Barbarism in the Digital Age
We need to get beyond this shit
I distinctly remember the first time I ever saw a homeless person, or at least, the first time I understood the person I was looking at was homeless. I was about seven or eight years old and our family was going to a local art gallery to see my mother’s paintings there, because both my parents are artists. We parked in back of the gallery, and on the way in, we observed a man curled up next to the building, asleep on the ground.
My dad stopped short and pointed. “It’s a bum,” he said, as if the man wasn’t a person — just a curiosity. Then we walked into the gallery without a second thought. (Well, he did anyway. Clearly I didn’t.)
That’s how my conservative dad taught me to view the world. When those commercials with hungry, dying kids would come on the television asking Americans to sponsor a child in need in Africa, my dad would often say something like, “What’s the point in sending money over there? Those people are going to die anyway.” As a child, believe it or not, it made sense to me. “Those people” were far away and abstract, and if you didn’t think about them, it was almost like they didn’t even exist.
My dad raised me to see the world as winners versus losers, bums versus those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their own way in the world…
