Yes.
Unless they’re affiliated with The Committee to Re-elect the Resident.
I’m totally serious. How many of you who’ve complained about jobless or homeless people asking you for change have donated to political campaigns?
So comments like this whoosh right by in this message board community…
“white males have to be SUCH screwups to end up homeless in this country that I figure they’re beyond help”
You’re my hero. Seriously. I thought I was one of the few people that thought that way. Its not callous and insensitive, its just…logical! “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.”
It’s not the fact that the person is homeless/black/mentally ill/etc. that makes me not want them near me; it’s the fact that they want my money. I do not have a lot to give, I pay from my middle class income hundreds of dollars per year voluntarily and thousands of dollars per year involuntarily to social programs designed to enable people, and there are too many horror stories that begin with a “harmless guy” walking up to a lone person on the street for me to attach my liberal guilts to the situation, so I err on the side of caution. As
Libertad mentioned in his post, remember that the vast majority of these people have been denied a place to stay with their friends and families, and there’s probably a reason.
I’ve had a major turnaround on how I view panhandlers- when I was much younger I literally NEVER passed one without giving whatever I could, even if it was only cigarettes, but now it’s by far the exception when I do give money. I’ve worked too many really shitty jobs (often several at once) and seen too many of my friends do the same to feel enormous sympathy for somebody who seems able-bodied but who can’t or won’t find ONE shitty job. I agree that homeless people are deserving of basic human dignity and I would never taunt them with “get a job!” or the like, but I have no problem with generally ignoring them. (An exception- I’ve been bothered for the past month with an incident over the holidays involving a mother and child, but I still simply do not have the resources to do more than a temporary [i.e. 5 minute] fix even for somebody truly in need.)
What really p.o.s me, btw, are panhandling scripts- stories that you’ve heard more than once that are just too similar to be coincidental. By far the most common one I’ve heard is this one:
*“Hey buddy, I have a pregnant wife in (insert name of town about 30-70 miles away here) and I’ve got to get to her, but the insert moderately priced car-part here went out on my car. There’s a place up here who can sell me one for insert exact dollar and cent amount here but I only have insert exact dollar and cent amount here is there any way you can find it in the goodness of your heart to help me out?”. *
I have literally heard it in so many states that it makes me wonder if there are panhandling conventions and periodicals to help standardize the spiel for maximum cost effectiveness. It’s so freaking rehearsed that it makes me want to ask them “Are you that stupid or do you think that I am?”
There’s also the ‘better-dressed-than-most-panhandlers’ guy who starts by telling you he isn’t a panhandler but… and then goes into a minor variation on the basic story: I have a job in ______, ___ (usually a small town 100 miles or so from where you’re standing that’s big enough you may have heard of it but small enough that you’re probably not from there) that starts on Monday and I was robbed and they took my car and wallet but I can give you the phone number of my employer if you can just spot me a few dollars to get a motel room. CALL YOUR SIGNIFICANT-OTHER OR YOUR MOTHER OR YOUR SISTER OR YOUR FRIEND AND HAVE THEM WIRE YOU SOME MONEY! THIS QUALIFIES AS AN EMERGENCY- IT’S WORTH ASKING A FRIEND TO GET A CASH ADVANCE ON HIS/HER CREDIT CARD AND IF YOU REALLY HAVE A JOB STARTING MONDAY YOU CAN PAY THEM BACK!
At 12:30 at night, a knock comes on my door.
I open and see a guy I don’t recognize. A car is in the street, with the engine running. He is 30-ish, white, blue-collar looking, which is the norm in my neighborhood.
He says, “I’m Dan – Karen’s husband”.
“Right. What do you want?” (I don’t recognize either name).
He proceeds to give me a fast-paced, confusing story in short spurts. He blurts out things like, “Did you see the white truck? My dad had the white truck?” I repeatedly reply that I don’t know who he is, and have to keep asking him what he wants (keep in mind I’ve just been awakened, so I’m slowly spinning up the old brain. I’m also not wanting to slam the door on a neighbor in need, but I tell him the truth, that I don’t know who he is).
He answers me with non-sequitors, or other questions. Or repeats that he’s “Dan, you know, Karen’s husband”, or “lives five houses down.”
He eventually tells me what he wants: his kid is in the hospital, and he needs $37 for prescription drugs.
I reply that I don’t have any money (a lie), but if he wants me to get the change from my car ashtray, I’ll get the keys.
He dejectedly declines and leaves.
Over the next week or two I check with all my neighbors. None of them has ever heard of anyone in the neighborhood fitting the description.
Makes a street beggar con artist look downright honorable.
Apologies for the rant – I know this is GD.
Reasons I have heard are things like
- ‘I was sexually and physically abused and no one believed me so I had to run away’
- ‘My mom’s new boyfriend kicked me out’
- ‘My family had me committed to a psychiatric institution and drugged’
- ‘nobody at home could support me with my mental illness, and the hospital I was staying at was closed’
- ‘My family lives in [remote town]/is dead/is worse off than me’
- ‘I had/have a problem with drugs/alcohol and since I’m so poor I have no support with which to get better’
and stuff. I deem these to be acceptable reasons to not go home again, as well as reasons why they would not be a threat to me.
I’m in NYC, and the panhandlers and beggars are abundant, unfortunately. I’m an erratic giver, with a few adamant rules:
-
I do not give to anyone in an ATM cubicle, or standing beside a token booth, or standing directly outside a store. These are all places where they know a money transaction is taking place, and I feel as if it’s – and I think it is, in many cases – a veiled threat.
-
If I’m reading, writing, or just staring into space on the subway, and you thrust your cup in my face, I not only will not give to you, but will make a point of looking at you to recognize you in the future. Asking for money is hard, I realize, but violating someone else’s personal space is inappropriate.
-
If I look at you and say, “Sorry, not today,” sucking your teeth at me, telling me “You ugly!” or calling me a nigger bitch is not going to make me change my mind. Again, I’ll remember you.
It’s hard, though. And everyone I know has their own set of internal rules if they give at all, and feels awkward about them.
I give food. I don’t KnOW for a fact that the money goes to a drug or alcohol habit. But I’m not taking any chances. At least if I don’t give money i’m not enabling them.
I have NO idea if that’s the 'best" thing to do or not, as I’m not well-educated in the demographics of homeless people, but I guess it’s better than doing nothing.
My former boyfriend (and still a good friend) and I went to Washington DC a few years ago. A homeless man approached us at (is it the Grand Central Station?? anyway, the big mall there at the train station), and told us he hadn’t had anything to eat for X days.
We were standing in line at the food court, and so my boyfriend said “sure, stand in line with us, I’ll get you a lunch”.
But the man said “oh well, but I don’t like chinese”. (???) My boyfriend smiled and said “well, no problem, if you’ll wait for us to finish, we’ll go to whatever booth you want, and you can pick out lunch there”.
The man left without a word.
And then again, I’ve given food to people on the corner (there’s a particular corner in Anchorage, (my former hometown), where the homeless often have the little signs and beg, and had people tell me 'thank you, and bless you" and such.
Who knows? Sorry, I guess that wasn’t much of an answer to your dilemma. But it’s how I try to deal with my feelings on the subject.
I blame deinsitutionalizing the mentally ill for a fair chunk of the problem, although mental hospitals, especially for charity cases, aren’t exactly wonderful places to visit. More money for out-patient services wouldn’t hurt, but it’s hard to imagine a politician really bending over backwards to help destitute mentally ill people–it’s not a huge voting bloc.
It’s tricky, if not impossible, to separate the “worthy” (note scare quotes) people who are mentally ill by no fault of their own from the “unworthy” people who are alcoholics and drug addicts. Schizophrenia and drug addiction often co-evolve–drugs become a way of self-medicating, which exacerbates the alienation from reality, which encourages more drug use, etc.
I would guess that a fair number of homeless people are former felons. If you’ve been convicted of a felony, that radically reduces your future job prospects. I had a friend who worked at a grocery store that routinely turned down applicants who have been convicted of any crime except minor traffic violations. When you can’t even get a gig bagging groceries, how are you expected to save up money for a deposit on an apartment?
It’s certainly not impossible that a panhandler who claims to be a Vietnam vet actually is: a lot of people came back from 'Nam with little money, few useful skills, and (oftentimes) a nasty case of shell-shock.
And, yes, there are homeless people who live that way by choice. Certainly you can trace a non-trivial amount of petty crime to homeless people in most places.
Fact is, anyone who has a glib 'n simple answer to the ethical question of whether to give a panhandler some spare change is someone who has a simple and stereotypical view of a widely diverse group of people, some of whom are, by most ethical standards, more worthy of your sympathy than others.
With the small exception of those with severe limb loss or other obviously apparent physical disabilities, I will NEVER give anything to a homeless person again. NEVER.
Their may be a small, miniscule percentage of folk out their that may actually be down on their luck and just in need of a bit of kindness. But the other 99.7% of beggars (approximate percentage, but fairly close methinks) have doomed any chance these folks have of getting change from me.
The various characters that have brought me to this conclusion include:
A group of about 8-9 folk, all living at a house, a well-known drug-addicts squat sort of place, near the highway. They would take “shifts” begging for change at the highway off-ramp, writing up all sort of desparate sob-stories on cardboard. My brother lived about a block away, and we dealt with this group everyday, got to really know their “work” patterns. None of them were “homeless” in the sense they were staying out on the street, though thier signs would suggest anything from being Vietnam Vets, to being stranded trying to get out of the city, to trying to support a three year old child on the streets ( yes, she brought her child along with her). Only one person, at any one time would be begging, hiding the fact that anyone there was part of a collective group of drug addicts squatting in a house across the interstate.
Walking along an open air market on a hot summer day, I collide with a man drinking a bottle of water. He drops it, and seems distressed that the top is now dirty, and he can’t finish it. He keeps asking for a bit of change, since I was the one who ran into him. I eventually fall for it, give him two quarters and then he asks for a dollar. I finally walk away, and he starts yelling at me, until one of the store merchants tells him to run off. Apparently, this dropping water/food routine goes on everyday with this guy. I have to admit it must work a lot better then sitting on the sidewalk looking pathetic. . .
Any of those homeless who hover nearby news-vending machines. I HATE when they do this. And I’m getting to the point where I now drop my quarter in and get my paper and just ignore them. It makes me feel bad, like I’m rubbing it into them.
I don’t want to sound like some Cold-hearted Iceman. For what its worth, I think I was a very, very generous person up until my 21rst year or so. I would almost -always- give something. But I run into this stuff far to often in my neighborhood, nowadays, and it gets old. I’m getting to the point where I am not only angered by beggars, I am also angered by others who CHOOSE to support them. It doesnt “help” the homeless problem. It doesnt “stop” hunger. It just makes them flock to my neighborhood in greater numbers, inevitably forcing me to deal with them more and more often.
The last guy I did NOT give to was the fellow with the “Homeless Viet Nam veteran - please help” sign. He looked to be in his mid-twenties.
Regards,
Shodan
i sometimes give spare change because they look like they need the money more than i do and it makes me feel good
plus its insurance, if god exists he may say ‘well…you did give some money to the poor so i suppose i better let you into heaven, cant have you going to hell !’
Whoa there, not giving to people begging in the street != not giving to the poor. Donations to legitimate charities and volunteering is the way I do it, and governments don’t hand out cash either.
Let’s have another look at mojo filter’s response, shall we? If you were tired, dirty, hungry and homeless, how would you respond to an off the cuff suggestion to go apply for work? Better yet, here’s an experiment any of you can try. Don’t take a bath for a few days, skip a few meals, put on those clothes that are buried in the basement because they weren’t good enough to give to Goodwill or the Salvation Army(remember-don’t wash them!), then go look for a job. When it comes to the part of the application that asks for address, phone number and references, just leave it blank. Most companies won’t even give you an application form to fill out when they see you, and pretty much all of them are going to toss your app in the garbage as soon as you leave.
How do I know? Three years of experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
There are such papers in many countries (including France). However, I learnt years ago that though some of them are published by charities, some are published by a for-profit company, operating in several countries, and keeping a significant part of the paper’s price. Also, this company didn’t come up with the idea, but copied the charities when they noticed it could be profitable.
I’m really upset that some people managed to find a way to make money by using homeless people. Beside, these papers are way overpriced, around 2 euros for a dozen pages, since people buy them mostly to help the homeless, not because they’re interested in the paper’s content. IOW, the company is basicaly indirectly begging, and its concurents are charities.
Concerning the OP, I often tell myself that I should estimate what amount of money I give to beggars and give it to some charity, which could perhaps use it more efficiently, but in fact I go on handing out money (perhaps 50% of the time when asked, randomly, like a previous poster). At some point in the past, I stopped giving money to beggars for a time, because I realized one day that a beggar I had just handed some change to was actually making much more money than me (I was really poor, at this time) when begging. Later, when things went better, I forgot and resumed handing out money.
There are two categories of people to whom I don’t give money, though : people who try to scam me and sell me some story about them not having enough money to pay for a train ticket to come back home or something similar, and, more importantly, and contrarily to a previous poster, women begging with a baby/child (essentially all of them, here, being gypsies (illegal immigrants from eastern europe). I think that there’s no way a child should be out in the streets with a woman begging (to whom, I gather, they aren’t necessarily related). These women are using the child to get more money, and that’s children exploitation, plain and simple. Anyway, in our wealthy countries, there’s no way a child is going to starve (except, perhaps, precisely, when they’re exploited by such unscrupulous people).
And by the way, there’s a category I do not consider the same as beggars, though they’ve been mentionned in this thread. People who play music in the streets/metro. I give they money when I like the music enough to stop by and listen.
Also, concerning an issue which has been mentionned, I feel the way people use the money I give them is none of my business. I can choose to give or not, but in the latter case, they can spend it on booze, on food or invest it in the stock market, I don’t care. That’s their responsability as (assumedly) responsible adults, and I’m not willing (nor able) to make a judgement call about how they should conduct their lives.
Finally, on the overall, I don’t really feel the need to worry too much about the issue at hand. Handing some change or not isn’t going to make any major difference in their lives or in mine.
And did you consider that all the people (possibly not as small a percentage of the population as you believe) who happen not to have a “dozen family members” able/willing to help them/feed them/let them live in their house will likely end up in the streets as soon as they’re out of luck (by the way, how many of your friend would be willing to do so if you were homeless for…say, one year…? What if your family was poor, your friends unemployed?) ?
After all, it’s not like 25% of the population was begging in the streets. It’s a little percentage. Could it be precisely the small percentage who doesn’t have the “safety net” you’re relying upon who will become homeless when some shit will happen?