Lesson on Where Disconnection Can Lead Us

 Aljazeera's Craig Stone wrote eloquently about the tragic death of Swiss photographer René Robert:

When I was 22, I flew to Berlin for a weekend. I sat in a café, watching the world stomp by. I noted an old man, hunched, unstable, hobbling slowly on the other side of the road. He fell. I watched the old man on the cold floor, from the warm comfort of the café, and considered crossing the road to help.  I watched four young men walk over him, a lady walk around him, and one family cross the road to avoid him. The old man had become invisible. I left the café, crossed the road and helped him to his feet. But as he stood up tall, the man pushed me away, angry to be helped. I sloped back across the road to the café, confused.

Some eight years later, at the age of 30, I was working in the city and living in Willesden Green, North London. I was a minimum-wage receptionist, dreaming of becoming an author. My landlord raised my rent and, long story short, I quit my job to live in the local park and write my first novel. When I was homeless, just like that old man I tried to help in Berlin, I was invisible. My existence spread fear. People walked over me. They walked around me. They crossed the street to avoid me. It was as if I had taken a fall, and I was no longer a part of society.

Today, I’m about to finish my fourth novel. I’m a freelance journalist. From being single, skint and living under a tree, I’m now a married father of two and people pay me for my words.  But I still remember what it feels like to be invisible. Which is why Swiss photographer René Robert’s recent death in Paris hit me hard.

Eighty-four-year-old René died from hypothermia in the middle of a busy street after he fell and was ignored by passersby for more than nine hours. René Robert did have a home. But for those nine hours, he appeared homeless, so he was invisible.

Today, in society, disconnection is rife. It is much worse than it was 20 years ago. Disconnection is an epidemic. And born from that disconnection comes a need for justification. In order to sustain disconnection, our minds fill the gaps in our knowledge with thoughts that explain our instinct for separation.

And this is never more evident than when those within society walk past, over, or around a homeless person. An everyday person will look up from their phone, see a homeless person, and immediately their thoughts will turn to whatever justifies their indifference. “He must be a drunk.”  “She must have a drug problem.”  “I bet he’s not even homeless.”  Blame, blame, blame.

But if indifference was the gun that fired at René Robert, then the bullet was fear. Fear allows us to turn our indifference to homelessness into a form of deluded self-protection. Society is afraid of itself, but especially afraid of what lurks beyond its control. Society fears strangers. Society fears the homeless. And so, like all fears, the homeless become invisible.

It was fear that led Parisians to step over René’s body. For nine tragic hours, René appeared to be homeless – someone invisible, someone who must have done something wrong, someone dangerous. That was his crime. And society punished him for it. For those nine hours, René was not only homeless, he was, tragically and simply, “less”.

In the end, it wasn’t a person with a house, a job, or a family who reached down to offer help to René. The hand that reached down to touch René, to ask if he was okay, was the hand of a homeless man. A man with no possessions was the only human who possessed the compassion and absence of indifference, to call emergency services.

And when later found, this man didn’t want to give his name. Because the one thing a homeless person owns is their name. Why should he offer his name to a society so indifferent that the people who live within that abundant society couldn’t spare a moment to check on one of their own?

Because indifference can be ignorance, it can be judgement, self-protection or even disdain. But to René Robert, on the night of January 18, our collective indifference was exposed for what it’s always been – an act of violence.