Street Strippers

     There were no street people or beggars in the small town in which I was raised.  Maybe they avoid all small towns as a rule, but certainly they avoided mine.  Not surprisingly, when I got to college in Boston, I lacked the Beggar Auto-response a city-raised kid would presumably learn from his parents.  It bugged me for awhile.  Was I supposed to give them money?  Was I supposed to say anything to them?  Eventually, like I did with most problems that did not seem to have a solution, I just stopped thinking about it.  I gradually stopped seeing the beggars as people.  I thought of them as potholes—something to avoid until the city got around to fixing. 

     Many years later, in the first euphoria of my late-life salvation, I was like Mr. Scrooge yelling out the window on Christmas morning “It’s not too late, it’s not too late!”  Beloved, that was sublime.  But like the first blush of romance, it had to subside or I would not have been able to work, raise my family do or any of the other things the Lord  would have me do until Kingdome come.  Dickens did not tell us what life was like for the New Scrooge on the day after Christmas but, if he was like the New Me, he said, “now what the heck do I do?”  My Worldview had changed radically, but the world I viewed had not.  There were still potholes begging for money, but now I saw them as men, and I felt ashamed and guilty. 

     But, at least now I had an answer to the question that had nagged me in college:  do I give them money?   Yes, of course I give them money.  They are people, not potholes.  Christ said that all men are my neighbors.  My church taught me that eradicating poverty is a millennium goal.  So I gave them money—whenever they asked.  In fact, to be more efficient about it, I went to the bank and got a stack of one-dollar bills to keep in my right hand pocket, just for them.  When they accosted me with their tale of woe, I would hold up my left hand piously to stop them, “no need Brother, I understand,” and slip them a dollar with my right hand.  They would say “thank you” and  move on.  Sweet Jesus—problem solved.

     One day, having no cash in my wallet, I pulled out my beggar-roll to pay for my client’s lunch and he said, “you planning on hitting the strip club after this Dredd?”  Beloved, I wish I could tell you I was confused, but I knew what he meant.  My beggar-roll looked no different than the wad a man takes to a strip club so he can slide dollar bills into young girls’ garters. No different.  And that made me realize something.  What I was doing with my beggar-role was really no different from what a man does with a stripper-roll.  Like a man in a strip club seeking short-term sexual gratification, I was seeking short-term alleviation of my guilt.  I could tell myself it was charity, but that was a lie.  Charity is a giving without a receiving, and what I was doing was transactional.  With my beggar-roll, I was buying absolution on the cheap and the beggars were selling another day of self-degradation.  They were Street Strippers willing to expose their brokenness to me for cash, and I was the jack-ass paying them to keep dancing.