Our town has always had its (small) share of (usually) homeless people, standing in the shade under a tree at the street corner, often close to a grocery store or Walmart, usually with a smallish hand-written piece of paper or cardboard sign, asking for help, food, occasionally money.

Recently, things have become more sophisticated. It is now usually a small family, or mother and children, often Hispanic where the mother speaks no English and depends on the child(ren) to communicate. The signs have become larger, much larger, with large print that is readable from across the parking lot, and the pleas for help have become more urgent, usually mentioning some sort of dire emergency: pregnant without resources, just lost their house in a fire or having been thrown out by the landlord with nowhere to go, one of the children urgently needing surgery, etc. and so on.

Gone is the disheveled look, the temporary-ness of the small cardboard signs. The same few (two or three) families seem to cycle through town, showing up in different places on different days.

The newest, latest, is now someone, sometimes a child (with father nearby), playing a violin, again with a large sign declaring their emergency, often with an online payment option at the bottom of the sign, Venmo number etc. so you don’t even have to interrupt their playing as you give them money.

The music is beautiful, romantic, lush, usually with some orchestral background to the violin solo. While it is not at all unusual for street musicians to have a recording of the orchestra part to their live playing, these recent performances are so obviously NOT live performances – the bowing and the finger movement of the other hand are so terribly out of sync with the music, and the sound of the violin unnaturally carries all the way across the parking lot.

It is not these scam artists whom I consider a sign of the times, but the reaction of the people.

We’ve been under so much stress for so long, helplessly watching COVID-19 ravage our country, raging fires destroy towns, entire counties, with no end in sight. Afghanistan, hurricanes, it just keeps piling up – and there is NOTHING the average citizen can do. We’ve been feeling helpless, powerless for so long – so, when there appears a chance to make a difference in someone’s awful life by helping them – a chance to actually DO something, right here, right now – people jump at it.

Reading accounts on social media, it is touching how quickly people put their lives on hold and go to great lengths to help these unfortunate ones who through no fault of their own are in such dire straights right now. People spend hours and resources to collect money, set up GoFundMe’s, collect resources where to find help (we have lots of them in our town), offer to take them places. – Only, these unfortunate ones show up a couple days later in a different part of town, with the same story, starting another cycle of people going out of their way to help them.

When it is being pointed out to the helpful ones that the boy playing the violin is not actually playing the violin, they get upset, “We were just there! We saw him!”

Which may possibly be a point to be made for public school music education: educate people so they can tell the difference between real violin playing and something fake.