Jon Carroll* calls for us all to be "enablers" of homelessness:
JON CARROLL: ...One section talked about people who give money to panhandlers. It called such people "enablers." Isn't it wonderful how rehab lingo is entering the general vocabulary? The presence of enablers is thought to be one reason why so many homeless people congregate here [in San Francisco]. Enablers are not held in high regard. Apparently, all the bums would go winter in Denver if it weren't for the bucks some folks give to bedraggled people with wry signs. And that may even be true, except for the Denver part.
Here's what I think: Each of us plays many roles. Two of those roles are social citizen trying to work within the community, and individual human being trying to rediscover kindness and compassion and love every day. If those homeless people weren't in San Francisco, they'd be somewhere else. They are all still human beings, and we are bound to them by the mysterious spark of consciousness that makes us such peculiar beasts. It seems to me that honoring our common humanity is a good habit to get into. Charity is not an obligation; it's a spiritual practice.
So it is time once again for the Untied Way. The Untied Way has no officers, headquarters, business plans, pie charts, benefit dances, benefit auctions, celebrity endorsers or national poster children. Participants in the Untied Way do not get their names on a plaque, nor do they receive in the mail letters signed by Kofi Annan. The Untied Way is a program of small cash donations to individuals for use in self-identified need areas. Here's how it works. Go to your local ATM and withdraw $200 in 20s. It can be more or less, but make sure it's just a tiny bit more than you can afford. It should hurt just a little, so you'll know that you're making a choice.
Take your self and your 20s down to any area of town where people might ask you for money. (If you don't know any, San Francisco's Market Street is always reliable, and it's easily accessible by public transportation.) Walk along. Hand a $20 bill to any person who asks for money. Repeat until you are out of money. Congratulations: You have become an Untied Way volunteer. You will not get a T-shirt. It is true that some of your recipients may use the money for self- destructive purposes. That is not ideal, but neither was it ideal when you used your money for self-destructive purposes. We're all just trying to figure it out as we go along, and your fine home or apartment does not place you closer to enlightenment.
We're all experts in how other people should get their lives together. There are the worthy homeless and the unworthy homeless. You may concentrate on the adjective, or you may concentrate on the noun. I'm a noun guy. You may be sure that people who get your money have been punished worse for their sins than any penalty you or society could devise. They are not having fun. They almost certainly will have even less fun tomorrow. Some of your Untied Way clients may not show gratitude for your gift, while others may show too much gratitude. Some of them may do something embarrassing, like praying loudly or complaining about malign energy rays. What they're really saying is "Thank you," and what you're really saying is "You're welcome."
*And it's some kind of testimonial to the internet that I'm alerted to this year's appearance of this column by some guy who works in the Flatiron Building in Manhattan.
Posted by DeLong at December 23, 2003 08:13 PM | TrackBack
oh yeah, giving cah-chink cah-chink to the homeless. It's that time of year.
I dunno. I mostly don't. Money for crack? Booze? Better to buy the dude a sandwich.
As for going somewhere else -- I wish they would. One thing the homeless around here suck up is all the discourse about generousity, all the mind real estate for compassion. Want to know where the poor people in San Francisco are? Walk into any public school. That is the neglected population.
Posted by: camille roy on December 23, 2003 08:53 PMWhoa, for a second there I thought I was reading about the United Way. Its a good thing I wasn't. They do good work. Why don't we do a matching grant thing. For every dollar you give to a homeless person through the Untied Way, give another to the United Way. They help low income people in a myriad of ways (the one I know the most about is through legal aid). Happy Holidays to all.
Posted by: lauren sturm on December 23, 2003 09:04 PMCharity is supposed to help others, not make one's self feel Christmas-y good.
Any ethical person would be all for *helping* someone down on their luck by giving them $20, but we are *obligated* to be reasonably sure it's helping, not hurting. Helping an alcoholic buy more liquor, or a crack addict buy more crack, or even cigarettes, by any definition hurts them. The heart-rending reality is that the majority of homeless people are addicts, or have mental health issues, which compel them to use donated cash for self-abusive purposes. It's therefore counterproductive in the extreme to give cash to sustain self-abusive behaviour. Also it's almost impossible to sort out on a street corner the addicts and scammers from those who can truly benefit from spontaneous charity.
Therefore providing anything other than food, clothing, personal care items, heathcare or shelter is ethically and practically wrong, because it almost certainly hurts both the recipient and the neighbourhood where these unfortunate people live.
Worst of all, Jon Carroll is just plain selfish, since he's willfully ignoring the direct individual harm and indirect social pathology caused, in favour of assuaging his guilty conscience.
Giving to the real United Way, Sally Ann or other organization with proven results, is the only way to *help* most homeless people. Give, and give generously, to support these charities.
Regards,
PeterB
P.S.: Also, give generously to help elect someone to stop Bush and Arnie from cutting the treatment and other services that provide the only escape hatches from homelessness that these people have.
I have to disagree with the recommended implementation - by all means give to homeless people in the street, but please do so intelligently. Try to differentiate between "homeless" people and "street" people. For example, in Montreal the number of people asking for money on the street dramatically increases in the lead up to Christmas, and then they disappear after Christmas. It made me infuriated when I saw people giving generous holiday donations to these alleged "homeless" people, and denying money to the truly needy.
Often the truly needy will not actually ask you for money. They may be so mentally ill that they cannot stomach what really is quite hard work - begging.
They may not even know how to handle money - and it may be taken from them. So find the truly homeless - they won't be outside your subway station - and give food, money and most of all, a kind word.
Posted by: Lance Wiggs on December 24, 2003 01:16 AMJon Carrol reads well and doing what he prescribes with bills of money could possibly make you feel good, but I don't like the idea.
I do give money to people on the street sometimes (a) if they are visibly and severely crippled and if at that moment I also happen to think they have somehow fallen through the cracks in social system or (b)if I get the impression that they are doing this, asking for money on the street, once and for all. In general.
I just don't like to contribute to people getting the idea that they can just go out on the street and collect money from people as if they were collecting wild cherries or something.
Posted by: Bulent Sayin on December 24, 2003 02:04 AMYou guys are making your own lives way too hard. The Bible urges charity. The Koran makes it a sacrament. You wanna do the analysis first. OK, the simplest take from economics would be that money is always and everywhere a more efficient means of proving utility than other forms of charity, because it allows the recipient to take his or her own preferences into account. Maybe the $5 tuna sandwich you'd give is not as much to the taste of the specific homeless person as a sardine sandwich - which the homeless person could buy with the $5.
I had the pleasure of living in DC when Reagan emptied St E's residents onto the street. At the same time, homelessness was becoming an issue because the economy was in bad shape. Turns out DC had some of the best programs for the homeless, so they flocked there. I had the pleasure of living in NYC when Giuliani decided that the homeless could just as well be somebody else's problem. It's one thing to choose a level of services for the poor and let them decide where to live. Ethically, it is quite another thing to actively encourage the homeless to become some other jurisdiction's problem.
The solution, which is obvious from these two cases, is to federalize care for the homeless, so that local politicians needn't fear doing good deeds (DC) or get a gleam in their eye when they find yet another way to make the homeless shift to somewhere else (NYC). But of course, that ain't the way we do things.
Posted by: K Harris on December 24, 2003 10:12 AMThink Salvation Army.
Posted by: David Lloyd-Jones on December 24, 2003 07:08 PM