I’ll be honest — I am ashamed of how long it took me to get here. Too many half-hearted hypothetical protestations, hands sweatily-wrung. I read someone’s blog post about this a few years back (I’ll link it when I find it) and it hit me square in the middle of the forehead with how obvious this all ought to be:
We should give folks spare change when they ask for it.
The lady on the corner by your office, the scratchy-voiced man on the subway, the folks pitching local newspapers outside your neighborhood bar — when they ask for help we should help them, unconditionally.
I am uncomfortable with all forms of policing, including behavior scolding. If this post isn’t for you, I don’t take it personally, there’s a whole bunch of articles about HTML right around the corner from this URL.
I get the feeling, however, that this post is actually for a lot of us, and we just need an excuse to let ourselves change our minds on this. Stick with me here.
Why you might not
I’ve gone through literally every one of these little cognitive dissonances at one time or another — it’s just how we’ve been socialized, but I’m gonna face each one and by the end of this I hope you’ll shake them off and sit next to me.
I don’t have any money to give
You’re off the hook. If we can’t afford to spare even a dollar a week from our costs-of-living, that’s real and it really is awful out there, and this post just isn’t for someone facing that.
I reckon many of us can spare it, though — even the smallest amount, and we know who we are. I’m building a habit of taking out a fluctuating amount a week, depending on how sore my wallet is, breaking it at a cafe or convenience store, and because Denver has a big population of folks who need help, I’m usually able shed it by the end of the week.
What if they use it for drugs/cigarettes/alcohol/The Wrong Thing?
This is one of the really sticky things about this conversation — we need to actually believe that people are entitled to their own privacy and their own agency. Just as it’s none of our business what our housed neighbor or our best friend spends their money on, it is none of our business what the struggling person on the bus spends theirs on. It’s the hardest pivot to make from the socialization we’ve received that we have any stewardship over anyone else’s life just because they’re having a harder time than us, but it is imperative to make the mental shift.
Anecdotally, most of the people I’ve known to experience homelessness or otherwise need to ask for help just have to meet obligations — overdue bills, medical care, eating a meal — but even if someone should decide to spend it on what you deem The Wrong Thing, they are owed their own agency to do so. It is not up to us to decide who gets to run their own lives.
Furthermore, I’d love it if everyone got clean of their challenging drug or alcohol habit, but if a fix will get my neighbor through one more day and hopefully some steps closer to getting treatment, a day of self-medicated survival is always worth it over a potentially deadly withdrawal.
Shouldn’t I give them this toiletries/PB&J/care package I keep on hand?
It doesn’t hurt to offer! Usually, people will be honest with you about what they need, though. This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point of affording folks their own agency. If someone asks for cash, and we give them one of the pre-made sandwiches we’ve had in your car for weeks or the toiletry kit that they might already have many of the items from instead, we’ll have gone through a lot of effort to not really help very much. In some cases, maybe the care package we designed is exactly what someone needs, but often folks are best served by being able to choose their own priorities and make their own purchases.
What about the guy that my buddy says drives a Mercedes home from panhandling every day?
You don’t believe that guy exists, and neither do I, and we sound silly saying it — it’s a strange urban myth a lot of people hang onto because they’ve never interrogated it. To be extremely generous and afford this some credence, I’ll make the assumption that this is a warped perspective on there being different states of poverty. Plainly: Some people own homes and still need help. Some people own cars and still need help. Some people have disability statuses that mandate they cannot work without losing coverage. All of these countless states of Getting By are easier to understand if you believe that, almost always, when people ask for help, it’s because they need help.
They should seek help from government programs/soup kitchens!
Many people do! And it is possible to hold true two things: the government programs, government workers, and volunteers all do great work, and people still need help beyond that. If the government responded adequately to the needs of its citizens, we’d have a lot fewer problems in many more directions. Additionally, many shelters are unsafe for myriad reasons, and many programs simply can’t meet the demand, and must turn people away. It’s something but it just isn’t enough — our direct action we take when called upon is one more raindrop that raises the sea.
Why you really ought to
For your peace
This is a little hand-wavey, but stick with me. I know some of us feel uncomfortable with the interaction of being asked for money. It is incredibly distressing to practice ignoring someone asking for help on the subway, and it rots our hearts to do so. We become reflexive in how quickly we deploy “sorry, I don’t have cash”, “not today brother”, etc.
A deliberate practice of carrying cash specifically to help our neighbors solves this: we are able to, in one stroke, meet the need of the person asking for help, acknowledge their humanity and show them kindness and respect, easily resolve a previously challenging human interaction by acting human, and feel like we’ve done something material and active to make our neighborhood better.
There’s no shame in helping because it makes us feel good to help. Our reasons for helping are immaterial to the result.
For your soul, for your community
We take care of us, we keep each other safe. There’s an uneasy silence among middle-class people in neoliberal cities like Denver, like San Francisco, like Seattle, etc, about the routine violence of our police against homeless or mentally ill people. We cannot rely on the government to solve problems; we must show each other love and care freely and openly and unconditionally.
None of this is new or revolutionary — quite the opposite, I came way too late to this way of thinking (garfield-you-are-not-immune-to-propaganda.bmp). But the second I switched over to this mindset it instantly became the easiest, most obvious, most soulful contribution I’m able to make to my neighborhood every single day. We’re late but we’re not too late. I hope you’ll join me.
As always, email me to talk more or challenge these ideas. Thanks for reading.