<\/a><\/p>\nI stood there paralyzed, thinking about the blood-streaked bags of cat food on her lap and how they were going to get from there to the cash. I did not want to be a part of that process and so I decided to buy the cat food for her. This cost $4. I did this out of self-interest rather than altruism. The cashier and everybody in line seemed relieved.<\/p>\n
Then one of the bags fell from her lap to the floor– as if a bell tolling, a command to be more involved in her suffering than I was willing to be. Again, I just stood there, waiting for somebody else to become alive to this moment, and then I saw something in her hands that looked a lipstick container and it struck me that perhaps this was all a performance and she had smeared lipstick on herself in order to look like blood and garner sympathy! It was an act!<\/p>\n
It was an astonishing cognitive leap, this. There are homeless, broken people all over Toronto, and in order to inure ourselves to this procession of misery, we have to believe there\u2019s a level of performance to the suffering. We construct ridiculous narratives that keep us distant from those asking for our help. Maybe it was all just a ruse, but no, no. This woman needed to buy cat food– either to eat or to feed to the one point of light in her life–and there was blood all over it and it was lying on the floor two feet from where I stood.<\/p>\n
For what felt like a minute but was probably closer to 20 seconds, nobody did a thing, and then a woman bent down and with a gloved hand picked up the bag of cat food and returned it to the woman\u2019s lap, the security guard then rolled the panhandler out, and the rest of us continued with our day as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other day I was at the Dollar Store at Bloor and Bathurst and as I was at the cash paying, a woman suddenly appeared behind me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4078,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[2126,159,2120,2121,626,100,2119,2118,399,632,2123,61,1166,2122,55,2124,1410,336,2125,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4075"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4075"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4081,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4075\/revisions\/4081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}