Ping
Everyone has heard it before: Loaction, Location, Location!
No honor among thieves.
On another occasion, I saw one of the professional pan handlers putting on makeup...dark blue around her eye to make it look like she was hit.
Now-a-days, when I do give something to pan handers its only in the form of food.
Yeah, forget about clearing out the moochers and loiterers from a business’ steps or off a busy corner. Just break up their squabbles over lucrative panhandling sites.
Here in Austin, a few months or a year back, panhandlers occupied a particular corner that kids walking to school had to use. Once they started harassing kids for money, the parents and local talk radio got involved. Then the cops did what the public wanted and finally cleared ‘em from it.
Huh? It’s illegal to say racial slurs? Good luck with that one.
My grandfather seeing a guy begging on the off-ramp said,
“Why is that man begging?”
“He looks healthy and he’s not blind.”
“Why doesn’t he work?”
“Has he no shame?”
Grandfather is from the “Old Country” and doesn’t understand the sophisticated ways of Americans.
They have been doing it for years. These aren't people who are disabled (even though their signs occasionally say things like "disabled vet" and such)
Windows roll down, hands come out, usually with a dollar.
I won't give them money.
However, there is this guy on busy corner at the corner of Newbury and Arlington Streets in Boston, just across the street from the Boston Common. It used to be the Ritz Carlton Hotel, might be something else now.
I think he has cerebral palsy, and someone sets him up with a cooler full of soda. He has a box with a slot, and you put your money in the slot, and he reaches shakily down with one hand that still functions and opens the cover on the cooler so you can take your soda.
That is a man.
The other beggars on the busy intersections...not so much. (To this day, my wife and I suspect they are part of some kind of twenty year psychology experiment at Harvard. Hey, look what a Harvard education did for a no-load like Barack Obama...)
My wife and I have plenty of compassion, and we give a lot to various charity causes. But a healthy man, standing and begging for money is worse off than many of the physically disabled in my opinion.