Read Online What Difference Do It Make? by Ron Hall - Free Book Online

character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those.
    A caged bird in spring knows perfectly well that there is some way in which he should be able to serve. He is well aware that there is something to be done, but he is unable to do it . . . “What a idler,” says another bird passing by—what an idler . . . But then the season of the great migration arrives, an attack of melancholy. He has everything he needs, say the children who tend him in his cage—but he looks out, at the heavy thundery sky, and in his heart of hearts he rebels against his fate. I am caged, I am caged and you say I need nothing, you idiots! I have everything I need, indeed! Oh! please give me the freedom to be a bird like other birds!
    A kind of idler of a person resembles that kind of idler of a bird. And people are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don’t know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage . . .
    A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls . . .
    Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives. Moreover, the prison is sometimes called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, suspicion . . .
    If you could see me as something other than a idler of the bad sort, I should be very happy.

DARLENE
    Skid Row Samaritan
    During the Gold Rush, Sacramento, California, was a thriving place, the westernmost stop for stagecoaches and wagon trains, for the first transcontinental railroad and even the Pony Express. Sacramento still thrives today, but like many cities, it has also become the last stop in life for thousands of homeless people.
    Homelessness is not new to the city, but in early 2009 it was getting worse. National attention focused on a tent city that had sprung up on the city’s outskirts. As many as fifty new people a week moved in, some of them as a result of the avalanche of home foreclosures, a phenomenon that hit Sacramento harder than most US cities.
    But the tent city was not the only part of Sacramento where homelessness was a problem. The wedge of town west of the capitol was a motley mix of redevelopment and still-derelict, a place where attempts at gentrification competed with rundown motels that doubled as low-income housing for transients. The city was working to fix up the area, but for longtime Sacramento residents, those streets still meant drugs, prostitution, and shabby bands of the hardcore homeless. It was a part of the city, Darlene Garcia told us, that she preferred to avoid.
    But Darlene, age sixty-six, did find herself driving through west Sacramento on her way home from on errand on a cold, cloudy day early in 2009. And sure enough, as she drove along a seedy thoroughfare near the Pickwood Hotel, she saw a man sprawled on the ground in a narrow vacant lot