Tightrope by Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn

Author:Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

* Stan died unexpectedly in August 2018 of complications from a stroke and was mourned in communities across America that he had served. Remote Area Medical continues to hold health fairs in the United States almost every weekend.

12

Homeless in a Rich Nation

Keep your coins. I want change.

—Sign held by a homeless man as a social protest in a painting by Australian street artist Meek

The man’s straggly hair and white bushy beard hung from a tired, wrinkly face as he stood by his shopping cart filled with clothes, shoes and empty cans, his only belongings after living on the streets for years. When Americans approach such a homeless person, the natural response is to avert their eyes and hurry past, pretending not to notice. That’s impossible when you suddenly realize, with a stab in the heart, that the homeless person is an old friend and neighbor, Mike Stepp. He was in the park by the library in McMinnville, the county seat of Yamhill County, and our reunion was warm, poignant and unsettling.

“It’s good to see you,” he greeted us warmly, and we exchanged hugs. “We used to walk up and down that hill! Too many times!”

Mike and his brother, Bobby, were Nick’s closest neighbors when he was growing up, and the three of them walked each day up and down a hill to and from the school bus. Bobby, good natured and eager, made some money trapping animals for their fur, while Mike, a few years younger, was funny and excitable and something of a ham.

The Stepps were much like the Knapps and the Greens: solid working-class people whose lives had improved dramatically over recent generations and who looked forward to further gains. The dad, Robert Stepp, had lied about his age to join the Marines as a sixteen-year-old at the outbreak of the Korean War, and then he regularly volunteered for reconnaissance patrols. One of them was ambushed by a North Korean unit and Stepp was shot twenty-two times. Before he blacked out, he remembered the North Koreans going from body to body, stabbing each American to make sure he was dead. Unsure how he survived, he woke up in a military hospital and spent the next eighteen months recovering from grievous injuries. As a nineteen-year-old injured war hero, he married Lorena Dockery and found work at a lumber mill north of Yamhill.

Robert became an alcoholic, drunk at night but functional, hardworking and law-abiding by day. He was deeply proud of his military service and active in the local American Legion. When Bobby struggled in high school, Robert and Lorena, who also drank heavily, sent him off to the Marines to toughen him up, but Bobby failed boot camp and soon returned. Likewise, Robert nudged Mike into the military when he dropped out in the eleventh grade, but Mike settled for the Army Reserve and was then pushed out as unreliable. By the time Robert died at age fifty-six, he was deeply disappointed in his offspring.

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