On the LiveJournal Lutherans community, a question was asked: what to do when someone comes asking for money? Today at the store I got to put my philosophy into action. A short and skinny female came up to me in the grocery store parking lot and gave me a spiel:

“Excuse me, sir, could you help me out?”
“Sure, what do you need?”
“Well, you see, my family is down on its luck and homeless, and we’re really hungry. We could use money for food. I can’t stay for too long because I’ll get a $40 ticket for Aggressive Panhandling. Could you help me?”
“Okay. I don’t have much cash on me. I’m going into the store, and I can get you anything you want. You can walk away now and come back to pick it up. Would you like sandwich stuff, meat, crackers, anything?”
“Oh, there’s the manager now, I’d better leave. God bless.”

She walked away, and I turned around. I saw no manager. I didn’t see her when I came out of the store. It was the first time I’d heard of the Aggressive Panhandling ticket, but it looks like it’s been in place since 1997.

It’s sad commentary when it is more profitable for able people to ask others for money than to earn it themselves. Can I not deduce that because food was refused, she wasn’t hungry? Could we also assume that she has been previously rewarded for misrepresenting what she wants? Evidently some people just hand out cash without care as to where it goes. Perhaps it’s easy to do when the automatic deposit comes in, the income tax withholding and FICA are already gone, and we don’t ponder the amount of effort it took to get what we have. I hope the next person she comes to will not reward such bad behavior in the name of charity. It steals credibility from those who aren’t able.