RE: The Stable of Beggars- Professional Panhandlers Testing Our Empathy?
As much as I'm oozing empathy, beggars like this is something of an epidemic that has plagued my country for quite some time now. Heck, I've even dedicated a future koan for this. I'll make sure to link back to this post when I get to it, though it might be for a while.
I've dug into this a bit deeper, and I'm sad to report that this phenomena does indeed exist. Here, syndicates hire disabled people or street urchins, or worse, kidnap kids and use them as beggars. It's quite easy to spot them nowadays, that's why people have been advised to give food instead of money. I have seen these beggars firsthand, refusing the food and asking demanding, quite violently, that they'd be given money instead. It's like robbery by using sympathy.
There have been reported cases that when given coins, they throw it back and demand paper bills. Pretty soon they would be demanding cryptocurrency, I'm sure.
Things have really gotten out of hand, and it has reached a point where giving alms only provides a means to enable the syndicate operation to continually run. Some beggars who aren't part of these kinds of operations feel entitled to alms as well. They look like able-bodied individuals who could easily work legitimate jobs, they're just too lazy or feel like they're owed their due.
When I was writing this I was describing a thing that is relatively new to this part of the world, and I was also aware that my definition of 'beggar' from this little Mayberry RFD town's perspective was very first-world, and that most of the world has been seeing worse than this for a long time. My friend @maya7 is in India where there are children begging, and she has experienced these children tugging her dress in the city, so my version of a bum is I suppose the new American version. I would say that it's probably a good time for the sheltered minds of this mid-western region of the USA to wake up to what the world is really like right now, the guy standing on the corner may be the canary in this gold mine, but then, maybe we are all canaries here!
I'm right in the middle of the US, and this ain't New York City! There were plenty of bums there in '05, and I wasn't surprised-- I could never understand how anybody could survive the city with rent so high and all, I was always a day or two away from living in Central Park myself when I was there.
Children tugging dresses is a common sight here as well. No worries about how the perspective looks. Every country has its different shade, brother. Some bums are in a better standing than others, so it's hard to compare them. I've read about bums there who are vets that suffer from PTSD and are unable to carry a decent employment, so we can't generalize all of them. They simply come in different shapes and sizes.