Rob Parsons

And even when we're buying a copy of Big Issue, not just to buy it, but to...

to actually look in somebody's eye and ask a few questions and a little bit of dignity.

You know, I was on a subway in New York many years ago and a guy came on pitching for money and we all had our heads down reading and a woman gave him a dollar bill.

And then just before it came to the next station, he moved towards the doors and he turned around and he said in a very clear voice, he's a young guy and his features were pinched with the cold.

And he said, ladies and gentlemen, I haven't always been like this.

And you should all know that anything can happen to anybody.

And now when he's gone, there's a silence in the carriage because we know a philosopher's been on the train.

And he's right.

We spoke to one of the guys in our homeless center the other day.

He's a homeless man.

He said, I lost my family and my kids in a house fire.

And I never got over it.

None of us know.

And the really scary thing is we think we're a million miles away from that kind of life, but not necessarily.

Not necessarily.

We need each other.

And that's the tragedy today is we have more communication than ever digitally, but more loneliness.

Right.

And so there'll be people in our street who, look, I don't recommend what we did, but we can take a bunch of flowers around.

We can say, how are you doing?