Comments on: The World We Live In

By: Charity

Charity — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:21:55 +0000

Thanks for the comments, everyone.

JD, that is sad. The thing is, I think a lot of people use that as an excuse to not give anyone money.

If I lived in a city like that and frequently passed beggars, I think I would budget a certain amount of money to give away each month to them, instead of giving only to organizations.

If we all did that, we could meet people’s needs. I truly believe that.

Of course, I also believe in God and free-market capitalism, so take it for what it’s worth.

By: JD Ryan

JD Ryan — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:21:31 +0000

One moment in my life I will always remember was being on the subway in NYC back in the mid-90’s when I was visiting some friends there… there was a couple panhandling in the train, both in the advanced stages of HIV, the woman could barely stand. And I remember seeing everyone on that train go out of their way to ignore them. Now, I haven’t spent a lot of time in cities, so I asked my friend about it and he said something like.. if you gave money to every person that asked, you’d be broke. I understood what he meant but it really bothered me, nonetheless, to know that part of living there required one to turn off (or tune out) their humanity just a bit. It made me very sad.

By: Chanman

Chanman — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:02:14 +0000

I don’t blame you one bit for your caution; it is the normal-looking ones that scare you the most. An author named Gavin de Becker wrote a book a few years back called (I believe) “The Gift of Fear”. In it, he admonishes women for putting themselves in dangerous situations rather than risk offending a man who may or may not assault her. An example would be a woman being alone on an elevator, and then not getting off the elevator when a man who gives her a creepy feeling gets on because she doesn’t want to offend him.

I had a similar situation on a recent Sunday morning when I had just parked my car at a grocery store, and a black guy in hip-hop regalia started walking toward my car. I had just started to open my door, but when I saw him walking toward me, I shut the door, turned the engine back on, and rolled down the window just a crack in order to talk to him. He was asking for a couple bucks so he could put gas in his car, and I’m sure that is all he wanted. But if I opened the door and and shut off the engine, would his intentions have changed? Probably not – but with a wife and two young children at home, I felt it was better to offend this young man than leave behind a widow and two young fatherless children.

It’s a heck of a shame that society has come to this.

By: Haik Bedrosian

Haik Bedrosian — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:58:16 +0000

It’s not worth it. The guy should call AAA, or Benway’s, or walk. Or call a friend. Or stick out his thumb and hitchhike the normal way, not walk up to a stranger in the parking lot. The most normal looking people can be the most dangerous. I would tend to trust a person more if they had a bone though their nose and a mohawk, than if they looked normal. Normal people are freaks.