Barbara Lazear Ascher's On Compassion

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In her essay "On Compassion" Barbara Lazear Ascher (1988) asserts the clear physical differences between the average person and the growing homeless population in New York, and that it is wise to question whether, when interacting with homeless people, people are motivated by compassion or fear. Ascher supports her questioning of the non-homeless population's motives by crafting an immersive third-person scene between a privileged woman and a homeless man and then switching the point of view to a first-person narrative which allows Ascher to voice her own opinion and calls upon the reader using inclusive words like "we" to develop an opinion of their own; at the end of the essay Ascher also alludes to ancient Greek rhetoric to remind the reader
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