our own guilt in doing so by making excuses; that’s if we notice at all, if we even take a moment to register the fact that one of our own suffers.
I am just as guilty as the next person. I drove past this woman and remembered spotting her only when a colleague pointed it out.
I walk past a man who, when it rains, uses the awning at this very newspaper office as his temporary shelter. I watch out the window as he picks up the garbage in the parking lot — garbage dropped not by himself, but by those who look through him, those who don’t even honour him with a glance.
He cleans up after people like me, and I can't even spare him a glance, a "good morning," or a couple of bucks — not that he's ever asked.
It's just so much easier to avert the eyes.
It’s just so much easier to make the excuses.
Druggie.