Posted 4:54 PM by Gene

Coming home from work an old lady with a walker asked for help -- and when she uttered the M word, I assumed a curt attitude (cuddling a very bad mood at the end of the workday) and strode away. Being usually very slow of mind I didn't pay attention to what looked like some sort of ID (a Social Security card, perhaps) dangling from her neck. When I returned to follow up somebody at a local pizza shop gave her money he probably could spare, and she shuffled away on her walker.

I felt bad about it; I should have done something for her. If she had left a nursing home or hospital it didn't say much for it, but a person with Alzheimer's can usually outwit $8-an-hour security guards. But what did it say for me to say no? On the other hand I'm accosted by beggars every day. Lately some middle-aged lout whose every other word is "God" or "Jesus" has taken residence center-stage in a stairway on the way to work. Then there's this dimwit who plays a fingernails-on-blackboard-sounding gheetar on the way out. Yesterday a policeman had the temerity to ask him what he was doing. If it had been a StinkyInky editor he'd have asked for more of his art and gotten him on the front page. The beggar has inordinate power to harass us, and he exercises it ceaselessly. And yet our therapeutic culture would have us believe they're Thoreaus searching for their inner Walden, and the kind of effete idiots who will never stop gassing about their damned SOPRANOS turn them into a kind of tourist attraction, or an admirable zoo specimen. They should all be off the street, either thanks to a compassionate society helping the helpless addicts or some agency that would point the able-bodied to work. Every time I see them I suspect a few do very well by their begging; I further suspect there are even those who beg for a lark. In any case I can't help thinking that giving money to a beggar is like giving crumbs to a pigeon; it winds up on the sidewalk.

This whole experience has made my pestilential frame of mind even more pestilential.