Should You Give A Bum A Buck?

Sticking plaster on a suppurating wound?

Here’s an every day scene from my every day life. I drive up to a T junction where the traffic light is on red. A man holding up a tatty cardboard sign saying ‘Hungry and Homeless’ shuffles towards my car. I feel troubled by his hunger and his homelessness. A dialogue starts in my head. Should I wind down the window and give him a dollar? Aside from the immediate alleviation of his hunger, why would I do that?

The charitable side of my brain says: “What's wrong with immediately alleviating hunger, you tight-fisted, mean-hearted bastard, all warm and secure behind your locked car door listening to your alt country indie-pop hard bop yadda yadda wank. How can you ignore this man’s plight? He is hungry. He needs money for food. Now. You have more than enough money. Give him a buck. Now.”

“Oh yeah?” says the resistant (read: ‘cheap’) side of my brain. “You think that if I give him a buck now that I’m in any way helping the plight of the hungry and homeless? Or am I just giving him a buck to make myself feel better? Maybe I’ll even feel a frisson of superiority over the woman in the car in front of me who shook her head and refused his plea.”

“It’s not all about you,” says Charity. “It’s not about you at all. It’s about his need for food, right here and now.”

Seduced, Beaten, Spent

More things you must have.

“Here, your favourite magazine,” Mrs. Pop said as she thrust the latest glistering incarnation of the Financial Times supplement How To Spend It towards my shaking hands. Some months I toss it disdainfully into the recycling pile. Other months, I can’t resist. The desire to feel morally superior to the overwhelmingly wealthy is just too great. That’s right, this magazine exists to help me feel good about myself.

As I started to read the February 11 edition, I became more convinced than ever that it’s entirely written for my amusement. It’s a subtle but vicious parody, inventing people that could not possibly exist in the real world, nor survive without having their heads kicked in by the indignant normal folk they happen to bump into. For it’s just not conceivable that an actual human being, “executive chef” Alain Ducasse, say, would go public with news that “the best gift I’ve given recently was a gold and diamond ring from Lorenz Bäumer for my wife, Gwenaelle, to celebrate the birth of our son Arzhel”.

Alain explains with a hint of apology that the son’s name “is from Brittany”, though that’s not going to stop Arzhel’s future school yard contemporaries from wilfully mis-pronouncing his moniker, especially if he’s anything like his old man and his penchant for bragging about having picked up stuff like “a folding tea-ceremony table from a gallery called Mitate in Tokyo”.