On her book The Man in the Dog Park: Coming Up Close to Homelessness
Cover Interview of January 06, 2021
A close-up
There are so many encounters, described in the book, which
continue to affect me. Maybe the reader would stumble on one of them and see
its poignancy.
A strapping, homeless, youth walks with me (a 5’ 2”, 112 lb.,
female senior citizen) in an upscale neighborhood and turns to exclaim: “I feel
so safe with you!” (He likes to look at people’s gardens and homes and feels
that, without me there, residents would call the police).
A homeless day-laborer, working a back-breaking 10-hour construction
job, is worried only that the other men on the crew will see he has no lunch
when it is time to eat.
A 44-year-old woman sneaks each night into the 10x10 storage
unit she rents, because her minimum wage salary is not enough for an apartment
in her town.
These are just a few of the people whom readers might meet.
Probably, though, I would most want browsers to begin at the
beginning. There (in the preface and the first pages of the introduction) they
would see where I personally started with this: afraid of a homeless man I
encountered one early morning when I came alone with my dog to a secluded dog
park. And I would add: Completely unaware that anyone of the people in the
stories above lived the lives they did.
From these initial pages, browsers would also get a sense of
where one can go in crossing the boundaries into another world, at least, what
it offered me: “not only a greater responsiveness to the human condition but
also the delight of living in a world less alien, less hostile, less unloving
than it felt before” (Preface, viii).
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
There are so many encounters, described in the book, which continue to affect me. Maybe the reader would stumble on one of them and see its poignancy.
A strapping, homeless, youth walks with me (a 5’ 2”, 112 lb., female senior citizen) in an upscale neighborhood and turns to exclaim: “I feel so safe with you!” (He likes to look at people’s gardens and homes and feels that, without me there, residents would call the police).
A homeless day-laborer, working a back-breaking 10-hour construction job, is worried only that the other men on the crew will see he has no lunch when it is time to eat.
A 44-year-old woman sneaks each night into the 10x10 storage unit she rents, because her minimum wage salary is not enough for an apartment in her town.
These are just a few of the people whom readers might meet.
Probably, though, I would most want browsers to begin at the beginning. There (in the preface and the first pages of the introduction) they would see where I personally started with this: afraid of a homeless man I encountered one early morning when I came alone with my dog to a secluded dog park. And I would add: Completely unaware that anyone of the people in the stories above lived the lives they did.
From these initial pages, browsers would also get a sense of where one can go in crossing the boundaries into another world, at least, what it offered me: “not only a greater responsiveness to the human condition but also the delight of living in a world less alien, less hostile, less unloving than it felt before” (Preface, viii).