Or so it seemed.  I've been wondering how it all worked out.  Turns out, it didn't.  Ted Williams is already out of a job that he never actually had, and it turns out that some situations can't be fixed by the magic band aid of money or gainful employment or national fame.  Celebrity status doesn't fix things like we all want to believe it does, and the brokenness in people's lives is usually far deeper than we're willing to look.  

I think that this situation is fascinating.  People were all a-twitter with the idea that someone's problems might be easily fixed by a shave and a suit and a connection with The Right People.  Now that this doesn't seem to be the case, the guy is just another homeless addict.  He might be in recovery, he might not.  We really can't be bothered to find out.  

And we certainly can't be bothered to care any longer.  If he's not going to serve as an inspiration about all the potential wonderfulness in the world and the system and in us, then to hell with him.  We don't have time to care about his situation or how to help him.  We can't take that sort of a liability on to the payroll, and the public wants a heartwarming special interest story, not another reminder about how messed up we all are.  

I've been struggling to make sense of what it means to love people who are marred at a level that hurts to look at, in ways that we want to snap that this is all your own fault and you deserve what you're going through.  That may very well be true.  We all have elements of that at play in our lives, yet we are called to love one another all the same, rather than just point fingers.  How do we do that well?   I suspect that's a question with no clear-cut answer, no defining moment at which Our Duty Is Done, no assurance of a Happy Ending.  We aren't promised any of these things, yet we somehow seem to think that they are the conditions for investing ourselves in another person, and when these preconditions aren't assured or can't be assured, then we're justified in not getting involved.  

And as we hem and haw and deliberate, the people that we're deciding whether to care about or not may be on the road to recovery already without us.  Or maybe not.  Sometimes it isn't really possible to tell for sure until we're already heart-deep in it with them, which is probably how it should be.