lifestyle

One simple question completely changed a man's day.

 

By DIMITY KIRKWOOD

A month ago, three students approached a homeless man on the street.

One of them sat down and asked for the man’s drum. He then started playing it, and the student’s friends joined in with a guitar and they made a song.

The clip is incredibly moving and has now been seen on YouTube by over 11 million people.

To put this in perspective, this is roughly 203,700 times more popular than Robin Thicke’s album launch in Australia.

But something’s not quite right about the video. See if you can pick it:

The “homeless” man is actually not homeless – he’s a paid actor.

At first, this made me feel furious. How dare they get an actor to impersonate someone whose situation they could in no way understand?

It all felt very wrong. Until I read the description under the video by the students:

Before filming we asked ourselves the following question: Can we simply film a person in distress and put it up on the internet, without asking them or knowing their history? Our answer is quite clearly no, which is why we have hired an actor to take on this role.

The students also said:

In May of this year, we performed like this with more songs and WITHOUT a camera. We liked the massage (sic) of what we were doing so we decided to turn it into a video in order to encourage others to possibly do the same.

Now, I don’t know. Is the video demeaning to people without a home? Or, does it raise awareness and encourage compassion?