Alms Giving

A white collar businessman is walking down the street when he is accosted by a panhandler and asked for a dollar.
"I don't give able-bodied men alms," says the businessman.
"You just don't know how it feels to be hungry," retorts the panhandler.
"Of course I do," replies the businessman, "that's why I work."

The common joke above indicates the different views of alms-giving. I recently had three separate perspectives brought to light; my nephew's wife's, my wife's, and mine.

Many times since returning from Saudi my wife would see me throw a few cents into the ratty, tattered disposable coffee cup of a street person in Boston. Invariably, she gives me a hard time about it. In her mind, anyone who does not have a significant physical disability should not be given alms. She supported her view by reminding me of the panhandlers in Africa, and how none of them could work and support themselves otherwise. She says that street people in America have the opportunity to avail themselves of government funded social programs to assist them in becoming self sufficient, and people who did not wish to garner assistance in this way should start lifting something heavy, or mowing, or sweeping. She pointed out that there are so many beggars in Jeddah because alms giving is one of the pillars of Islam, and repeated payment to able bodied street people in Boston will only perpetuate their circumstance.

Recently my nephew's wife was here in Richmond with the kids and the subject of panhandling came up. I mentioned my wife's point of view, and my niece-in-law wholeheartedly agreed, and took it a step further. She said that able bodied people should not only not be given alms on the street, but that neither should they be given the opportunity to avail themselves of the public largesse in the form of social programs.

This made me think of how appreciative a supermarket checkout lady was when I bought a box of food to be donated to the poor in Appalachia. She could not stop thanking me for my $8.00 donation, of which she would get exactly none. I could easily tell that she had been one of the hungry many in the past, perhaps originally from Appalachia. I told her I didn't mind giving it because I had in the past been hungry, and she looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, reforming first impressions, and knowingly agreed that a little help goes a long way. I remembered the frayed and worn down looking young woman who came to our door in Cork city with her son asking for food- not coins or folding money- food to sustain them through the day. They were clean and polite, but very poor. Though we were poor students we rummaged through our meager larder and handed over whatever we could live without.

I know that there are no farms in Boston run by extended families to which able bodied unemployed can run for sustenance when times are hard. There is no tropical warmth to keep the Bostonian homeless from becoming solid blocks of plasmic material. The unfortunate in Boston do not only have fewer options than the unfortunate in the tropics and the south, they have no education on how to seek to better their circumstances outside of the society in which they were raised.

I went unemployed for a number of months during the big crash, and it wasn't for not trying to get or hold a job. I did everything within my power to become gainfully employed day in and day out for months on end, to no avail whatever. If I didn't have an extended family to fall back on then I may have ended up with the same tattered cardboard cup in my hand, standing on the corner of Beacon. When I see those people, not the college kids playing at begging, but the true unfortunates, I think, "There but for the grace of God go I." I had the opportunity to study economics for years and have a more intimate idea of how the big wheels turn to churn out down on their luck people, but nothing is as powerful as the sympathetic emotion put in your heart when you meet one and see yourself when you look in his face.