MOTHER TERESA USED TO SAY THAT the greatest pain for the poor she fed and comforted was not the physical facts of their poverty, nor the chronic hunger, the untreated infections or the million inconveniences that complicated their lives. Instead, she said, it was that they believed themselves to be invisible — People Who Don’t Matter.
America, too, teems with People Who Don’t Matter; there are entire cities inhabited by almost no one but them. We know those cities by the names of Watts, Compton, the South Bronx — and, here in the Bay Area, by the names Richmond, East Oakland, East Palo Alto. There are many more.
Until I was 14, I lived in Richmond. The city consists of The Flats — that portion west of Interstate 80 on the coastal plain next to San Francisco Bay, where the poorer people live — and The Hills, which overlook the flats. I lived in The Flats, so I can say from personal experience that these places are beset by violence. Despair is a constant temptation when you are immersed in such a place.
These are places filled with suffering, but they are also filled with grace; not only the grace that sanctifies those who dwell there, but the grace waiting to sanctify those who live in more comfortable circumstances, but who have the courage to go and serve their brothers and sisters there.
These places also bring forth a saintly response to the ongoing crisis from the people who live there.
A few years ago, I met an elderly woman in a support group for survivors of violent crime. A year before, she had lost a grandson to murder, and almost exactly a year later she lost her remaining grandson in the same manner. He had bled out on almost the exactly same patch of street as his brother.
I held her hand as she wept for her lost grandchildren, as the pain came off her in waves. It was as if the skin of her face was floating on an ocean of tears. She had loved those two children with fierce, maternal love, and losing them was like living a nightmare.
But she took up the cross of her grief and reached out to the kids in the neighborhood, doing the best she could to prevent another mother’s or grandmother’s heart from breaking as hers had. She prayed, she worked and she filled her days with service. She is a saint.
I remember an older kid who lived a few houses down the block from me in Richmond. He had had polio, and had braces on his legs, and eventually he ended up in a wheelchair — but his heart was big and loving and more generous to me than I deserved. His immobility made him a keen observer of the goings-on in the neighborhood.
I remember sitting on his porch on summer afternoons while he shared his concern for a family across the way that had hit a rough patch; his excitement at the college prospects of the high school-aged boy of the family next door; and his musings over why Mean Mrs. Warner was such a bitter old lady — her late husband drank a lot, and she had put up with a lot from him. I don’t think my wheelchair-bound friend ever saw himself as a mentor; he just enjoyed my company, and I his. But I learned an immense amount from him about seeing without judging, and about taking whatever situation God puts you in and making the best of it.
There was Mr. Pender, a retired man who lived next door with his wife. His wife had had a stroke, but her heart was very wise. She had a sixth sense about when the streets were getting rough. She’d take me in and give me hot chocolate on rainy winter afternoons, making a point of telling me that she just knew I was going to grow into a very special young man.
From my neighborhood in Richmond you could see, about a mile away and on the other side of the freeway, The Hills and the comparatively lavish homes of middle- and upper-middle-class folks. To us, the people in those houses seemed to live on the other side of an unbridgeable divide. On those rare occasions when we ventured into those hills, we were greeted with cold stares and parents pulling their kids indoors. When I began middle school in The Hills, I was shocked by the attitudes of the kids in my school. My dear childhood friends and neighbors were dismissed as “Zulus,” and worse.
But those kids in The Hills were immeasurably poorer for not knowing the people I knew; they were deprived of the joy of being held by Mrs. Pender; they never sat on a porch and learned from a wise young boy who’d had polio.
The ongoing emergency in our poorer neighborhoods is our greatest moral scandal. With their grinding poverty and their unconsoled victims and relatives whose bodies and minds have been wounded by violence, Richmond and the many places like it stand as searing indictments of our greed and selfishness. The violence and the tattered social fabric of Richmond is a poignant expression of the outrage — more than that, the unutterable pain — of priceless children of God who have been told, with words and the bleeding wounds of a million injustices large and small, that they are People Who Don’t Matter.
If America is to be a truly great nation, we must realize our fundamental kinship with all who share our shores. I pray that one day, the God who made us all will break our hearts. On that day, we all will be reunited across the gulfs that divide us. We will be so reconciled with one another that we will finally, truly and deeply recognize our brother- and sisterhood.
On that day, the sounds of reunion will echo from the walls of our cities, and we will weep tears of joy in one another’s arms, flooded with gratitude that our long separation from our brothers and sisters is finally, blessedly, at an end.
Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.
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You have the title of this article backwards. It should read:
“People who don’t matter: Matt Talbot”
Please fix. Thanks.
Still waiting for your Pulitzer contender. Ed.
You responded to Matt, therefore Matt matters to you.
Matt: Great stuff! Don’t stop now…I enjoyed it—You got the stuff. Write on. Live the grace. – pb
Matt,
I too grew up in Richmond and now live in Benicia. I believe we went to the same middle school, junior hi then. My parents grew up on the Flats of Richmond, my dad near 10th and Barrett and my mom west of 23rd St. They thought they’d had made significant strides to move to the middle class when they moved just east of I80 to where the Flats just started to curve into the Hills. I was born on the flats west of I80 and grew up on the curve.
I can say that you speak the truth. But the full truth is you had to live way up on the Hill before folks on the Hill would recognize you lived on the Hill and folks on the Flats thought you lived high on the Hill if your house had any elevation at all.
I spent an entire career as a police officer and public servant working in the Hills and Flats of the East Bay and lived in Richmond until until my kids reached middle school age. I know that things haven’t changed that much.
Keep up the excellent writing,
Lee
You quote Mother Theresa, but if you are so riled up by what you perceive as injustice, what are you doing about it?
“Mother Teresa and the nuns at the “Missionaries of Charity” she founded in Calcutta, India served the poorest of the poor. Everyday she and the sisters got up before 5am, prayed and ate together then they took to the streets and slums providing food, education, comfort and help to everyone they could. It didn’t matter if the person was an orphan or leper – they mattered to Mother Teresa. She lived that way for decades.”
Matt Talbot works for a tech startup in San Francisco and …. ???? Just writes about this stuff?? What is he waiting for?
Here’s another guy, Bernie Glassman, who is taking action rather than just writing about it. He left his career as a mathematician years ago: http://zenpeacemakers.org/bernie-glassman/
Why not you, Matt?
What’s wrong with writing about it? Ed.
Beach Bum – well, I volunteer at a soup kitchen, and also work with addicts, so I do more than just write. That said, I don’t do enough – few of us do.
wonderful words and thoughts Matt- here’s hoping we can all open our hearts more. open our hearts, even to the local curmudgeon.
A great prophetic voice. Thanks. The comments speak a lot about those who make them – for both good and ill – the fact that some celebrate you and some diminish what you are saying proves my initial point – prophetic voices cause controversy and make people uncomfortable. Keep it up!
The problem with this kind of writing is that it plays with emotions, but it actually does not make any sense. Pure demagoguery. Take this line:
“With their grinding poverty and their unconsoled victims and relatives whose bodies and minds have been wounded by violence, Richmond and the many places like it stand as searing indictments of our greed and selfishness.”
“Our” = who? Matt? Matt’s friends in the tech world? Middle-class people in Benicia? The “insanely elite” that Matt railed against in his last article? Everyone who does not live in grinding poverty?
Since he talks of “kinship”, I would think his “our” must include the people who live in the flats, who would then stand as “searing indictments” of their own greed and selfishness. Is this what he means?
But instead, he makes a separation of “them” (victims) and “us” (greedy) while at the same time talking about kinship and brotherhood and sisterhood. He writes as if there is some higher purity in being in grinding poverty, that they are victims of “a million injustices” caused by those of us who are not in grinding poverty.
He implies that we who manage to put together moderate lives in an average town like Benicia, with barely enough to get by ourselves, are somehow greedy and selfish. Is Matt suggesting that we go down to slums of Richmond and Vallejo and meet all the wonderful people who live there and console them, while trying not to get robbed or shot ourselves? Did he ever think maybe they don’t want us there and would do their best to chase us out?
I will be honest — there are some very good reasons I don’t live there or go to those places. I spent my time in poverty, living in difficult neighborhoods, surrounded by people suffering from a victim mentality — and am darn glad not to be there anymore.
I don’t suffer from any bleeding heart / Mother Theresa syndrome. That was wrung out of me long ago. If Matt does, there is nothing to stop him from moving back to the flats of Richmond, presumably in a house with an avocado refrigerator and an orange shag carpet. Right next to a bowling alley. Ha ha!
Matt stated: I learned an immense amount from him about seeing without judging,
and later stated: Richmond … stand(s) as searing indictments of our greed and selfishness
Is not “greed and selfishness” a judgment call?
Now DDL did you check with the Rev. Roger Straw before you made that comment. I do believe you are going to get scolded man also myself by the Rev and his second in charge. The local Citizen Research Reporter. I worked in Richmond in the late 50’s. Right in the heart of te business district on MacDanald ave. I am not sure I would agree with your description of Richmond. It was a very segrated city and I did not like that at all. Our company did everything possible to change that. It appears we failed.
Good column, Matt.
I had a friend like your Mrs. Pender. Her name was Ella Rogers and she lived in “the projects” in Trenton, NJ. She was also the Deaconess of her church and the most gentle and loving person I’ve ever known.
These ladies and Mother Teresa seems like a pretty good models for all of us.
People like Mrs. Pender and your Ella Rogers are real treasures. Mrs. Pender is surely long dead, and Heaven is a richer place for her being there. I’m sure she’s putting in a word for me.