[leica] photographing the homeless

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

Larry sed:

>>>Of course, Americans tend to have
>>>more pity for homeless animals than homeless people,

I sed:

>> for the record, americans do NOT pity homeless animals, they EAT them.

Don chimed in:

>For the record, the only pets I have eaten were some stray dogs that I
>errantly ate at a "Korean" restaurant in south Houston.  

As part of this conversation it's interesting to me that larry said 
"animals", I said "animals" and don mentioned he didn't usually eat "pets" 
-- its semantically interesting to me in the same way i find it interesting 
we say "steak" instead of "cow". cows are cute and alive, steaks are juicy 
and wrapped in cellophane. don probably has eaten lots of animals, but when 
we're speaking of compassion and animals our minds tend to assume the word 
"pets" -- it's the way the inner back-channels of our minds work.

while working on the armed america book i very frequently would show photos 
to non-gun people who would say something along the lines of "i can't 
believe those vicious people could shoot a deer", all the while munching on 
a ham sandwich. 

i think the word "homeless" as a qualifer to "person" has a similar power. 
if we say "bob asked me to help him" or even "a person asked me to help him" 
it's different from "a homeless person asked me", one carries a sense of 
obligation "oh, i'm glad you helped bob", the other doesn't.

when i first moved to philadelphia there were four people living in my 
driveway in a silver honda civic with flames painted down the side, two men 
and two women. they would sit on or in the car during the day, drinking 
beer, and sleep in it at night. when i mentioned this to my colleagues at 
work, their immediate reply was "did you have them arrested?" -- not that i 
have above average compassion for the homeless or people in general, but at 
the time i figured their lives were pretty miserable already.