I will give them a dollar not to play it.
I don’t think anybody disagrees with the sentiment.
But some of us disagree as to where to put the money to best make their day less shitty.
I never give money to people who wait at traffic lights, because it’s unsafe for both panhandlers and drivers to have people darting in and out of traffic and I don’t want to contribute to that. I tend not to give money to people who approach me and ask, because I don’t like being approached by strangers who want me to pull my wallet out. Otherwise, it depends entirely on circumstance and whim. I don’t typically pass judgment on people who panhandle; I don’t feel qualified to say who deserves what.
I give money to charity and I lobby for increased services for homeless, mentally ill, and drug-addicted people, and every now and then I’ll give money to someone who seems to need it, but those occasions are pretty few and far between.
I never encounter panhandlers much, but I always give them something (sometimes just change, others a couple of bucks – I’ve never had more than that to give) and I always will. Especially now that in the last year we’ve lost our house due to my husband’s illness, and I see how close we’ve come to being that destitute ourselves. If it weren’t for family and some great foresight, I might’ve been calling a cardboard box my home and a street corner my job. And I don’t care what they spend it on or if I’m being scammed… I just want to make someone’s life a teensy bit better, in some way, and I think having to beg (regardless of circumstances) has to be one of the most dehumanizing and demeaning things one can endure. So, yeah, call me a sucker. I don’t care.
I used to give cash to everyone I saw on the side of the road.
Now I only give cash to people with unique marketing strategies.
The guys with the “not gonna lie, I need a beer” , “wife threw me out for cheating, it was worth it” and “global warming burned my house down” signs
Ok, to all the people who are saying things like, "I just want to make somebody’s life a little bit better, if only for a moment. "
Are you thinking about how that 5 dollars ends up in the pocket of a drug dealer? The kind of person that uses 12 boys to sell drugs their drugs, puts guns in their hands, to shoot other 12 year old boys selling drugs. About 200 to 300 of these kids die in my city each year fighting for control of the drug trade. They not only kill each other, but they terrorize working families in the neighborhoods that these drugs are sold.
Ultimately your 5 dollars winds up in the pocket of a drug cartel in Mexico, where tens of thousands die fighting for control of the smuggling trade.
There are plenty of churches and private sector organizations that are trying to help people break the chain of addiction, and put their lives back together, you’ll do much more good giving your 5 bucks to them.
I do this too. And I can’t speak for others, but I live out in BFE now. The people who end up getting some cash out of me are usually really old vets who could also be drunks, a couple of women who’ve seen bad roads (abuse? meth?) and the occasional folks who swear they need money to get from point A to B. That’s it. I may be sliding along a habit for an afternoon, but I sure the hell ain’t funding any cartels.
meth is probably home grown and may or may not come from a cartel. Heroin is probably imported.
When I lived in Albuquerque, there were a few colorful panhandlers around. One was a guy who would always, without fail, ask for $20. I guess if you ask for a quarter, you’ll get a quarter, but ask for 20 bucks and maybe you’ll get a dollar.
Another one would ask for spare change and then when given anything he’d stare at it in his hand for the longest time like he was trying to figure out just what the fuck this was. Then he’d say, “Have a shitty day!” and wander off. This guy was eventually set on fire by some teenagers one winter night and burned to death.
There were many panhandlers on Central Avenue, the main drag in Albuquerque, running right by the U of New Mexico campus, so many that when I first moved there I toyed with the idea of trying it out for a couple of days, just as an experiment to see how much one could get doing that. But then I found a job and began meeting people, and it wouldn’t have been any good. It would have been one thing to try it when no one knew me.
I suspect the vast majority of times it ends up in the pockets of the Miller Corporation. Occasionally Philip Morris. Once in awhile the local sandwhich shop. And, sure, some may end up going to the guys slinging chiva down in the Mission District.
But nope, I don’t think about it much. Because I have no way of telling and I’m not giving out applications and doing background checks before disbursing funds.
According to all the news reports around here, they make it sound homegrown. So, I guess our skeevy folks are just that enterprising!
I don’t. Panhandlers around here tend to have territories and stick to the same areas. I also have territories (home and work neighborhoods) and tend to travel the same paths. The last thing I need is someone starting to expect a handout from me. I’ve know a couple people who give to neighborhood panhandlers and it always turns into some kind of toll, where they start to worry the panhandler will retaliate in some way if they stop giving, because now they’re recognized as a target.
One night a couple years ago, my car got a flat tire on my way home from Detroit. I was on the expressway in a section right in the middle of the ghetto of Detroit and i just barely managed to get my hobbled car off the e-way and into the nearby gas station parking lot.
My car (Mazda rx-8) isn’t equipped with an actual spare tire; rather it just has a “fix-a-flat” kit. Well my tire had hit a rusty piece of metal sitting on the side of the lane on the expressway and was ripped completely open. The fix-a-flat kit wasn’t going to do the job here; I needed to call a tow truck.
So I had to just sit out in front of this gas station, in one of the worst ghettos of Detroit, in the middle of the night to wait for this tow truck. As I sat there in my wheelchair, several people came in and out of the gas station, passing me by as they went. What I was NOT expecting was to be mistaken for one of the panhandlers out working the area (there were two crackheads enthusiastically approaching every person that came to the gas station and asked for money. They got nothing).
I, on the other hand, was just sitting there, not saying a word to anyone. This apparently proved to be the winning strategy for attracting donations, because not just one but two different people stopped before they entered the gas station and handed me a few coins. 
I was so dumbfounded by the first lady who dropped a couple quarters in my lap (without saying a word, either) that I just sat there saying nothing. But i got a kick out of it! So a few minutes later when another older lady stops and offers me her spare change, I just stuck out my hands and said “Thank you so much!” 
My wife used to pay a very bad singing panhandler near her office window to be quiet.
I have struggled with this issue. My current strategy is two-pronged:
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I don’t give money to panhandlers - people with cardboard signs, or people who mumble ‘spare change’ as I go by.
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There are enough people who are obviously in desperate straits downtown that I give to them spontaneously- for example, the 65 year old with a long beard, no shirt, pushing a shopping cart full of junk who’s so skinny I can see his ribs. He says nothing to me at all, as he’s busy digging recycling out of the wastebasket. I walk up, say ‘you look like you could use some help’ and hold out $5. He takes it, says ‘thanks brother’, or the equivalent, and we both go on with our lives.
This technique has several benefits: I’m in control. I don’t feel guilty for giving or for not giving. I know the person who gets the money isn’t scamming me, or else it’s one hell of a long con. I’m pretty sure the money is going to someone who could really use the money for whatever.
This usually works pretty well. The one major failure was the time I accidentally insulted some freegan who was dumpster-diving.
That’s not a failure, that’s a feature. 
He meant only the poor that weren’t going to spend it on booze, of course. Jesus was all about “deserve.” :dubious:
Christians are capable of amazing mental gymnastics in the pursuit of putting any plausible spin on Jesus’ crystal clear instruction to give to the poor, that might make them feel OK about not giving to the poor person right in front of them.
Jesus had the benefit of divinity and the ability to tell if the person asking him for stuff was lying or whatever and turn it into an appropriate Jesus-y lesson. Jesus also wasn’t really in the “direct disbursement of cash” business so much as performing miracles, healing the sick, giving out bread & fish and offering Son of God advice on how to change your ways. Lacking that sort of talent, I have to make my calls based on my own ability to figure out how to help best and I think that donating directly to charities who can multiply the spending power of my dollar to help many people is the best option.
That’s not “mental gymnastics”, that’s just logic. I do remember passages though about people who perform “good deeds” and take pains to let everyone else know how their good deeds were better than anyone else’s good deeds.
I realize that the situation might be a bit different in rural areas.
Yes, I’m guilty of looking at this issue through the lens of my city, Baltimore.
Drug use creates misery for not only the user, but those around him. The working poor who are trying to raise families, and send their kids to school in drug infested neighborhoods suffer a great deal from the open air drug markets. Guess where those junkies spend that money they collect at traffic lights and gas stations.
Sliding the habit along for a afternoon, huh?
Maybe that junkie doesn’t have too many afternoons left?
You aren’t really doing him any favors providing him money to get high on, and you most probably are indirectly funding a drug gang of some sort if you give money to a junkie, even in rural America.
There are other ways to help, and saying " Sorry brother, can’t give you any cash" is one.
No, definitely no. I may have given money to a panhandler once or twice, but if I have, it was a while ago. It’s since been my policy not to. As the OP points out, I have no way of knowing how the money will be spent, not that it’s really my business, but it’s important to me that if I think I’m helping someone, that I actually am and I’m not just enabling them to continue to be self-destructive. I think that, in general, giving money to a panhandler is like feeding a stray cat, and in most areas they’d probably be better off getting the services of a shelter or charity. I’d rather donate my spare change to something like that than encourage panhandling.
That said, I will give money to a street performer, even if he appears to be homeless. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not charity, it’s a performance art; and if I like it, I’ll drop in a few bucks. Hell, I’ve even seen some of these guys selling CDs, so at least those ones presumably are not homeless, and I’ve bought those too. Still, I’ve seen plenty that looked homeless, were playing the harmonica or a guitar or something. So, sure, maybe they will spend that on booze or drugs, but I’m paying them for their art/performance, and I’m sure a number of the artists I support in other means spend with which I support them on booze and drugs.