Quandary

These signs have been around Down­town for a month or so now. I still don’t quite know how I feel about them. I don’t know how bad the homeless/panhandling sit­u­a­tion is here in Cleve­land, and whether or not it war­rants a cam­paign with this lev­el of blunt­ness or scope. It is sup­port­ed by The Home­less Grapevine, and var­i­ous oth­er home­less-tar­get­ed social ser­vice agen­cies, but it cer­tain­ly does­n’t give off a very char­i­ta­ble vibe. The Down­town Cleve­land Alliance [DCA] web­site offers some elu­ci­da­tion:

One of the ulti­mate goals of the cam­paign is to show a dis­tinc­tion between pan­han­dlers and the home­less. Many of the pan­han­dlers down­town are in fact not home­less and dam­age the image of the home­less that are in need. Our goal is to make sure people’s gen­eros­i­ty is not mis­guid­ed, but rather goes towards orga­ni­za­tions mak­ing a real dif­fer­ence. Instead of giv­ing mon­ey to a stranger on the street, peo­ple can now donate mon­ey to help rep­utable orga­ni­za­tions that have been pro­vid­ing food, shel­ter, coun­sel­ing and job train­ing to the home­less for years.

Nev­er­the­less, it hurts to see those imper­son­al signs next to the panhandlers/homeless, on the streets. At the same time, it is an inter­est­ing chess game between this ini­tia­tive and those it tar­gets, and the ter­ri­to­ry being fought over is the moral mind of any­one walk­ing the streets down­town. I’ve wres­tled with this issue before, but now that there is anoth­er play­er it is eas­i­er to exam­ine my own reac­tions to home­less­ness and char­i­ty.

The DCA is try­ing to cur­tail pan­han­dling and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly force the home­less to accept the social ser­vices avail­able to them by remov­ing the DCA’s main com­pe­ti­tion, folks who donate on the street. I’m not mak­ing a moral judg­ment here, just show­ing what I see as the mech­a­nism behind this effort. The ads play on the guilt of passers-by, and absolve them for not giv­ing while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly offer­ing them an alter­na­tive to assuage the guilt on their own by donat­ing to the DCA.

The homeless/panhandler response has been instinc­tive and quite clever, I think. By just about every sign there are one or two homeless/panhandlers with their cups out. Their inten­tion­al jux­ta­po­si­tion com­plete­ly sub­verts the intent of the sign and strength­ens the guilt one feels by not giv­ing. The sign, next to an actu­al human in need, seems inhu­man. Too bad the whole sit­u­a­tion is emo­tion­al­ly abus­ing to the bat­tle­field. A bit hyper­bol­ic in this sit­u­a­tion, but:

When two ele­phants are fight­ing, the grass is what suf­fers.