By Robert O’Connor
When Studs Terkel passed away last October, I attended a memorial service put on by his friends at the Community Media Workshop. Rick Kogan, who wrote the obituary for Terkel that appeared in the Tribune, spoke about what Studs taught him.
“Because of him,” he said, “I remember the bus driver who takes me to work, or the kid that delivers the papers.” At Kogan’s job, he would talk to politicians and business leaders, but because of Studs, he would remember ordinary people’s concerns and consider their own thoughts as equal to those in the moneyed halls.
Homeless people are the sort that people would prefer to not pay attention to. They see them, standing on street corners, or kneeling on slabs of cardboard by parking lot exits, or sitting in a wheelchair with a McDonald’s large cup in one hand, singing the blues to no one in particular.
When people pass, the homeless speak, but aren’t heard. When people pass, a homeless woman underneath an El station, she’ll ask, “Help the homeless, sir,” and only a few will put change in her cup. Or the man on Michigan and Monroe who mumbles “God bless yuh,” to everyone who passes—whether they give him change or not.
Some homeless people don’t speak at all, but shake their cups of change and let the intersection they sit at ring with the sound of tossed coins. It’s no Salvation Army bell that clangs just one note loudly and clearly. But it is the same call to help those in need. And most people don’t listen.
In India, beggars need not make a sound. Most of the ones I encountered in Bangalore where I studied abroad in summer 2007, many of them children, came up to me and put their hands to their mouths and then stretched them out for rupees. They’d look at me and communicate their need without saying a word, without making a sound.
Here, those in need make a sound, and they still aren’t heard by those with a little to spare.
“They’ll spend it on addictions,” they say.
“I give to charity,” they say.
“They should just get a job like the rest of us,” they say.
There are more important immediate concerns for them, their own job, or their own home. But seeing the invisible and hearing the voiceless are abilities that anyone can possess.
When Studs Terkel passed away last October, I attended a memorial service put on by his friends at the Community Media Workshop. Rick Kogan, who wrote the obituary for Terkel that appeared in the Tribune, spoke about what Studs taught him.
“Because of him,” he said, “I remember the bus driver who takes me to work, or the kid that delivers the papers.” At Kogan’s job, he would talk to politicians and business leaders, but because of Studs, he would remember ordinary people’s concerns and consider their own thoughts as equal to those in the moneyed halls.
Homeless people are the sort that people would prefer to not pay attention to. They see them, standing on street corners, or kneeling on slabs of cardboard by parking lot exits, or sitting in a wheelchair with a McDonald’s large cup in one hand, singing the blues to no one in particular.
When people pass, the homeless speak, but aren’t heard. When people pass, a homeless woman underneath an El station, she’ll ask, “Help the homeless, sir,” and only a few will put change in her cup. Or the man on Michigan and Monroe who mumbles “God bless yuh,” to everyone who passes—whether they give him change or not.
Some homeless people don’t speak at all, but shake their cups of change and let the intersection they sit at ring with the sound of tossed coins. It’s no Salvation Army bell that clangs just one note loudly and clearly. But it is the same call to help those in need. And most people don’t listen.
In India, beggars need not make a sound. Most of the ones I encountered in Bangalore where I studied abroad in summer 2007, many of them children, came up to me and put their hands to their mouths and then stretched them out for rupees. They’d look at me and communicate their need without saying a word, without making a sound.
Here, those in need make a sound, and they still aren’t heard by those with a little to spare.
“They’ll spend it on addictions,” they say.
“I give to charity,” they say.
“They should just get a job like the rest of us,” they say.
There are more important immediate concerns for them, their own job, or their own home. But seeing the invisible and hearing the voiceless are abilities that anyone can possess.
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