Troubadour

Yesterday, I was walking down King Street with Carter when a street musician came up to us. He asked Carter if he would "buy the lovely lady a song," and Carter agreed. He started playing the harmonica -- some blues and some boogie -- for us. He was a black man in his sixties perhaps (hard to tell), tall and slender, and a man who had been through rough times. But he didn't beg for money... he offered us a service (musical entertainment) for a monetary compensation. We were enjoying the performance (because he was really extraordinarily good) when a group of young, preppy white kids step out of a restaurant. They see Carter and I standing there, and the musician playing for us. One of the kids, wearing a striped green shirt and a baseball cap turned backwards starts laughing and says, "Aww, man, now you gotta do a little dance to that, too!" Then he walks away, laughing with his friends. I stood there for a moment, startled. I couldn't believe what had just happened.

One second, we were enjoying an interchange -- he performed music for us, we paid him -- the next, he is being demeaned, publicly - by a pimply guy whose only skills are probably limited to getting a highscore in Halo. How did he had the nerve, the audacity, the presumtion that he could speak like that to a man who was trying as best he could to eek out an honest living? Who was he to tell this man to "do a little dance with that?" Would he have instructed any man with a harmonica to dance? What if that were Bob Dylan? Or the white twenty-something guy who pretends to be John Mayer who plays at Red's on Friday? (Red's is a bar in the up-scale part of town known as Mt. Pleasant) Would he have laughed and pointed then? Chances are, he never thought he was even doing anything wrong. He never thought how goddamn condescending, elitist, and insulting he was being. He probably just thought he was being funny. Truth is, he was ascribing to a century old belief system in which he sees his white, upper class self as superior, and he was, through his comments, showing that he did not respect this individual as a full human being.

This musicial had talent, and without knowing how or why, some guy a third of his age judged him and decided that he was better than him, by publicly demeaning him. Am I exaggerating? Am I going over the top and making a big hoopla out of an innocent remark? I don't think I am. What could this man have been if people had given him a chance? Maybe he would have been on the streets anyway. But he was talented, polite, and educated. As we walked away, he said to me, "I'm a troubadour -- a representative of the lost art." Did the pimply-faced kid who walked away feeling good about himself even know what the word "troubadour" meant?

The questions are rhetorical. The point is that the kid should have been taught respect for his fellow human beings. I don't for one second believe that everyone deserves the same kind of respect -- I for one don't respect that kid on an intellectual level because of his actions and if I ever see him again I will tell him as much -- but I have a basic level of respect for everyone. That is what he lacked. That is, unfortunately, what a lot of people lack.