“Hey! Who are you?”
I had just left kung fu class and was rounding the sidewalk corner of an intersection. The guy asking the question was bearded, middle-aged, and sitting cross-legged on a short concrete wall in front of a homeless shelter on the opposite street corner. I turned. He wasn’t yelling at me but instead was looking towards one of my classmates, a woman who was moving down a third connector of the intersection.
“Who, me?” she asked.
The guy nodded dramatically. “What’s your name?”
Without hesitation, the woman responded. Because a car passed on the road between us, I couldn’t quite hear what name she had shared. But I did hear what she said next. “What’s yours?”
The guy seemed pleased to be asked. “Larry,” he shouted. “Hey, come talk to me!”
To my surprise, the woman stopped and crossed the street to talk with him.
Impressed, I continued on towards my car, questioning my own potential response. Would I have given a guy sitting on a wall outside a homeless shelter my name? Would I recommend that my wife or daughters, or any woman for that matter, respond truthfully to such a request?
We live in interesting times. For all the media and electronic communication methods available to us, we are not necessarily able to connect any better than we used to. In some ways, the increased variety of capability has hampered our trust in trying to do so.
Consider this: these days I know who is calling before I answer a phone. More accurately, I expect to know who is calling. Consequently, if I don’t recognize a number, I usually don’t answer as it is often someone trying to run a scam or sell me something. The same is true of emails. Even if I do recognize the name on an email, it can still be a phish or some other trap. So I often don’t respond. Or I quickly hit delete.
And I wonder how, in little more than a decade, the world has gone from a place in which phone calls were answered from a phone hanging on a wall – when we didn’t know who was calling but understood that it was almost always someone we knew – to a world in which calls are often made by computers, from numbers spoofing other numbers or from people with deliberate malintent rather than general good will in mind.
Despite this change, has social communication become so potentially treacherous that a person shouldn’t give his real first name to a man sitting on a wall outside a homeless shelter? Does it even matter what name I might give a guy like Larry or rather is it ok that I simply respond to him, as a fellow human being, even if in a guardedly compassionate way?
Who have we become? Who am I in the midst of that becoming?
“I didn’t give him my real name,” my classmate explained the next day, when I had a chance to ask her about the encounter. “People can’t pronounce it very well so I gave him the name that people sometimes hear.”
I nodded my understanding. “That was still pretty nice of you to go over and speak with him.”
The woman shrugged. “Yeah, well, I just said hi and recognized him, you know? He wasn’t sober so they wouldn’t let him into the shelter. I just wanted him to know he wasn’t invisible.”
All of our so-called social media does not necessarily make any of us more visible. Personally, I often feel more exposed, more unshielded, instead of more seen. That vulnerability can make me more likely to close in, to withdraw, and hence be less likely to acknowledge someone like a guy named Larry, a guy sitting on a wall outside a homeless shelter. A guy who might only want to know my name.
Who am I? I am someone who, despite my fears, needs to try better to make others feel visible.
Who are you?