Today I sat outside on the grass to study, because it was a nice day out. Windy, but nice. Before my leg even had time to fall asleep from the awkward position I sat in, I was approached by a man I suspected was a panhandler or con man. It was the questions he started with – how long I had been at Cal, if I had ever seen him before. He was feeling me out to see if he had ever worked me before.
I often attract the crazy or indigent – I guess I look empathetic. Or like an easy mark. Many don’t ask for money, though; they just want a sympathetic ear. I once talked to a homeless man in San Francisco who walked around singing all day as he pushed his shopping cart. He told me he wasn’t really crazy, he just pretended to be.
The man who approached me today, and who later identified himself to me as RaLo, didn’t look crazy, or even like a typical panhandler – which is why I suspected him of being a panhandler. Counterintuitive, maybe, but that’s how my brain works. He was an older guy – fifty-four, he said, and I can’t imagine why he’d lie about that. His hair and beard were silver and close cropped. He did not smell. He was sober, but missing a lot of teeth, so he probably had a past with heroin. He was dressed kind of like I was dressed – jeans, sneakers, hoodie, and a jacket over the hoodie. I actually thought the jacket looked pretty cool, but I have been told by friends in the past that the jacket I have now (which I like a lot) makes me look like a hobo, so maybe I have bad taste in jackets. I did not ask him where he got it, it seemed tactless.
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RaLo began to tell me a tale that, while no doubt mostly false, probably mirrored his real life in some ways. He battled heroin for years and now was in a clean and sober program. He came out here from the South to escape the poverty and bigotry. He had a wife and three kids, and had trouble supporting his family. He’d had jobs on and off in the past, and was having some trouble securing one now. He believed in God. He believed in the devil. He believed the white man was the devil. Some of these statements seemed to me to be more likely than others.
RaLo said he was glad I was in school, since education was one of the few things they can’t take from you. He felt secure in confiding in me his hate of the white man, he said, because I too am a minority. I am not as dark as he, RaLo noted, but I must still be on the receiving end of the white man’s boot. I figured it was better not to tell him that my father was white.
RaLo said he liked the way I handled myself; that he appreciated being treated like a human being, rather than being pre-judged “for his color.” I felt like a hypocrite, because I had in fact already judged him, though not for his color. I felt sorry for RaLo, that a man would ever need to stoop to begging, which he no doubt was getting around to. I saw the weight of life in the lines of his face. I saw years of heroin addiction every time he opened his mouth. I assumed a lot of things about him.
I listened to RaLo for quite a while. It was more interesting than reading about the political economy of the Lebanese Civil War. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, though. Behind his elaborate backstory lurked the demand he was about to place on me – he would ask me for money.
I wish this was a story about breaking down stereotypes – that after a time, he smiled at me wistfully, heaved himself up from the grass and said, “thanks for listening.” Instead, he asked me for money. RaLo claimed he had been accepted for a job at UPS, starting tomorrow, and that he needed to get his class-b driver’s license renewed. I can’t imagine that UPS would hire a truck driver without a valid license, and the DMV is closed on a Sunday. What would he do? Get the license the day he was supposed to start work? He told me how much the job would mean to him, to his family. He was almost certainly lying to me. RaLo was not a man fallen on temporary hard times – he was living on the street, making a life as a panhandler, and he may even still be using drugs.
So what?
No one wants to give money, or time, or any kind of charity to the “undeserving.” We figure that those who use drugs, or who can’t/won’t get jobs, should be cut off. No more life of leisure for them! And it makes lots of sense. Giving money to the homeless is incentivizing that lifestyle; if people believe they can have a free ride, they’ll stop working. Thus, if we removed all charity from the indigent, some people would be strongly motivated to get off their ass and get to work.
And some would die.
In modern society, the kinship, village, and tribal networks that would have once sustained a weak member are gone. Instead, there is the state, and the random kindness of strangers. Both of these give an extremely limited amount of assistance to the poor. Some people cannot sustain themselves. I don’t know why this is true. I suspect it is because of problems in the structure of society – that we allow some to fall into the cracks early, and they can never recover. Others might say these people are born lazy, or weaker. Perhaps. Even if that were true, are we prepared to agree with Ebenezer Scrooge, and allow them to die, so that they may decrease the surplus population? Will we cave to Social Darwinism? I am not so cold yet. Everyone who lives is deserving of life. This is not to say that free-riderism is not a very real problem – but like all major social problems, we will need to be careful about where we draw the lines. Unless we are prepared to institute wide-scale programs for the assistance of the homeless and indigent, we cannot simply stop giving. Not soup kitchens, not church charities, not individuals. If I gave RaLo money, he would no doubt spend it “irresponsibly,” either on more drugs or on basic living necessities while he continued to fail to get his life on track. But at least he would continue to live.
I gave RaLo what I could spare and said, “good luck.”
