Livre d'Or

My neighborhood gets door-to-door beggars. People will come up, knock on the door, and ask for $1 or $5 or more, often with some Story of Great Woe (my wife's in the hospital; my brother lost his job and we just need to raise $80 to pay the electricity bill).

Sometimes I hand them money. Mostly I don't. Handing them money gets them to come *back.* (I've wondered if some of the graffiti on our windows is code for "Suckers Inside.")

We get a lot more door-to-door people asking for cans to recycle. Those, we used to give out to whoever asked for them first; we've stopped, and taken to just stacking the cans outside to be picked up. If they ever stuck around more than 6 hours, I'd worry about the mess.

(I live in an industrial area. We have no recycling pick-up; we're not zoned for it. Our garbage pick-up is a dumpster a block away.)

I never fretted over what they were spending the money on. I didn't like the lying, but I figure anyone desperate enough to beg strangers for money needed *something*, and if booze is what makes their life tolerable, so be it. I'm not under the delusion that if they saved up my $2 and their next $5 and a bunch of quarters, they'd eventually have enough to fix their car to get that job 25 miles away, nor even that they'd be able to buy a couple of new outfits from Goodwill, get a haircut, and apply for a job at one of the local shops.

I know how many of the local shops aren't hiring. I know how much they don't want to hire someone on parole, and how much they don't want to hire someone who's never worked a 40-hour job in their lives. How much they don't want to hire someone who doesn't have an address.

The safety nets in the US work tolerably--allowing for a certain level of fuckups--for people who are white, moderately-educated (at least a high-school diploma, and the skills expected from that), English-fluent, not part of an "exotic" cultural group, not disabled in any way, single, and without children. Change any of those, and the chance of falling through the cracks or getting bumped into a morass of unreachable requirements increases. Change multiples, and it quickly becomes almost insurmountable.

At the very least, for the official aid channels to work, a person has to be able to fill out large stacks of confusing forms and provide multiple bits of ID and paper verification of various statuses. (Quick, prove, on paper, that you're unemployed and broke. Prove that you're homeless. Prove that you're unable to climb 3 flights of stairs to a job... within 30 days, or your claim is denied.)

A lot of the US system seems to be designed to shame people out of poverty. It works exactly as well as you'd expect.

Because of that, I don't worry about what people in poverty--whether they beg or not--spend money on. I like the Occupy movement's attitude towards helping people: if you're here asking, you must need help. Not our job to sort out what kind of help you need--we trust you to know your own needs of moment.

Friends can suggest "hey, perhaps a little less beer, a few more sandwiches, mmkay?" I am not their friend. I'm *donating*, not making a bargain of "you can have $X if you promise to spend it on things I approve of." I don't want that obligation hanging on them, and I don't want that kind of commitment to care what they do next.

I can hope they spend it on things that improve their life, not just their day. But in the end, it's not my choice, and I don't want it to be.