Look, I get it: giving money to pandhandlers is not necessarily the best way to help lift people out of homelessness, and can often be counterproductive. Out of all the money that I’ve given to people, I’d say one out of three of them I could tell benefited from it (for example, one guy immediately bought food), one third were scammers (for example, one “hungry” guy immediately bought alcohol), and one third, I dunno. That’s one reason that signs like this go up in public squares all across the country:
But look at the kind of day that this sign was having. It didn’t get above freezing until noon. It’s too damn cold to be stingy to people who ask for things from you. Jesus said “Give to all those who beg of you” and while sometimes we can’t follow that advice given the context, yesterday was not one of those days.
This is part of a whole trend of “hostile architecture” where we structure our societies to make things difficult for people who are homeless – closing the parks, making benches hard to sleep on, stealing the possessions of the homeless (either as a condition of going into a homeless shelter, or outright theft by the police) and eliminating low-cost housing that could provide a path out for the homeless.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but when it’s fifteen below freezing, the right answer is not “no”.
-the Centaur
