Do you give to panhandlers?

[DFW]

78. Rarely

It's different in each country. At home in Germany, it's usually aggressive drug addicts or alcoholics who accost working people while we're waiting in line at 6:00 AM, hoping to buy a roll for the train to work before their train leaves. They tend to be aggressive. I once had one who mistakenly thought I had given money to an "English-speaker," and accused me of discrimination because I gave to an English-speaker, but not to a fellow German. I guess I should have taken it as a so-called "left-handed compliment" that he thought I was a native speaker of German.

Sometimes, it's women from "that ethnic group from northern India who cannot be named on DU" who, on orders from their men, give babies heavy tranquilizers and try to curry sympathy that way. They are more heavily represented in Belgium, where I have to be frequently, and Italy, where I almost never go, than in Germany, but there are still a couple (estimated 2.4) million in Germany. They have a practiced routine, which we find offensive--admittedly a culture thing. A friend of mine who now lives in Belgium was born in Transylvania. His native language is Hungarian, but lived there under the Socialists, and was thus forced to speak only Romanian in school. There was corporal punishment for children speaking Hungarian in school. He makes jokes with the women when they come up to us on the street, but he does not give them money. Most of them know either Hungarian or Romanian. Some are from Slovakia, but he doesn't speak Slovakian (neither do I). You can tell when their male overseers are approaching, because the joking stops in an instant, as if someone hit an off switch, and they scatter. He warned me to never speak Romanian or Hungarian to any of them on my own, or I'd be marked and followed. He could get away with it, because he is fluent in both, which I am not.

In France, there is a practiced routine that is loudly repeated on métro cars: I find myself without work or shelter, and rather than rob people, I try to get by this way, so if you have any spare money or meal vouchers ("un p'tit ticket restaurant"--and always the same phrase, repeated in exactly the same cadence by métro panhandlers all over Paris), this is what I ask. I'll sometimes offer food, which is not looked upon kindly.

In the States, I rarely encounter them, as my time here is very limited. Airport to house or hotel, to work appointment or friend or doctor, and then on to the next city. One time, my wife was in a small store in tiny Wellfleet, MA, when a woman with a baby started crying. The store's electronic payment system had broken down, and she only had a card with which she wanted to pay for some formula to feed her baby. But with their system broken, the store now only took cash, of which she had none. My wife gave her the $5 she needed. She and I both mistrust and dislike the concept of the "cashless society," this being only one of many reasons. But while the woman was caught in an unfortunate situation, we never really considered her a panhandler. As a lifelong professional social worker, my wife has very fine-tuned antennae to detect if it is an act or not, and this definitely was not.

If a panhandler is not pushy, and does not come across as a total phony, then sometimes we give them money, but reluctantly. Germans (and resident non-Germans, like me) pay a lot of taxes, some of which support the network of government-subsidized help for just such people. My wife was part of that network for all her professional life. Her pension, with the latest round of increases, is all of €1200 a month, and most of that is taxable. No one does it for the money, that's for sure.