I work at being charitable. I'm a long way from being good at it. I give money to homeless people, sometimes. I give money to worthy causes, like the Red Cross or food banks or the Japan relief efforts, sometimes. When I do give like this, I do it in as quiet and unobtrusive a way as possible. I'd rather just give money to a worthy cause, and not be recognized for it. Recognition doesn't matter to me.
Particularly at this time of the year, we are called to be charitable, to remember the least fortunate among us. I know Christianity has a mixed reputation on this board, but I think everyone can agree that whatever the reason, a season during which it is expected of people to make a practice of charity and compassion is a good thing.
Anyway, this diary isn't about religion. What it is about, is the difficulty in parsing between the genuinely desperate and needy, and the hustlers, hucksters, and con artists that inspire hard hearts and tight fists.
There I was, walking through the rain on an errand before I went home, when a woman in a U-Haul van calls me over. She apologizes for stopping me, and explains to me that she and what is presumably her family (some kids and some guy in the passengers seats) are going to Oregon to her mom, and are broke, and need money for gas. The gas meter is clearly reading empty or close to it. Being a charitable sort, I give her a twenty without thinking anything of it, and start to walk away. She calls me back and tells me that the money isn't enough to get to Portland from Seattle. She asks for more, and offers to pay me back once she gets back on her feet if I'll only give her my phone number.
Now at this point, I am getting nervous. We're in a parking lot by a major intersection with an open convenience store and a fire house nearby, so there's little rational worry of being mugged. Nevertheless, it's hard to be rational about these sorts of things when you've got your wallet out talking to a strange woman in a U-Haul van on a dark and rainy December night; and besides, the neighborhood, while far from a ghetto, wasn't exactly the safest and friendliest. What really bothered me about the whole situation, though, was that almost exactly the same scenario had played out a mere two blocks from that parking lot, with me in the same position then as I was at that moment, about a year previous. There were too many similarities for me to easily discount it: being called over to a car in a parking lot by a woman (it was an SUV the first time), being asked for increasingly larger amounts of money in order to go somewhere (it was Eugene, OR the first time, Portland, OR the second time), kids in the car with her, an escalating sob story involving leaving a husband, and a promise to repay me at a future time if I would only give her some contact information.
Needless to say, I had never gotten any repayment for my earlier act of charity, despite giving that woman the substantial sum of $400 (I was more trusting then, and she really turned on the sob story). In both cases, I didn't really WANT to be repaid. I just wanted to do some good old fashioned point of need charity, give them some money, and go. But since the first one seemed so insistent, I finally gave her my parents' PO Box (I didn't want to give her my address). And yet despite her assurance that she had a big tax refund coming, and that all she needed was to get to her family in Eugene and get back on her feet there, I never saw a penny in the mail. Maybe she had lost the address I had given her. Maybe she forgot about it. Maybe something happened on the way to Eugene. Maybe she never got her refund. Or maybe I just got hustled like a chump.
And so it was with those thoughts playing in my head that the conversation with the second woman went in almost exactly the same direction as it had with the first when I gave her another twenty and balked at giving her more. She had to leave her husband, she said, her mother couldn't come up to help her because she was old, all she needed was a little help, and why was everyone being so cold to her and sneering at her, and she didn't want me to get mad at her. I told her that I was getting mad at her now because of how she was acting. I should have said that people were sneering at her and being cold to her because she was giving the appearance of being a con artist, and while people may be generous, they also dislike having fools made of themselves. I can understand desperation, but asking a person to give someone who they've never even met before anything more than $20 is a bit much, even for the most generous of people. It would be much better to ask a number of people for small sums, and build up that way. Expecting one person to drop a hundred or more is excessive, especially when you have no idea how rich that person is.
She was becoming more and more emotionally agitated -- whether it was an act or not, I have no way of telling -- but I wanted no more part of it. I don't have a steady income, and while I have substantial savings (initiated by my parents and derived by inheritance), I wanted to keep at least some of that money to help get myself on my feet when I do get a job -- for the various necessities of life, like an apartment and a car. At the time I felt that I had been more than generous -- even for someone with money, $40 is a rather substantial sum to drop at once -- and that if she couldn't get from Seattle to Portland on $40, I didn't know what to tell her. I didn't want to depend on her paying me back someday either, since based on previous experience "someday" has a way of turning into "never." I trust people to pay me back eventually, but only people I know and people who I see on a regular basis; and despite the jokes some of my friends make, I am not a bank, and have no desire to be one. And so, I turned and took off running. I think she honked at me, perhaps in frustration or perhaps in a last ditch hope of making me come back. I didn't. I ran about forty yards, out of sight of the parking lot, ducked into a store, and didn't come out for perhaps thirty minutes. When I did, I didn't go back past the parking lot. She had probably already gone, but I didn't want to run into her again.
I really don't know what to think of the whole episode. The fact that it was so similar in so many respects to what had happened to me previously makes me think that it was a con. If it were, both these women ought to be making money as actresses. The only reason I stopped at $40 with the second one was because nearly the same exact thing had happened to me a year before, and "bullshit" alarms were going off in my head. On the other hand, if she really was trying to get to Portland, I only gave her enough to get halfway there; I found out recently that a fully loaded short U-Haul truck gets only about ten miles to the gallon, which is outrageously bad. Still, I didn't know that at the time, and it's closer than she would have gotten otherwise; and I can take some small satisfaction that whatever her motives may have been, I gave of myself without expecting anything in return. If she was a hustler, that's on her soul, not mine. I was trying to help someone out, and while perhaps a richer or more generous person would have given more, I think that I more or less did the best I could. On some level, I'm probably just trying to justify what I did. I am curious what the membership thinks of this whole scenario, and the one that preceded it.
[EDIT] Reference to tipping as charity has been removed. It was a stupid thing to say, and the fact that I did reflects badly on me. I should have edited this before I posted it, but I wanted to just get it out on paper.