With the holidays right around the corner, it’s traditional to say how happy one is that people are looking to help the less fortunate.

Indeed, 15 students braved the elements on Nov. 15 (TLR, Dec. 3, “Students sleep outside to raise awareness”) to gain empathy for those without the benefits of shelter and to make the plight of homeless people more visible.

Although they had good intentions, their efforts were a waste of time. They did little to gain any understanding of the problems associated with homelessness.

While six of the students did not have tents, the majority of them slept inside their makeshift shelters and had sleeping bags and clothes, which protected them from the cold.

“Sleeping outside is a hard process,” sophomore event planner Daniel Hellinger said in the story. “It took a lot of preparing.”

Preparation is an obstacle to understanding homelessness. The students were armed against the elements. Homeless people are not equipped to deal with the weather.

The students also had entertainment with them, including movies shown on a projector.

The biggest obstacle to understanding homelessness, however, was the group nature of the activity. These students were pretending to be homeless with their friends and close associates. Their tent village was guarded by patrols from Linfield Campus Community Safety & Security.

Staying outdoors with your friends is hardly akin to the experience of huddling alone, which characterizes homelessness. Staying outdoors with your friends is a social activity. Most people call it “camping.” All that was missing on Nov. 15 was the fire and the s’mores.

This is similar to saying that you’ve experienced the dangers of firefighting by sitting in the ladder truck. It’s like claiming to be a refugee by taking a vacation to a third-world country.

This was a half-measure, a spectacle with no actual impact, that leaves the participants thinking that they have somehow gained insight into a deep, complicated scenario.

The event takes time and energy away from doing something useful to stop homelessness. Instead of sleeping in a field, they could have gone to homeless people and helped them find shelter for the night.

The group could have held a fundraiser. They could have donated some food to a soup kitchen or volunteered their time.

They could have gone to Portland, split up, and individually gone to find shelter for the night if they really wanted to experience homelessness.

Doing that would have been dangerous. It would have sundered their ability to support one another. They would no longer have the power of numbers that protected them from danger.

In short, they would have no longer been safe. As long as they had the security of a group, they did not experience the dangers of homelessness.

Joshua Ensler/News editor