When I began working at this marketing job, I used to drive past the same homeless man every day. He stood at the corner of Twel
fth Street and Industrial Boulevard, just before the left turn into the private road to my office complex, and held up a brown cardboard sign that read, “Anything Helps.” I didn’t know how to respond to him. Most people didn’t respond at all but drove right past him. Even if the red light stopped them at the very corner, directly alongside him, they didn’t turn their gaze in his direction, much less reach into their pockets for a dollar bill. And yet, he made a point of smiling and nodding at every driver in the line of cars and sometimes wishing them good day. One spring morning, many weeks after he’d first taken over the corner, a day when I was first in the line of stopped cars, I happened to glance to my left and saw that he was giving me a smile and a nod. “Have a good one,” he said. Flustered, I managed to falter out the words, “You too.” The light changed, and I drove off. Immediately, I felt guilty for not giving him some money, for he’d been kind toward me, had treated me as a fellow human being, despite the fact that I’d completely spurned him. So the next time I was stopped at that light, I rolled down my window and extended my hand with a dollar in it. From that point on, I gave him a dollar every time I happened to be caught at that red light, and he swiftly came to recognize me. He’d walk over to my car with a big smile of comradeship and anticipation, and in exchange for the dollar, he’d entertain me with some observation about human quirks or some bit of news about how he’d been surviving over the past twenty-four hours. We knew each other, I felt, even if it was only in a limited way. “You shouldn’t do that,” my friend Janna told me severely a couple of months later. People who gave money to panhandlers were supporting them in destructive lifestyles rather than encouraging them to become productive, Janna said, and I believed her because she was a social worker at a charity and wanted to benefit the homeless in ways that were genuinely constructive, not just ways for some middle-class driver to fool himself into feeling virtuous. So I changed my morning commuting route and began entering the office complex from the other side. But from the beginning, I felt bad about avoiding him; I felt I had bowed to peer pressure, had shown the opposite of courage, and was depriving myself of an opportunity to make a small sacrifice that would make someone happy. It hadn’t even been a sacrifice, I realized, because giving the man that insignificant (for me) sum had pleased me as well as him. The next day, I drove to work on my original route, which was quicker anyway, and looked forward to stopping next to him and exchanging a friendly pleasantry or two. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there the next day, either, and now that autumn and winter have come and gone, I can surmise fairly confidently that he’s never coming back. Maybe he’s migrated to some place with nicer weather. Or maybe something has happened to him that people like me wouldn’t want to think about. I don’t know what I’ll do when a different homeless person discovers that this corner is unoccupied.
Which theme can be most reasonably inferred from this story? Good intentions do not necessarily lead to wisdom. Generosity is always the best policy. People are not always what they first appear to be. Knowledge is power, and money is power, too.
