December 10, 2012
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Tailchasing
Last week or so there was charming video on the web about a New York City policeman who saw a barefoot homeless man, went to a store, and bought the man a pair of boots.
A day or so later news stories abounded: the homeless man was seen again later and once again he was barefoot. What he was not was homeless. He lived on the street ‘by choice’.
And there, in a nutshell, is the American tailchase about poverty and homelessness. The underlying assumption is that none of them are ‘really’ poor or homeless, and if they are, it’s by choice.
When asked where his new shoes were, the recipient of this unrequested gifting replied that they were ‘expensive’ and he would be afraid to wear them in public because ‘they’ might kill him to take his shoes.
So he doesn’t appreciate the shoes, and he’s living on the street because he wants to.
Stupid cop, anyway.
Having worked on the fringe of the public welfare system, I knew the second story was coming when I saw the first one. They go together like bread and butter. Someone somewhere had to prove that a simple act of kindness cannot stand on its own.
We need to give up our beloved notion of the ‘deserving poor’.
For one, it masks our deep and suspicious belief in the ‘undeserving poor’, those cheats, liars, connivers, drug-addicted, alcohol-addicted malcontents who would intentionally cheat us of our God-given right to practice our kindness on those who truly elevate us to the level of saints, rather than fools.
We need to give up to notion that gifting someone else with something grants us the right to determine how, when, where and why that something will be used. If you give it, let it go. It’s not yours any more. If you need to control how it used, them perhaps it is time to ask yourself why you gave it away at all.
For two, it is a horrible reflection on all of us that we truly believe that kindness is judged not by the content of our own hearts, but by the content of the hearts of those to whom we have been kind.
I have never met the barefoot homeless man in New York. I know nothing about him. Perhaps he is wiser than I am, a man of uncommon balance of spirit and heart. Perhaps he has connected with some spiritual awareness beyond my ability to comprehend.
Perhaps he is a paranoid schizophrenic. Perhaps, for whatever reason, he makes really bad decisions for himself (like going barefoot in New York City in December.) Perhaps he will continue to make bad decisions for himself; perhaps there is nothing we can give him that will change the decision-making process in his brain.
It was still very nice of the cop to buy him a pair of shoes. He saw a man with no shoes. He gave him shoes.
Whether or not the man is homeless, whether or not the man ever wears the shoes, whether or he takes them around the next corner and sells them for drugs…it was still a nice thing to do.
Let us give him that.
