Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

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Brother, can you spare a dime?

My neighborhood is natural habitat for beggars and panhandlers. The freeway is only a few blocks away, and its overpasses often harbor bedraggled men with cardboard signs asking for a handout. Garbage cans and recycling bins are regularly gleaned for aluminum and other valuables before the city picks them up.

On Veterans Day a scruffy man roused himself from the sidewalk outside my local convenience store and asked for 30 cents. Later the same day, a woman flagged me down in the parking lot of my post office with a story about going through a divorce and having nothing to eat. Could you spare a dollar?

Scenes like these aren’t uncommon in many places in the U.S. They shouldn’t particularly surprise us. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the official poverty rate in 2013 was 14.5 percent, which amounts to about 45 million men, women and children. And according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, on any given night more than 600,000 people — 58,000 of them are veterans — don’t have a safe, warm place to sleep.

A healthier economy would help, but it wouldn’t resolve these problems entirely. After all, Jesus said — maybe a little too casually — “The poor you will always have with you.”

But he wasn’t thinking in terms of policies that a prosperous, good-hearted nation might bring to bear on the apparent want and desperation that can be seen at intersections and on sidewalks in many American cities.

No, Jesus’ method was hands-on and person-to-person, and it’s expressed in one of His most uncomfortable and regularly ignored directives, Matthew 19:21: When the young rich man asked — maybe a bit self-righteously — what he was lacking, Jesus said, “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor.”

But let’s get real. Short of giving everything away, what should a benevolent American do when a down-and-outer — he might even be a veteran whose only friend appears to be the loyal puppy at his side — looks up from the sidewalk and asks for 30 cents? Jesus would probably say to give him some money.

But the police chief in San Antonio, Texas, would like to make that charitable act a crime. This fall he proposed to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee an ordinance that would make giving money to panhandlers in forbidden areas a Class C misdemeanor. “If it’s a crime to panhandle, it should be a crime to give to panhandlers, as well,” the chief said.

But some committee members, moved by concerns over basic liberties such as the right to ask for help, the right to give and the right to refuse were unconvinced. The committee shelved the proposal.

Arnold Abbott didn’t get off so easy for committing charity in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Abbott, 90, and two south Florida ministers got in trouble recently for feeding the homeless in a public park in violation of a new ordinance that could put them in jail for 60 days and impose a $500 fine.

The National Coalition for the Homeless says laws restricting charity — old-fashioned begging and giving, Jesus-style — have been introduced in 30 cities.

This is an unhealthy trend for several reasons. It should probably make us nervous when the government begins to intervene in private behavior between beggar and benefactor.

But it should also worry us when we try to push a problem out of the public view. Rather than address the hunger and want, it’s easier to legislate tough love, to imagine that denying handouts to the poverty-stricken will drive them to more industry and self-sufficiency.

Of course, Jesus never said anything about the effect of the alms given to the poor. And I don’t recall him being concerned about whether the poor spent the money on wine instead of food.

In fact, I suspect the motivation and certainly the effect of these laws against panhandling and charity are to cover up the awkward and unpleasant fact that one of the most prosperous nations on earth still has citizens who can’t get enough to eat.

John Crisp, a columnist for the Tribune News Service, teaches in the English department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.

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