ANOTHER WORLD

Although considered a city in Maine, in most other states Bangor would qualify as a small town. It has much to recommend it: a vibrant commercial life as a regional service center; historic ties to natural resources like the Penobscot River and the woods and fields in outlying areas; a lively cultural scene that includes theater, music and the visual arts; an array of colleges and universities; and hard-working and friendly people who are proud to live here and who are committed to making a great town even better.

So the glimpse of another corner of life in this town that came with the alleged killing of a homeless man at the hands of, according to police, another homeless man comes as a bit of a shock. With a population of about 35,000, Bangor is big enough to have various subcultures, and one of them includes people who sleep in shelters and, during the day, sit in the woods and drink. The scene at the Pines, portrayed by BDN reporters and photographers, is reminiscent of the hobo camps of the 1930s, except it seems as if their plight was not caused by a Great Depression. Or was it?

The way these men apparently lived invites speculation. Are they victims of brutal upbringings and mental illness? Or was their fate the result of conscious choices they made to avoid responsibility, ignore the consequences of earlier failures and indulge in substance abuse? Could social services have intervened in these lives – both the victim and the alleged perpetrator – or were they determined to spurn help? Will communities like Bangor always have a version of the Pines, and if so, is it to the community’s shame?

Few choose to live in poverty. What is often written off as laziness is actually a lack of hope, when it seems that no matter what a person does, he or she seems destined to remain poor or on the wrong side of the law. Reaching that conclusion is, for the most part, not based on reality.

But sometimes, people enter life with a limp, figuratively speaking. Their parents are not nurturing, do not encourage them to become educated, or even abuse them. They set awful examples or encourage bad behaviors. Succeeding in life with such burdens is hard.

Bangor, in many ways a quintessential American small town, is a classed society, as is the nation it reflects. Those Bangoreans who get up every morning to get their kids off to school with a good breakfast, hustle off to work themselves and give their employers a good day’s work, and on returning home get dinner cooked and help the kids with their homework before starting the cycle over the next day are too busy to notice the other world of places like the Pines. But it’s there, in Bangor and every other like-sized community. And when it is thrust in our face, as it was this week, the image is jarring.