Stephen Terence-Gould tells us that we should each personally subsidize the substance addictions er, give money to panhandlers because, well, he knows a homeless man:
On my walks down the 16th Street Mall these days, I look ahead for Bill. He’s in a wheelchair now, with a container on his lap you can drop money into.
Bill is one of those homeless persons the Downtown Denver Business Improvement District says to “please help. don’t give.” in their anti-panhandling campaign. But I disagree with the campaign, especially for people like Bill.
I knew him from some years ago, in his days of pride and poetic talent and alcoholic rage. We both had volunteered for the monthly newspaper for the homeless, The Denver Voice. Bill slept in those big concrete sewers at construction sites, and wrote by flashlight, muting its glow within his sleeping bag. He was good.
On my Mall walks now, I look ahead to avoid Bill. I don’t want to feel the angst of confronting him face to face again.
At least Terence-Gould admits that his homeless friend is an alcoholic. You really don’t think that the money you give Bill is going to pay for a hot meal at Arby’s, do you? Anyway, proving that he’s a “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do” kind of scold, Terence-Gould ends his article with:
So let me urge you, if you see Bill on the Mall, please feel whatever emotions you can. He’s a poet. Give him a buck. Denver’s Road Home – the city’s plan to end homelessness – does good work, but not really for someone like Bill.
So Terence-Gould can avoid Bill with a clear enough conscience, but the rest of us should drop something in his hat. Oh, and if you’re one of the heartless business owners who has the temerity to not like the idea of having a homeless man begging for spare change outside your shop, you’re a “social Puritan.”
David Aitken of Life’s Better Ideas suggests something, well, better:
There’s a simple solution to panhandling. Create a property right in the air space over the sidewalk and deed that property right to the adjacent business. Technically, anyone who walks through that air space is trespassing and the property owner, in this case the business, then has a legal right to tell that person to leave. The deed could grant an easement for sidewalk maintenance and law enforcement.
You heartless Puritan, you!
Why not just skip the middle man and give crack or heroin instead of donations? You will get the instant satisfaction of seeing someone get some relief from their addiction and you know where the money is going.
Even better would be to hook these panhandlers up to machines where you can put a quarter or a dollar in and the machine would then inject that much drug into their system. This way you wouldn’t even need to obtain the drug itself.
Handing off money to panhandlers is not helping them. If you feel you need to give, give to the shelters and give to the local charities that will really help these people.
When I was younger in downtown Memphis, I used to just tell them I had no money, but would give them a couple of cigarettes. They always took the smokes, and went on their way with no more discussion.
When our friends at the ACLU began defending panhandling as a free speech issue, it reduced the quality of life for most urban pedestrians. When a stranger on the street asks you for money, there is more often than not an implied threat of violence. Yeah, some of these people are just pathetic burnouts, but too many are overgrown street hustlers who refuse to work and live for booze and drugs. In the old America, the place that it used to be 30 years ago, these people would end up on the county work gang or confined by the cops to a skid row section of town. The county work gang has been largely abolished and skid row has been gentrified, which means aggressive policing is required to deal with the problem.
The panhandler deserves no sympathy and in fact already receives too much of it from professional do gooders and poverty pimps. The real people who deserve your sympathy are the working poor, and if you really feel the need to give away a small portion of your personal wealth, I would recommend doing so in the form of larger tips to waitresses, pizza delivery drivers and hotel maids. The bum on the street just deserves a smack across the side of the head and the sole of your shoe as you walk over him.