Dream Log: Reporter in Philadelphia

I dreamed I was a newspaper reporter who lived and worked in downtown Philadelphia. I had some sort of unexplained gift of making myself almost completely unnoticeable, so that I could get up close to people and listen in on conversations they thought were private. Some of my colleagues in journalism referred to me as "the Ghost."

In the lobby of a huge skyscraper was a white-tablecloth restaurant patronized by people who were very expensively-dressed. The restaurant's dining area was separated from the rest of the lobby only by a waist-high partition, with no wall or windows. Against a wall across the lobby from the restaurant, a homeless man wearing an orange-and-black checkered overcoat sat on the floor. Two expensively-dressed men approached him and spoke with him, and I did my unnoticeable thing and listened in.

"Does the restaurant ever give you food?" one of the expensively-dressed men asked the homeless man. He was tall and broad-shouldered and bore a slight physical resemblance to David Harbour.

The other expensively-dressed man was nondescript.

"No," the homeless man answered. "Some of the customers are very nice. They'll get leftovers in a doggy bag and bring it out and give it to me. Good stuff. The duck is out of this world, but all of the leftovers I've had from this place have been outstanding. But the restaurant itself seems to have an official get-rid-of-me policy. The maître d' especially seems to have a hard-on for me."

"That's too bad."

"I can see his point of view," the homeless man said. "Some restaurants will give you food, but I can see why they might not want to. They pay God only knows how much for the rent here, and they see me as bad for the ambiance."

The next day, the two expensively-dressed men-- silk suits, both of them -- were at the same place at the wall where the homeless man usually was, but the homeless man wasn't there. They were looking across the lobby into the restaurant and smiling. The homeless man was there, seated at a table in the dining area, scrubbed and brushed and clipped and clean-shaven and wearing a silk suit, looking like three million bucks.

Suddenly, the maître d', holding the overcoat the homeless man had been wearing the day before, charged up to where he was sitting, shouting something which was unintelligible from where we stood across the lobby, threw the overcoat at the homeless man's feet and literally chased him all over the dining area. The two expensively-dressed men ran across the lobby and into the restaurant and got between the maître d' and the homeless man. I stayed back and watched. The two expensively-dressed men and the maître d' were all yelling at the same time. I couldn't make out what anyone was saying. The homeless man wasn't saying anything. He just looked embarrassed.

Finally, the yelling died down a little, and the two expensively-dressed men stood protectively on either side of the homeless man and walked him out of the restaurant, out of the skyscraper's lobby, around the corner and into an only slightly less-fancy restaurant nearby, where they all three sat down together for lunch.

Civilization In Europe And The US

Today I saw a hidden-camera video made in Germany: a man with rather long hair and a scruffy beard, wearing jeans and a denim jacket, pretends to have some sort of collapse in a downtown area. He appears to have trouble breathing, he staggers around, clutches at his chest, and gradually sinks from a standing position down to the ground. Many people stare but walk away. Finally, not long before he would be lying flat on his back, a young woman rushes to his aid. A moment after that, seeming to follow her example, several others run toward him also.

Then we cut to a very close-up camera -- the man who pretended to collapse is standing up again, he's beaming. He tells the people who came to help: "I'm fine. It was only a test. You did very well."

Then the same man gets a haircut, gets his beard trimmed, is put into a very nice suit and coat, pretends to be having the same sort of problem in the very same downtown area -- and almost immediately he's surrounded by people who want to help him.

Among the comments from the people watching the video: refusing to help the man when his appearance was scruffier was, among other deplorable things, "against the law" ("strafbar").

Against the law. I live in the US, and the laws having to do with homeless people vary greatly from place to place. In many if not most localities, homelessness is not treated as a condition requiring that others help, but as a crime itself. I immediately thought of a video taken recently in Florida by a bystander, in which a police officer slapped and arrested a homeless man for trying to use a public restroom.

I also thought of another video made recently in the US: a hidden-camera setup very much like the German one: a person in shabby clothes pretended to be in trouble in a downtown urban area; then the very same person was groomed a bit and put into nicer clothes, and behaved in exactly the same way in exactly the same place. Just as in the German video, the first time, the person in a scruffy exterior was ignored by passers-by for quite a long time, and the very same person after a trip to a salon and put into rich-people clothes was helped immediately.

In the comments of the people watching this video, it didn't seem to occur to anyone that not helping this person in trouble because of an unkempt appearance could be against the law. Oh, by the way: in this video, instead of a man pretending to physically collapse, the person who appeared to be in trouble was a little girl, maybe five years old, screaming for help and pretending to cry.

The Homeless In America: Ft Lauderdale Cop Slaps And Arrests Homeless Man For Trying To Use A Public Restroom

After this video went public,



the police officer involved has been suspended. But I have to wonder whether he was suspended because he did what he did, or because he got caught. You see, there are communities in the US which try to help the homeless and other poor people, and then there are places like Ft Lauderdale, where this video was made, which in 2014 made it a crime to feed homeless people. For a long time in the US, perhaps for all of our country's existence, in many communities, perhaps in most, it has been the standard practice of the police to try to make life for homeless people so uncomfortable that they will leave town. Ft Lauderdale's law against giving food to homeless people was just a little more public and flagrant than most implementations of this longtime standard policy.

If you've got a video camera in your phone, and you believe that all people are united in some way, if you believe that we're all in this together, please make sure that you know how to use that video camera and how to post videos online.