#destiation

Airlines have pledged carbon-neutral travel and use of alternative fuels to reduce pollution. Electric airplanes also raise hopes for green air travel. But how close are we really to impact-free air travel?

     The GPS is a pretty useful invention. If you’ve used one, you would probably agree. With the press of a few buttons, it can take you to places you’ve, never before, been. The problem with a GPS though? It can tell you where you’re going, but not exactly where you are. Like, home for instance. Have you ever tried entering “home” into a GPS, only to read: invalid destination? Of course it might read: turn left and veer right, your destination will be on the right, if given a number. It’d show you a house, but only you would know its name. Perhaps in the telephone book, it’s listed as “42 Maple Ave” or in an MLS Real Estate search, “#LRS970031211”  The thing is, numbers nor structures can account for the space in which you put your Christmas tree every year or the wooden coat rack in the sun porch on which you hang your jacket. Those are things most people are very in touch with, when it comes to being in the comfort of home. Then why, are they not in touch with the loss of a home? Homeless. The word has become much like the numbers, swiftly swept beneath the doormats of dwellers, day in and day out. But the issue is in their backyards, on their porches, and walking past their mailboxes. In order to understand the extent of the term, one must remember where they are, much like two female writers, Ann Quindlen and Barbara Ascher who know where they are, know where they’re going, and remember where they’ve been.     Ann Quindlen, writes a poignant piece on a woman in a bus terminal. She has a name, a story too.  In fact, so did her house. She called it “home.” Quindlen insists, when addressing the issue of homelessness today, it is “not simply [the] shelter from the elements, or three square meals a day, or a mailing address to which the welfare people can send the check, [but]  precisely those kinds of feelings that have wound up in cross-stitch and French knots on samplers over the years.” She understands that within the home, lies the heart which can be identified, not by structure or definition, but by the feelings that come with it. Quindlen takes the time to hear the woman’s story and she relates to her own home. Her point is simple. It centers around the understanding of the “issue.” She writes, “It has been customary to take people's pain and lessen our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human beings. We turn an adjective into a noun: the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box or the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.” People must learn to see and feel for these problems as they do their homes. Every house has special qualities about it that makes it a home, like the “the hot-water heater, the plastic rack [to] drain dishes in, [and] the roof…which occasionally leaks” that Quindlen mentions in her essay. Every individual has qualities about him or her that define them. “Homeless” is not something that does because people are not defined by what they have or do not have, in this case. If society could view and embrace the problem of homelessness in this way, the room for compassion would certainly be made and perhaps “painted blue.”       In her essay, “On Compassion,” Barbara Ascher stresses the same truths. She states, “I don't believe that one is born compassionate. Compassion is not a character trait like a sunny disposition. It must be learned, and it is learned by having adversity at our windows, coming through the gates of our yards, the walls of our towns, adversity that becomes so familiar that we begin to identify and empathize with it.” She makes the point that society must look among the issue that lies beyond the structures, and they must embrace it. They must not only hide the issue and pack it up for the winter like the Christmas tree ornaments at the holiday‘s end, as “the mayor of New York City [does]…moving the homeless off the streets' and into Bellevue Hospital.” Ascher claims this is done because, “We do not wish to be reminded of the tentative state of our own well-being and sanity,” but she questions the extent of it being “humane.” The word “tentative” signifies the same purpose. ‘The homeless,’ are individuals just as ‘we’ are. They once had a state of well being and sanity too. Society fails to come to terms with the fact that that could be them, in “buttonless” clothes, as life rolls away when lights turn green. If more of society could understand the issue as a circumstance of individuals, as an adjective and not a noun, like Quindlen states, than perhaps compassion would be attainable.      Both Quindlen and Ascher have made sense of the roots of homelessness. The people without homes are also without stability and security, without the place in which their heart lived. They can identify with them on an individual level, as they do with their potential tentative homes and stability.  A GPS can’t take them to every home in America. It may show them the houses, but the thought of the home must come from within. Because of this, both women write to prove that if society took more time to identify with the individuals victim to homelessness rather than “issue” itself, compassion would follow and on the road lit by compassion, would be more opportunity to permanent reform. Now can your GPS do that?