Daleth

Sorry state of affairs, keyser. I was just channelling Will Rogers for a moment. "This is the only country that ever went to the poorhouse in an automobile," or something like that.

I'm tempted to say something very nasty about NYC cops, but then I thik of the few who have helped me out in animal rescue with injured dogs and such, and I stop. There are rotten people in every occupation. When their job is to protect us, the rotten ones matter a lot more.

Dal

Jimmy Higgins

I so don't miss the subways in New York City! "Give me money, I'm hungry." I'm thinking to myself, then you need food, not money! I never gave money, and in rare instances when I had food, I'd give them some, but I refuse to give them money. Oh wait, I did atleast once, at Bryant Park where I was reading. Some guy comes up, asks for money, I must have just been in a extremely liberal mood and went to the ole wallet. Get this, I pull out a couple of bucks, and he dares to ask for a 10 dollar bill! I said no, rather rather reservedly, I'm not rich, I'm going to college and all. He asks again for it. I'm thinking right now would be a great time to drop an anvil on him, but I've got no anvils. I gave him a couple of bucks and that was that. There was a duo act I saw once on the subway, a pregnant woman and a black guy. She said don't give the money for me, but my baby. :rollseyes: An individual would give and the black homeless man berated everyone else, because she "could have been your mother". YAK!

The panhandling was a joke, they created laws in the City that stopped in for about one month. Now that I'm in Suberbia, whenever I go to a Kmart or Tops, I'm surrounded by children begging for money to play little league, of which I never give money. If they come to my door, I usually will but they have to put out the effort to go door to door like I had to do, none of this surround the grocery store crap.

Everywhere you look, there is always someone needing money. Heck, I was pondering it in college. "Hi, I'm a college student and need to pay tuition. Your country's future depends on my education so please, give freely. 50 to 100 dollars would be great, but 10's and 20's would be appreciated as well."

Daleth

LOL, Jimmy! Wish I'd have thought of that in college.

Post-Rudy New York has me coming across far fewer homeless people and very little begging in the subways. I expect the mass graves to be uncovered any day now.

If I've got the money, I'll offer to buy them a sandwich. They often refuse.

Funny thing, when I was in college a friend and I got some pizza and sat down on the sidewalk to eat. We were clean and decently dressed. At least 20 people offered us change and one woman asked if we needed info on shelters. We had food in our hands! But we were 18 and female.

Dal

KoopaFanatic

Where I'm from, we don't really have much begging. There's one homeless woman, but she's too proud to ask for handouts (or something like that). Gotta love small towns

I spent a summer studying in Europe, and had an entertaining accosting on a weekend trip to London. As I was walking to the station to catch the 5pm train back to Brussels, this rather unkempt fellow came up to me and asked me for a pound so he could buy a Metro pass to get uptown, or downtown, or something like that (I wasn't there long enough to learn the proper local geographic terms ). I looked at him skeptically, then shruged and handed him my weekend pass, still good for another six hours or so. He scowled for a few seconds before he covered and thanked me. I was grinning the whole way back... One thing I learned quickly is that it's fun to foil the people who want to take advantage of naive tourists

Ultimate Atheist

The beggars in the New York subways confuse me. Some are already beyond the gate standing on the platform. So did they pay to get down there or were they able to find a way to sneak down there.

I used to offer jobs to beggars, you know the kind that hang around at free way off ramps. They would always tell me to fuck off.

I worked in pizza delivery while putting myself through school. Sometimes we would have canceled orders that we couldn't do anything with and the manager would let me have them because he knew that I liked to take them to homeless people. More than 50 percent of the time the people looked at me like I was a dumbass and refused a perfectly good, fresh pizza. Many of them don't want food or other forms of help. Many of them want money for drugs or booze. Don't give them money. It just makes matters worse because then you have a drugged up or boozed up bum harrassing people for money. Pass them by and act like you don't care. Then bring them back a hamburger or something. If they take it, you've helped someone that really needed help. If they don't eat the burger yourself or find another sincere person that just needs help.

sakrilege

In Cleveland it's the The Homeless Grapevine , a member of North American Street Paper Association. There was a dispute with the city about them being sold on street corners that went to court a few years back.


I bought a Grapevine yesterday and there was a Chick tract inside!

Sakpo

I try to give what I can to those who need it. I also try to support street artists, you know those people who either are living on the streets or are close to it, who are asking for money but do something creative to entertain in return, and in a way to make the world a bit more magical... one of my favourites in Vancouver was The Amazing Floyd. He built this insane musical instrument out of a large stand alone coat/hat hanger which he'd outfitted with clasps, drilled holes with other pieces of metal tethered on and sticking out to act as bridges, pegs, etc, and had put strings from stringed instruments on (it was always very interesting to watch him work on it). I used carry around extra high E guitar strings for when I saw him, because he mostly just got entirely worn out ones that'd snap, and the high e string bit (which he tuned to something else entirely) was a standard string on his instrument. Anyway, he played the thing a bit like a harp and it actually sounded quite wonderful. At some point he got his hands on one of those things violinists use to play their instrument and from then on in he both used that and plucked manually, and it got even more interesting sounding. Anyway, he was a real entertainer, and also very poor (from what I understand he mostly squatted in the abandoned buildings that litter the worst area of Vancouver, which is in walking distance of the tourists and others likely to give money to people like The Amazing Floyd). The guy was obviously quite insane/ high/drunk, but he did something good. He also had a reputation with other homeless for being generous (he had a good income for a street person not obviously involved in the drug trade). He had a regular spot where the police were willing to leave him alone, so I used to love going there in the evenings to hear him and give him a couple bucks. Anyway, he hasn't been there in over a year and I've heard a few reports of his death (contradictory too, one said he was stabbed, another that he had a heart attack, a few without any cause, but the end result is probably correct).

I also have a guy I was friends with for a long time who is homeless now. In a way he's "homless by choice" insomuch as he has a local family that'd take him in if only he'd let them, but he is seriously mentally ill (impairing his judgement(, and unfortunately in Vancouver now we don't have a hospital or many other places for the mentally ill homeless except the streets, unless a doctor or a policeman decides they're a serious threat to the lives of themselves or others and goes through a somewhat laborious process. He doesn't seem suicidal and he's harmless to other people, so there's not prospect of that (then again, even if he was shouting about how he was going to engage in murder/suicide there'd be little chance of him getting proper help). There's only so much over burdened social workers and the like can do. Whenever I see him I get him food and hang out with him for a bit, and give him some money. I'm aware he almost always spends the money on weed, but I also think of that as a relatively harmless drug and I know he's been using it to self medicate against one of his anxiety disorders for a long time and that it really does help him calm down, so that's fine by me. I stay up worrying about him sometimes. I know his parents and siblings probably do that all the time. I wonder how many of these people, wretched as they are, have people who do that, how many did but now have given up on them, how many never really did have people who'd care about them?

I consider it a massive and glaring failure of our society that we have severely mentally ill people who don't get treatment, people so poor they live on the streets, etc. It's easy to judge them all as lazy drunks not worth caring about, as many people do, but it's not the right thing to do. Here we are in the western developed world, and look around our cities. We rob from the rest of the world non stop and mind bogglingly huge fortunes are accumulated, but not even enough goes around to give everyone over here a warm, dry, and safe place to stay at night. Meanwhile, how much wealth is squandered on meaningless status symbols, sickening luxories, and just sits in the bank accounts of the super rich? Of course, most of us have enough trickled down to us that we feel we have something worth protecting and clutching on to and not risking, and when we look around the homless are right there, serving as a threat of what we could be if we lost what we had.

Daleth

Interesting, Sakpo. I also tend to give money to the performers. I enjoy seeing and hearing them, so I don't mind paying for it. For me they are a part of the city, and as there are few of them, the city gets darker.

There also used to be a lady who made it her job to open the door at my bank. Most of the time people who do this trouble me... I'm scared they are just there to rob people who use the ATM. But this lady just opened the door, always with a wide smile, and said, "Good morning and welcome to Chase Manhattan!" She was more polite and professional than the bank staff. I alwas gave her money and was sorry when she was gone.

I also had a friend who was homeless by choice. He wouldn't take a dime from me and my friend, but we would bring lunch and he would panhandle up enough to buy a 40 an we'd all have a picnic. He was funny and seemed pretty smart, but he was definitely a drunk. He had a brother in Jersey. I hope that's where he went when he vanished.

Dal

nj_heathens

I work in downtown Trenton, NJ. When I go out at lunch or after work, I figure it's best to just keep some loose change in my pocket and dole it out in small amounts if I'm approached. I'm not going to miss the dollar's worth of change. It keeps those who ask for money from getting abusive the next time I walk on that street. Over time, you recognize each other and you know if they've asked you recently. They know, too.

I don't want to spend alot of my brain cells and time thinking about how the homeless are trying to screw me out of my money. If they ask and I give, I will not judge how they spend it. If I'm feeling judgmental, I don't give. If they buy food, great. If some cheap wine will keep them warmer on a cold NJ night, that's okay with me. If my money combined with more buys street drugs that numb the mind from their situation, that's their choice.

I certainly wish the realities of life on the street were not so bleak, and in my heart I wish I could do something for every single person I encounter in my life who's less fortunate than me. But I'm just one person living my life in a way so that I can make small differences for the better whenever I can. I try to support shelters, food kitchens and pantries, and certainly encourage my elected officials to retain or increase funding for social programs to provide education, employment training, and life skills to those who need it.

BigJim, I think you did a very good thing! I've done the same myself, and almost always get a "god bless you" for the effort. Sometimes I let it go, and sometimes I've said "I'm happy to help you, but god had nothing to do with it." Not very definitive, but I usually prefer to keep it short. I don't ask questions about how s/he came to be in their situation, and I don't usually offer advice on how to change their lives.

But, I also would never refer to them as "bums." Homeless, downtrodden, even panhandlers, maybe. But calling someone I don't know anything about a "bum" would be very presumptuous, I think. I usually reserve that title for the many worthless folks I do know and wish I didn't.

Mrs. Heathen

RevDahlia

San Francisco has so many panhandlers -- particularly along Market and in the Tenderloin -- that when I'm in the city I don't give out money. I'd be bankrupted within five blocks, and to pick and choose who is "worthy" of a handout makes me really uncomfortable. So I don't. A woman asked me for forty-three cents to ride the bus once, though, and I gave it to her. Good panhandling policy, I guess, to ask for a cash amount so random it could only be for a specific purpose.

If I have a restaurant doggy bag and encounter a panhandler, I'll give it to them... kinda makes me feel bad to be handing out my leftovers, but I hear a lot of "God bless you"s. (Doesn't bother me, I know what they mean.) Also get a lot of dirty looks and "Got any money?"s. Sigh.