We met Michael behind a Family Dollar in Spartanburg, SC. Michael and his friend Kathy had come to see what all the commotion behind the Family Dollar was about. When we told them we were interviewing people struggling through poverty and homelessness they were both eager to share their stories.
Before Michael became homeless he had what many would consider a normal life. He had a wife and two daughters, a home of his own. He had actually moved to the area to start his own tree removal business. But in 2013 Michael was involved in a car accident and sustained injuries that made him unable to do hard labor. He became a stay at home dad, raising his two daughters while his wife worked. His life wasn’t what it was before the accident, but he loved it nonetheless. One day his wife left him. She took everything they owned, along with their two daughters, and moved to California. She had been cheating on him. His depression, along with the inability to do labor he was skilled at, drove him to the streets.
Michael has been homeless since December now. You wouldn’t know e was homeless if you saw him hanging out at the library or in line in front of you a the gas station. He was well spoken, confident, clean, and walked with an air of purpose and humility. Michael told us about how people still discriminate against him when they realize he’s homeless.
“I get discriminated against all the time. People ask me how many years I did in prison. I ain’t never been to no prison. Being homeless you get discriminated against. Just depends on how you look. People will pull into the QT and see you there and then drive around to the other end of the parking lot to park. They’re afraid that because I’m homeless, I’m gonna do something. Man I’ve got morals– I’ve got values. I’m not like that.”
This kind of discrimination is an everyday reality for people like Michael. Just because they can’t always find a place to shower, or shave, brush their teeth, or afford to wash their clothes, they get treated as subhuman. Nobody should have their worth determined by their looks. People are more than flesh and fabric. Michael and his friends just want to be treated as humans like the rest of us.
“Treat people the way you’d want to be treated. That sums it all up right there.”
Michaels says the worst type of discrimination, and in his opinion, the hardest part about being homeless, comes to trying to get some work.
“The hardest thing about being homeless is finding work actually. It isn’t finding something to eat or sleeping or finding a dry place. Nobody wants to work you cause you’re homeless. They think you’re a murderer or a thief or something. Most homeless people are actually good. Everybody just has a misconception on all of this. They think if you’re homeless you’re worthless. You ain’t worthless. It ain’t like that. There are a lot of people out here with skills and talents.”
We might not realize it, but honest work is one of the greatest sources of dignity you can find in the human experience. No one wants to beg for the rest of his or her lives. No one wants to have to depend on the mercy and generosity of others. It’s easy to look at people on the streets, begging and receiving government assistance, and see them as lazy. But that’s rarely the case. Laziness goes against human nature. It is rooted in hopelessness and fear. If a person is lazy it is because they have lost hope to ever be anything else. People like Michael need jobs to overcome both the physical and psychological poverty they are experiencing.
“To do nothing at all, is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.” –Oscar Wilde
Despite his Circumstances, Michael is still generous. In the short time we spent with him he never ceased to encourage his fellow homeless friends and was even helping Albert walk.
“I ain’t stingy, I ain’t greedy. I pay it forward. I share whatever I got. I’ve given people the clothes off my back before.”
The only thing that keeps Michael going is the thought he may one day be reunited with his two daughters.
“I ain’t give up totally yet. I’m not ready to give up, not yet.”
Michael Newsome, age 41