Actually, they call me ‘Cold, Mean, Heartless and Cruel’ but I think that it would be more aptly applied to these people.
Vancouver BC, Canada — St. Paul’s emergency nurse Christine Wellstead has seen some pretty rough things on the job, but nothing has shaken her as much as the callous indifference she witnessed Monday night as bystanders ignored an unconscious homeless man wrapped in a burning comforter.
Wellstead was on her way home from work around 10:30 p.m. when she stopped at Starbucks at 19th and Cambie for a coffee. Smelling smoke, she walked outside to see what was burning, but all she could see was a woman sitting at an outside table, talking calmly on her phone as clouds of smoke rolled past her. “She’s on her cellphone, having her coffee and she’s sitting amongst this acrid smoke,” she said.
Looking further, Wellstead found a man slumped on a bench in a nearby alcove on the side street, wrapped in a comforter that was on fire. “It was smouldering, and it was by his face,” she said. “It was all orange, and there was smoke. I threw the blanket on the ground and tried to wake him up, but he didn’t wake up.”
She ran back into Starbucks for water to put out the fire, and that’s when she got a real shock. She said another woman customer standing at the counter told her: “Just leave him alone, he’s a homeless person,” Wellstead recalled. “I looked at her and I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and she says, ‘He’s homeless, just forget it.'”
Appalled, Wellstead rushed back out with water to douse the fire and still couldn’t wake the man, so she ran inside again and asked a barista to call for help. “I said, ‘You’d better call an ambulance, because I can’t wake him up,’ and the lady [customer] said, ‘Don’t call the hospital, they don’t want him,’ and I just looked at her, and I said, ‘I work at the hospital and yeah, we want him.'”
Now, there’s no love lost between myself and ‘The Homeless’. I personally believe that 99% of bums choose to live like that, either unwilling to live up to society’s standards or give up their self destructive habits like alcohol or drugs or both.
But damn, if I saw a bum on fire, you bet your ass I’d try to keep him or her from being turned into a crispy critter.
Socialism at work folks.
Back in September, I spent a day and evening in Vancouver. I had dinner in Chinatown, and had a one mile walk back to Canada Place to where I had parked my vehicle. That walk would have taken me up Cambie Street, so I followed the maitre-d’s advice and took a cab.
I saw the mess that is Cambie Street, and the cabbie told me that the City Fathers have a strict hands-off policy on the homeless and druggies that gather there (it’s also the red-light district).
Yep, socialism works. They let this festering sore soil their city, but then, are our brand of socialists, who claim to fight homelessness and drugs any better?
Not if you measure success by clean, drug-free cities, they aren’t.
Yeah it’s a problem there. I spent 10 years living in Vancouver, the majority of it working in hospital security, but a few years driving a security car around the town watching the melodrama unfold outside the windshield.
The citys homeless are no friends of mine, I’ve been spit at and had human feces flung at me by some of the more “conscious” specimens the city has to offer. I’ve bickered, scuffled and outright fought with the less mentally stable ones.
I’ve developed a disdain for the “homeless” as a group that is hard to quantify here. Having said that I cannot fathom simply ignoring a person (and we are still discussing people here) who is on fire, so that I may enjoy my half-caf-mocha-frappe in peace.
Christine Wellstead deserves kudos for remaining human, and rendering aid to someone in need. I’d like to think she represents the majority of citizens in Vancouver more accurately than the other starbucks patrons in this story.
I’d like to think that, but my true feeling on the matter is that she doesn’t.
That story is unbelievable! Your guess that a large percentage of homeless people have chosen that lifestyle is pretty close to accurate based on what I have heard; I had a close relative who was homeless for 10 years because he preferred to spend his hard-earned money made while holding a “Vietnam Vet, Please Help, God Bless” sign on illegal drugs instead of a place to live and food to eat. He told me most of the homeless people he knew were drug addicted and had chosen that life. He made a couple hundred bucks a day holding that cardboard sign, twice that around the holidays, not a bad living. BTW, he was never even enlisted.
That all being said, human decency demands that you don’t let someone burn alive, no matter how they got that way.