All my life I’ve been told that I shouldn’t criticize anyone until I’d walked a mile in their shoes.

In my young and more literal days, I thought that would probably hurt since I had, as my father said, been blessed with a very solid foundation. I envisioned pinched toes, blisters, and all sorts of other foot pains.

But then, after I became older and less literal, I saw that the point wasn’t that we should try to put ourselves in the places of others, but that since we cannot walk a “mile in their shoes,” we should simply accept that others have different perspectives based on their life experiences.

For most of my life, that was one of those thoughts that you knew you had, but didn’t have to exercise very often.

Not anymore.

There seem to be a lot of people attempting to overlay their perspectives on entire groups of people. There are the people who say that poor people are poor just because of the choices they made. That homeless people need to get a job and a home. That people of other religions need to assimilate. That people from other countries need to speak English. In other words, there are a lot of people just like one of my relatives, who contended that (fill in your targeted group here) were fine so long as they knew their place. Then she would describe what that place was.

As a Christian, white male, I have never had to deal with anti-Semitism. I have never had to crawl across a racial barrier or try to crack glass ceiling. From the distance, I looked just like almost all the CEOs, major league sports figures, and other really rich people. That meant that as a young Public Health Service employee, I could take Linda to dinner at a Country Club (by invitation of a member) that was 100% white and Christian and whose annual dues were probably more than my annual salary.

The number of barriers I didn’t have to deal with were legion. That taught me two things: that whatever success I had was, in a large part, handed to me. I worked hard, hopefully with some skill. But those who didn’t have the advantages that I was born with, despite working harder and having more skill, had much more difficulty getting to where I’ve ended up or even close to it.

As I thought about other peoples’ shoes, three examples popped into my mind, two of which I hadn’t thought of in years.

The first was at a house I visited as an investigator when I was with the public health service. (Turned out that when I graduated from college, VD investigators were not only in more demand than writers, but were better paid.) There was a grandmother in her late 30s, her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter. When I went up on the porch I noticed that front door was missing. So was the screen door. All that was left was the frame, and the flies flew in and out unimpeded.  

The people who lived there didn’t have a long horizon line; they essentially lived from day to day with some days being better than others. They didn’t have a budget because they had no money. They didn’t have a career plan because—with no education—there was no career. And I imagine that they didn’t have hope because they had no real concept of hope.

But we have the self-righteous among us who claim that these people are in their situation because of their poor choices. But I wonder if they ever had any real choices at all.

The second example is a homeless person that I met when I volunteered in a shelter. I’ve written about him before because he made such an impression on me. Joe had once had a real life, one where he made decisions and had choices, but his mental illness had separated him from decisions and choices and left him on the street, afraid of everything around him. The shelter at Clifton Presbyterian took care of him as well as they could, within the bounds of rules, insurance liability, and financial resources. But Joe was still on the street every day, dragging his fears with him and enduring the hard looks of the people who were sure he could do better. But when your greatest hope is that the food they served you at the shelter isn’t poisoned, there’s not much better you can do.

And, finally, there was Sonya’s mother. Sonya was a beautiful Polish woman who married an American soldier shortly after World War II and returned to the United States with him. She worked for years to bring her parents from Communist-ruled Poland to this country. When I met her parents, I noticed that her mother’s face was slightly misshapened; Sonya explained that a soldier had knocked out her mother’ teeth and broken her jaw with a rifle butt. The father took to American life, but the mother just sat there. She couldn’t understand the ways. She couldn’t speak the language. The fact that she was fluent in both Polish and German didn’t help much in a small North Carolina town. Finally, she decided to go back to Poland, a repressive government in a country with people she knew was better for her last days than a Democracy where she was isolated. She and her husband went back, and a lot of people were surprised.

The point is that, even if I could walk a mile in the shoes of any of these, it wouldn’t inform my understanding of them. For any of them, it wasn’t just a mile, but many miles, and some of them very hard. I have no right to say that the black women in Macon should buy a door, get a job, and live like me. I have no right to look at Joe and say get off the street, cut your tangled beard, and be a productive member of society. And I have no right to tell Sonya’s mother that all she needs to do is assimilate; this is a great place and you'll love it.

Because I don’t have the slightest idea what brought them to the point I encountered them.

I do have the right to help them however I can. I do have the right to work to remove the barriers that will create more like them. And—at the very least—I have the right to treat them as individuals whose experiences I cannot imagine. Which should keep me from feeling self-righteous and superior.

Just keep in mind what Jesus said on the subject: If you love only those who love you, why should you get credit for that? Even sinners love those who love them!”