Ok, so I just saw this online a minute ago, and I’m really curious about what people think.
It’s a 3ish minute video, where an ad campaign hired people to be in a commercial where they walked down a street, but the people hired didn’t know that the company also hired various of their relatives, made them up as homeless people, and stuck them on the street as well.
The premise of the campaign is that we as a society treat homeless people as invisible, and I’m not arguing against that premise, but I don’t think this illustrates that point. I think it illustrates the point that we as humans run on patterns and schedules and when something is out of place (a relative in a place they aren’t supposed to be) we don’t SEE that because it doesn’t fit the pattern - which is a much more important point.
I think it’s unfair for the campaign to insinuate that the people hired are bad people because they didn’t recognize their loved ones as homeless, and that if they treated homeless people better, they would have recognized their loved ones.
Sure, if you stop to talk to every homeless person on the street, you’ll know them and then you’ll know when they leave or new ones show up. Likewise, if you know your cashiers at the bank or the store, you’ll know when something’s different. Do you know all of the Clerks and librarians at your library? What about the people at your church?
No one can recognize everyone they see in their daily lives, and I think it’s a false equivalence to equate that with disregard for the homeless. It doesn’t do the homeless or the people in the ad (or watching the ad) any good for those two different things to be conflated.
I read something recently, about research showing that people react to homeless people more like the way they react to inanimate objects.
They did some kind of brain activity imaging (fMRI or whatever), and showed their test subjects pictures of decently-dressed people; shabby homeless people; and inanimate things like furniture. They found certain difference in brain activity responses between the decently-dressed people and the furniture. Their brain activity reactions to the homeless people resembled their reactions to the furniture.
The campaign isn’t saying those people are bad people. They are normal people. It is saying that the Somebody Else’s Problem field around homeless is so strong, you wouldn’t even recognise your own wife. Do you think they wouldn’t recognise a family member who turned up at their church or as a library clerk or shop assistant? I think they would.
All the people glanced at the homeless person, then looked away. It’s emotional for them to realise they rejected their own family members after such a brief look, and that furthermore, everyone else does too. If that’s your wife sitting there she’s SOL, cos no one is going to help her.
I see homeless almost everyday and I have a hard time looking at them. I am not sure I would recognize my wife either. When I see them, I try to force myself to look at them and acknowledge them but I always feel guilty that I don’t help them and it makes it really hard for me to look them in the eye. Don’t get me wrong, I give them a couple of dollars every now and again (maybe 5% of the time), and my family volunteers at and collects donations for a local food bank; but this is not really solving the problem. We do (much) more than most in our neighborhood I feel really guilty that we are not doing all that much…
Don’t have many homeless living on the street around here.
Not sure what I’d do if I lived where I would see a lot of them every day.
I feel it would be different if I saw them just sitting in a door way with their head down, if the look directly at me when I look at them, are they in a position when I do not actually get a real look, ie, off the side where I only get a glimpse as I pass. If they are up & moving, I hear them say something, even if it is not to me, then I would think the odds on me recognizing them go way up.
The experiment is interesting to me also for the way I will know some actor playing a minor role and I can’t place them because it is not the type of role that they usually do.
Sometimes I will fail to be able to place regular acquaintances when I see them in unexpected places. I will wonder where I know them from. Not usually people I would normally got out of my way to speak to.
People I know well, like very much or dislike very much I seem to notice no matter where I see them and will notice them not only by face but by walk, shape, head shape, mannerism of sound of their voice.
Now that I am thinking about it, I identify many animals that I only get a glimpse of by their movement, shape & location. It seems to be very accurate if I actually know of the critter. Something I have no idea existed, not so much.
My problem is that the ad is focusing on the reaction from the actors walking down the street: the high point (narratively speaking) of the spot is the ‘reveal’ with the candid camera, and then the emotional reconciliation back on the street.
It’s specifically designed to evoke an emotional reaction from the actors, and in the person watching.
But it’s an emotional reaction to a behavior that we don’t have conscious control over. I don’t go outside and decide every morning that any homeless people I see are going to get categorized as furniture - it just happens (because of socialization or whatever).
I just think it’s sort of manipulative to make people feel bad about something that isn’t in their conscious control. I also think it doesn’t actually accomplish anything to fix the problem. People who see the ad will either get really teary and help the homeless for a week or so, or they’ll get uncomfortable and become even less likely to interact with them.
It just really bugged me, and I wondered if I was being way too critical of an ad campaign. I’m probably just being way too critical.
What the ad (like most public service campaigns and efforts to aid the homeless) fails to realize is that homelessness is a more complicated problem than simply not having a place to stay and being ignored by the public. The core of homelessness, especially in the Western world, is that an individual, for one reason or another, cannot find any place that will allow them to live for reasons that are much more complex than simply being poor.
I used to work with homeless vets. Most of them were homeless because they had a rigid and inflexible world view (along with substance abuse and/or mental or emotional illnesses) which precluded them from acting in the necessary manners to find a place to stay or to work long-term. Most had family members who would have (and did) offer to help them, but who wouldn’t subsume their own personal dignity or familial obligations to continue to do so.
An anecdote: I worked with a client one time who simply could not accept the fact that his brother was gay. This guy would rather sleep under a bridge and go in and out of the county jail than deal with his brother’s sexual identity. The brother would frequently offer to help him; but he finally got tired of the insults and the threats from his brother concerning his lifestyle and he closed the door to him.
Another anecdote: A female vet came into our agency and she had moved from Wyoming to Nevada (this is before the current oil/gas boom and the unemployment rate in the state was relatively high) because she had heard that casino were plenty and that they paid large sums of money. While the former was true (casinos were always hiring because they are terrible places to work) the former was not as most casino jobs paid (and still pay) a relative pittance.
A co-worker at our program attempted to steer this person and her children (she had two) into programs which would help her find some type of work and allow her to find low cost housing. However, due to this woman’s substance abuse issues and her rather antiquated racial views (she didn’t care for Latinos or Blacks) she was very difficult to assist and she finally disappeared from the area with her children in tow before Child Services could become involved.
My point is this: The commercial is correct that most people don’t want to deal with homeless people. However, part of that reason is that most homeless people are difficult people to deal with personally and socially even before they become homeless and adversity simply brings that into sharper relief.