Yesterday, I gave $50 to the American Red Cross to help people I’ve never seen in New Orleans. Today, I turned my head away from a man right outside my car window, at Colfax and Speer, whose cardboard sign says, “Anything Will Help.”
Anonymous victims are easy to care about. This one, up close and personal, can be scrutinized for worthiness: Drug addict? Alcoholic? Street-lifer by choice? Criminal? Mentally ill? Battered woman?
Many feelings arise as I wait impatiently for the light to change. Guilt: Have vs. have not. Anger: Why doesn’t he get a job? Compassion: I wish I could really help. Gullibility: He’ll buy beer or cigarettes. Helpless: My dollar won’t solve his problems. More and more, I give less and less to people on corners with signs.
I asked several of my friends how they handle it.
“The problem will never go away. Money won’t make it go away,” Jack says. “If the guy on the corner looks like a total drunk and the sign says, ‘Even pennies will help,’ I won’t give him even pennies.” He does give quarters to a man on the corner of Santa Fe and Mississippi, because of his attitude. “He humps along on a bad leg. He’ll do 10 car lengths on every cycle of the light. He yells out, ‘Hey! Howya doin? Peace! God Bless you!”‘
Lois says she’ll give money sometimes when she’s walking and someone asks for help, but people with signs make it seem like a business. When her daughter Caira was young, she says, “We decided they needed good food, so we carried granola bars and apples in the car. Some people wouldn’t take the granola bars.” Lois remembers when the newspapers gave street people papers to sell. “It was a way to make them feel they were doing something useful.”
Almost every day, I see the same person at 29th Avenue and Sheridan, a young white man with gender issues. He used to wear a dress and had bright orange hair. Lately he’s been wearing a purple shirt and dark pants and his hair is short now. He’s handsome, except for two or three missing teeth. He has an open, intelligent face and wide green eyes. He smiles and is not intrusive. I’ve given him a dollar or quarters various times. Once I gave him a bottle of water. Always, I hope he’s not there or that the light will change before I’m beside him.
Finally I decided to talk to him – but he’s a her, as it turns out. Ariana is a transsexual, bipolar, lesbian with post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s been raped and abused. She gave up the fem look because men in cars would proposition her when they stopped at the light. Ariana is 37, was born in Houston and lived there until she was 24. Texas will not change her birth certificate to say she is now a woman. She used to be a software engineer, she tells me.
Because Ariana is on disability, with zero income, she pays $25 a month for Section Eight housing. Most of her food comes from the food bank, but she gets meat at Safeway. Right now they have ground beef for $1.29 a pound. Just before I approached her, a woman had given her $20. “This happens several times a month,” Ariana says.
I asked her why others are out on the corners. “They’re mentally ill, drug addicts, alcoholics,” she says, and the long-time homeless who “can’t accept the confines of structure. Working in an office eight hours a day is like prison for them.” Some people Ariana knows have places to live. “A lot of them are on disability. This is the only way they can get by. I know a man who’s a double amputee. They told him he has to survive for two years on no income to get disability.” And she says that some people are frauds.
I believe that helping the homeless is my moral responsibility. And loose change doesn’t constitute real change. I commend Mayor John Hickenlooper on creating the Commission to End Homelessness. Short-term shelter and long-term affordable housing will make a real difference. This foundation, supported by case-management, mental-health, substance-abuse, employment and other services, will engender self-sufficiency. Everyone needs and deserves this, whether you’re beaten down by an addiction, mental illness or a hurricane.
The big print of Ariana’s sign says the usual, “Anything Will Help. Thanks!” Below that, she’s printed, “Poverty is not a crime. This activity is protected by the first Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
Karen Sbrockey is a coordinator of health education information.
