One-Eye Open

Yesterday I took a bus up to John Hopkins Bay View Medical Center. In route a one-eyed man boarded. He eyed me with his one good seer, and though he passed me by at first, I am not surprised he finally choose to sit in the empty seat next to me. The typical client of an inner-city bus is African American and the one-eyed man and myself were both white. (I do not think it racially motivated that he sat with me, just the natural tendency of people to relate more easily with those more like themselves.) So he begins to tell me how he lost his eye, interjecting that he could no long remember names. He asked me mine, but told me he would forget it soon enough. “I was shot in the face”, he said, pointing to the side of his nose and indicting the bullet went through his eye and outside the side of his head. He told me how the culprits went to jail, as they deserved, and that he was just lucky to be alive. He was in the hospital for nearly two years, in a comma for much of it, and had dwindled in weight to 80 lbs. You had to feel for the guy. He pretty much lost everything in the ordeal. Though he did not say so, it was clear that his relationship to his parents, wife and children were all irreversibly strained. I did not catch exactly where he said he was coming from, but it was some sort of “mission house” –a house for addicts, troubled people, people without real homes, but fortunate enough to have the money to pay for such a facility. He explained the government paid him $2500/mo is disability, but he did not care about the money.[1] He was just happy to help out at the mission. By the smell of his breath it was clear he wasn’t just there to help. He claimed it was cough syrup, but anyone who has experienced it before knows the smell of a street-alcoholic. The liquor helped explain why he talked non-stop.

Following his story about the bullet to his face, which he repeated, he then asked if I believed in God. Ugh. Now there is ultimate rhetorical question. Either way you’re in for a ear full. I shrugged and said, “it’s kind of complicated.” He took that to mean ‘no’, and said “hey it’s okay I was an Atheist for most of my 54 years too. Then he’s starts to evangelize. He explains to me that there must be a creator because… “just look how perfectly round the sun and the planets are”. “Clearly”, he explained “evolution is garbage”, but he clarified that there were dinosaurs and it says so in the bible (something about “big monsters”) and that God wiped them out with a flood. He went on to tell me that we can’t see past the planet Pluto (he emphasized that it was a planet), so we have no idea what’s really out there. “Aliens?”, he suggested. And finally concluded that God would eventually wipe us out with fire. “First water, then fire”, he said. But no one paid attention to the signs, though he tried to warn them.

I did not have the heart to explain to him that he was talking to someone that was probably an order of magnitude or two more educated than he. That the Sun and the planets were almost perfectly round due to gravity and centrifugal forces. Whether “God” created that force, or not, is a larger question, but being basically round is not a very convincing argument, and perhaps the ultimate irony since the Church was going with the flat-earth for all those years. I wanted to talk to him, wanted to educate him, at the very least to improve his arguments. Recently I listened to some Eckhart Tolle and I wondered what he might do if he was sitting in my place. I even considered taking this poor man down a Buddhist line of reasoning. But I doubt it would have done any good. He had been drinking, and so early in the morning, he would not have the ears for hearing. He was just rattling. The accumulation of weakly interwoven memes bouncing around in his head were dropping down like pachinko balls into his mouth. At least he was good intentioned. In the end I just sat there, in the present, and let him talk. I imagine that’s what Tolle would have done. I imagine that’s what most anyone would have done.

But maybe that’s not the best thing to have done. Maybe I should have said something, no matter how futile. After all, isn’t that what the one-eyed man was doing to me? He cared enough about me, some stranger, to try to educate me. Try to help me. If I know he is mistaken, should I not feel a duty to correct him? And although I suspect that he was getting some selfish gratification from the trying to “help”, so what? Shouldn’t we all be gratified by our attempts to share understanding? Perhaps it is because most people will do exactly what I did –shrug off the interaction as a hopeless one, that weak ideas persist. Perhaps if enough dialog accumulated from more educated people down to the less educated on a personal level, then a monumental shift could take place as good ideas reach a critical mass and propagated themselves. Perhaps I am being too idealistic, but as difficult or fruitless as it might have been, what would it have hurt to try? Trying might made all the difference. The smallest nugget toward a new way of thinking might open a new path that could eventually lead a poor man to prosperity. Perhaps I should have said something after all.

The smell of the one-eyed man never left me that day.

[1] I note that if the it is indeed true that the government is giving this man $2500/mo than they are simply enabling him. One can understand giving him some disability assistance, but essentially covering his every expense and then some is not going to give him much incentive to better his life.