The Power to Ignore

This afternoon, something stirred in me, quiet at first, then impossible to ignore. A passage surfaced in my mind from the Gospel of Matthew the Apostle, words I’ve heard before but never quite felt like this:

“For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed Me; I was naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Matthew 25:35

I’m not a preacher, I’m not a saint or a scholar. I’m just a man who’s lived long enough to see both the best and the worst in people. And to me, that passage isn’t really about religion, it is about something more basic, more demanding: our shared humanity. It strips things down to essentials. Compassion isn’t complicated. It’s food when someone is hungry. Water when they’re thirsty. Warmth, presence, dignity when everything else has been taken away.

Around the same time, a song from the 1980s came back to me, one that always left a knot in my stomach. A woman calls out for help, cold and alone, and someone walks past pretending not to hear. That discomfort isn’t accidental. It’s a mirror. It asks a question most of us would rather avoid: Who are we when someone else’s pain interrupts our path?

Of course I am talking about "Another Day in Paradise" by Phil Collins.

Even earlier than that, Elvis Presley gave voice to a similar truth in " In the Ghetto' a song and story about poverty, struggle, and cycles that seem impossible to break. Decades later, the question still hangs in the air: has anything really changed?

In some ways, yes. In many ways, no.

Homelessness used to be something people associated with a few large cities, often far away. Now it’s everywhere. You can see it in Westminster, where wealth and hardship exist side by side. You can see it right here in Vancouver, in the Downtown Eastside, often called the poorest postal code in Canada. But labels don’t tell the story. People do.

Today, in my work in housing and harm reduction, I met a man who brought all of this into sharp, painful focus.

He was on the street, yelling, caught in a storm most of us will never fully understand. He was taking off his clothes, voices clashing inside his mind. I approached him slowly, gently. I asked him to put his clothes back on. And he did.

Then he started to talk.

Not all at once, just fragments of words and phrases. Enough to piece together something real. He’d just been released from jail. No medication. No plan. No support system waiting for him. Just a door opening back onto the same street, the same chaos, the same pull of substances he didn’t even want anymore.

He told me he hated the drugs. Hated what they did to him. He knew, almost with certainty, he’d end up using again before the weekend was over. Not because he wanted to—but because it felt like the only way to quiet everything inside.

And then he cried.

Not the kind of tears people perform. These were heavy, breaking tears. The kind that comes from someone who still wants something better but can’t see a path to get there. It was a Friday evening after 5:30. Real help, the kind that might actually stabilize him, wouldn’t be available until Monday.

A gap where hours turned into days those a hidden zone where people fall.

This is the part many don’t see. Or maybe don’t want to see.

It’s easier to look away. Easier to believe these problems belong somewhere else, to someone else. Many people would prefer that those experiencing homelessness or addiction be driven away from their communities.

But this is our reality. It is a Ferris Wheel of the damned. Move them down the road to another community until they slowly circle back.

And the people living it? They’re not statistics. They’re sons, daughters, brothers, fathers and mothers. They are human beings with stories that didn’t start on the street. But through injuries, poor choices or a lack of understanding end up on this Ferris Wheel, moving around in the circle of life.

I’m not asking anyone to empty their wallet. I’m not asking for grand gestures or heroic acts.

But I do believe something simple, and maybe a little uncomfortable: if more of us (YES YOU!), the ordinary, decent people, take a few moments to truly see someone, to listen without judgment, to offer a small act of care, we might begin to soften the hardness that seems to be settling into our communities.

Because hardness spreads. But so can compassion.

John Lennon once invited us to imagine a different kind of world in Imagine. It’s easy to dismiss that as idealistic. But maybe the real question isn’t whether the whole world can change at once.

Maybe it’s this:

What happens if each of us changes one small corner of it?

A few hours at a shelter. Serving a meal at a soup kitchen. Sitting beside someone who feels invisible and treating them like they matter. Even just choosing not to look away.

Small acts don’t solve everything. But they change the atmosphere. They shift something inside a community.

Imagine a world where everyone did a small thing each day to not better the whole world but better their own little piece of the planet.

Peace to you all.

Authors Notes

Author Bruce Curle

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