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?
Top Comments
All I saw was a beautiful act of humanity. Actors, exposure for the band... does it really matter? The seed has been planted, we've been reminded to open our eyes and our hearts. Imagine how much happier we could be if we looked for the positive first.
What is this video really achieving or saying? That homeless people need to learn an instrument before asking for money?
I don't really see how these things help anything except for exposure of the band.
I guess thats true to an extent, and they do compound that mesage by saying that he was doing it wrong and they decided to help show him how its done, but the thing i noticed is that everyone was ignoring the homeless guy until the music started - then they donated money, paid attention, etc.
I guess I thought their take home message was that we are so busy & self absorbed that we dont notice there are people around us who are suffering. We just step over them. And we dont have to put oursleves out that much to help them either (although it would be great if we did put ourselves out a bit!). Even if you cant sit with them and sing a song, just a bit of small change, or hell, even just a smile as you pass them would be better than nothing. Than treating them like they are invisable, worthless, not even human.