Give money to hobos?

jonnosferatu
Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:42:01 +0000

I’ve given once and wanted to about twice. The once was largely because of the civility and good humor of the request; the other two were because the signs they were using were creative and made me laugh.

Basically, it comes down to:

1. If you’ve got the balls to walk up in a nonthreatening manner and ask me, and the manners to do it nicely, I’m fine with it because…well, I don’t have a real justification on this one. Demonstrating that manners exist without respect to economic situation, perhaps?

2. If your method of asking brightens my day (e.g. the sign “I’ll bet you $1 that / you read to the end of this sign”), I’ll at the very least want to give on the basis that I’ve been provided with an effective service. It’s not one I asked for, so on some level this is faulty reasoning, but I can spare a dollar for the very rare occasions on which this applies.

I agree with the personal safety thing, though. I’ve been fairly paranoid for most of my life and tend to be pretty active in analyzing the risks of a given path, and I’ve had reason to consider that a good thing about five times this semester versus once for all of high school.