Helping People

Several years ago, when I was teaching at a college in Indiana, very near the Illinois border, I suggested to a group of undergraduate students that they should give cash to people who asked for it if they honestly wanted to be helpful and generous. Unsurprisingly, they did not take to my suggestion, were, in fact, appalled by it, and--though they didn't use the actual words-were fairly unanimous in their conviction that what I was suggesting was immoral if not un-American.

Overwhelmingly, my students insisted that "help" is giving people "what they need" rather than "what they want." They argued that homeless people, or people who were reduced to asking strangers for help, would not make choices that were "good" or choices that the students could support. Implicit -and occasionally, explicit-in that argument was their firm conviction that "helpers" have a right to decide what it is that strangers need. That help should be regulated by the approval of the person rendering it. That help is, somehow, subject to the beliefs and choices that the helper would make, or think they would make, in similar circumstances.

My arguments that help is a form of generosity and that generosity should be to the benefit of the receiver rather than the giver fell on ears deafened by a lifetime lived within the Protestant Ethic.

Max Weber, who may or may not have been guilty of other things, was certainly guilty of instilling in generations that followed the belief that hard work and success have an indisputable cause and effect relationship. This would not have had socially detrimental consequences were it not for the converse conclusion that it contains: lack of success is due to lack of hard work, q.e.d., if you are poor or homeless or both, you didn't work hard enough and your condition is, therefore, your fault.

Now, fault and help have almost as interesting a relationship as success and hard work. Help is perceived by most Americans as containing a strong-almost overriding, some would say-element of deservedness. My students wanted to help those "who deserved it" rather than those who didn't, and the ethical question of who would determine deservedness troubled them not at all.

Their position, of course, was based on a moral certainty they could not quite articulate but felt nonetheless strongly. Examples of the "undeserving" that my students offered included alcoholics, gamblers, and drug addicts. In extreme cases of moral rectitude, unwed mothers and the unemployed were proposed to the list. These people and others who "did things" to make themselves poor and needy, were less deserving of help than others.

I suggested that they wanted to feel good about themselves rather than make other people feel good. I suggested that they weren't generous; they were selfish. I suggested that they wanted to look generous but that they also wanted to control the people they gave to and punish them for having the audacity to need help.

They were offended, angry. Good, nothing we teachers like better. Makes a change from boredom and irrelevance.

I started from the beginning, trying to build up a basis for decision-making and a definition of helping, keeping score on the board as teachers do.

"How many of you ever give to charity?" (Nearly every hand.)

"How many . . . donate food to a food drive?" (Hands go up and are duly counted and recorded.)

"How many . . . give clothing or other items?" (Ditto.)

". . . money in Salvation Army collection containers at Christmas? . . . money to church or community collections for the needy?" (And again. They were feeling pretty good about themselves, I could tell. They were generous; they were giving; the teacher was wrong.)

". . . money to a (presumed) homeless person on the street?" (Well, not so many hands and those that were raised were tentative.) On the other hand, (so to speak), this was a suburban area in Northwest Indiana, not the city. People who lived here did not see homeless people very often. You had to go to Gary or North Hammond for that. My students pointed that out to me, not wanting to lose points due to unavailability.

"Okay," I agreed. "Let's say you manage to graduate and get a job in Chicago, and every day you pass a half dozen homeless people on the streets, people with signs, people asking for money. Would you give it to them?"

The answers varied, qualifying questions intruded, and qualified answers resulted.

"Maybe. Sometimes. If I had enough money myself. If they looked like they needed it. If they had kids with them. . . ."

They thought about it. A young woman said, "Well, a family that needed food and clothes. If, maybe, the father was out of work."

"No," some of the others pointed out, "they could get food and clothes through the State and local churches. You still should not give them cash."

"Why not?" I wanted to know, pouncing on that important "should not." What was wrong with giving them cash?

The answer, again, came back to what they might use it for and the possibility that cash might be used for something "unnecessary" or "wrong" like alcohol or cigarettes.

Finally, one brave young man asked of the room, "Who smokes in here? Well, if you've ever been out of cigarettes, doesn't it make you crazy? I mean, my mother says she'll kill someone if she doesn't get a cigarette. Wouldn't that make cigarettes 'something necessary'?"

"Alcoholics get the shakes when they don't have a drink," a young woman put in. "They 'need' a drink 'cause it's like, an addiction."

"So," the teacher (me) tested this line of logic on them, "how many would give someone who was addicted to cigarettes or alcohol cash to buy some?"

No hands at first, then, a tentative hand or two, quickly recanted. Heads turned as other opinions were checked. Hands went up, hands went down. It was confusing. I was confusing them.

"Well, they should quit," summarized a young woman. "Smoking and drinking are bad for you."

Indeed they are. So are homelessness, hopelessness, and shame. So is fear of what the next day will bring and the certainly that other people look down on you (at best) and despise and judge you (at worst). So is having no autonomy and being entirely dependant on strangers for your survival until you find a job, a place to stay, get a paycheck, etc.

In fact, I maintained then and still do that having the choices that cash gives you, not to mention the knowledge that others trusted you with those choices, is a more critical need than that provided by all the shelters and food pantries combined.

I was arguing, essentially, that what one gives when one gives cash is autonomy and, secondly, respect. "I trust your choices and/or I respect your right as a human being to make them, right or wrong." I was arguing that that is what needy people need, more than food more than a place to stay. What they need is to be treated with respect, as an equal, as a person. And that is what my students found so difficult to give them, even theoretically, because the belief that the homeless and the needy somehow deserve their situation is pervasive. The belief that homeless people are different, strange, dangerous, "not like us" makes it almost impossible to treat them as equals or, often, as human beings.

I don't know if I changed any minds that day; the teacher never knows. But, it got them thinking, considering the ethics of deciding for others, of making generosity a moral judgment and help conditional on a stranger's approval.

Two things give me hope that some of them -maybe, one of them--will reassess the meaning of helping somewhere down the line in their lives and act in ways that consider the dignity and autonomy of those of need first before all other considerations.

One, is that a few of them looked disturbed by the discussion. Uncertainty clouded their faces and, even when they started out arguing with me, a very few stopped in confusion because what I proposed had shaken their worlds. And that is always a good thing.

And the second thing? -the thing that none of us could have foreseen on that day about seven years ago? That I, the teacher, as middle class as they, with two-and-a-half college degrees and no bad habits that caused it, would one day be homeless and desperate and asking strangers for help.

And the fact that, as I write this, after a few months of unimaginable misery, I am not any longer.