Wow
Last night I walked past one of the most poignant photographs yet to be taken. Unfortunately, I didn'’t have a camera on me. Picture this:
The hip downtown of a small southern city. The red brick, pedestrian only street is flanked by upscale, local boutiques and expensive restaurants. About halfway down the mall is an old fashioned performing arts center, restored to perfection. It's dark outside, so the flashy theater stands out like a beacon. Under the brightly lit marquee two kids are playing classical music -– a young black boy plays the cello and a young white girl plays the violin. They sound beautiful. They are well-dressed, obviously upper-middle class. The lights of the theater marquee illuminate them beautifully. In front of them is a cello case, open on the ground and half-filled with money. Six feet in front of the cello case are two homeless men. They are silhouetted by the bright marquee lights. You can barely see their faces. One in a wheelchair, with only one leg; the other stands beside him. They stand silently; a simultaneously invisible, yet undeniably present barrier between the comfortably middle-class adults who stand and watch and the children who play their expensive instruments. It now becomes painfully obvious that to drop a dollar into the cello case, you must be confronted with abject poverty and suffering in the midst of affluence. You wouldn't hesitate to give a dollar to the kids whose parents can afford to buy them cellos and violins. But, if the homeless men asked you for a dollar...…
I can'’t get the image out of my mind.
4 comments:
I thought this was a pretty sweet post...
It strikes you as awful because this is the only inequality in America that we don't pretend about. This is a perfect example: there is no pretense of equality or pretense of concern about the present inequality.
Mair, You assume that these kids were upper middle class. Why, pray tell, would upper middle class kids have to play on the street corner for donations? Unless they were establishing a college fund. Or maybe this was a new form of a lemonade stand, where kids use what they have to earn a few bucks.
Could they possibly be lower class kids who wore nice clothes to solicit donations? Geez, maybe the parents scraped and saved so their kids would have "costumes" to where when they went out to earn their families meal money.
Something about this whole scene doesn't ring true.
Greg'ry,
In the culture of our downtown, upper-middle class kids play music in the street quite regularly. It's for practice or something. I see it all the time. The poor people who do things for money downtown do stuff like sit on a bucket playing harmonica, or sit on the ground and read tarot cards for people or just walk around asking for money. If these kids needed to beg for money, they wouldn't have expensive string instruments and be very talented at playing them. Their level of skill indicated at least several years of lessons.
In theory it's possible that they needed to beg for money. But, in this highly stratified city, not likely.
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