Print of passers-by looking at a homeless man who is apparently undisturbed asleep on the pavement on Regent Street in London.

In lasts week’s post, a young homeless woman received attention from another young woman of her age. Unfortunately, this homeless man in London is as lucky. He is lying in the middle of the street, while crowds of people walk past and around him. Despite the large crowd, no one speaks to the man. How can loneliness in a big city be more dire than this?

We don’t pay attention

In large cities we – the ambitious working-class and well-to-do people – don’t pay attention to homeless people much. The number of homeless and rough sleeping people is increasing and despite our wealth, we don’t seem to be able to care for vulnerable people in our society. The much-praised free market does not work for them. According to a Dutch proverb: ‘From a bald chicken you can’t pluck’. There is nothing to earn from poor homeless men and women.

Going Dutch, the participation society

In The Netherlands the ‘participation society’ is a by government imposed model. In this Going Dutch-model family members, neighbours and friends are required to help to care. But some problems are too difficult to deal with as ‘amateur carers’. As a consequence ordinary people are literally ignoring the problem. Our government is doing little to nothing. In their view they have solved the problem when they outsourced the solution to us: the participating people of the public.

Only when you are ‘lucky’ enough to be e.g. a young homeless woman with whom we can identify. For someone with problems she seems like a YAVIS: Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent and Successful. The word successful can of course be taken with a pinch of salt.

This man on the other hand has to make do with the much worse acronym HOUND: Hostile, Old, Unsuccessful, Non-verbal, and Dumb. The little comfort for the man in the photo is that the weather was nice and warm at the time he was lying on this pavement.

Postscript

Would it be a coincidence that the acronym HOUND has no lemma on Wikipedia?