Screw the Poor
Alms in the Age of Affluence
Things were so much simpler in the old days. Back then, when you gave money to the poor, you knew they deserved it.
In today's age of affluence, people are poor because they're addicted, lazy, or both. If you give $5 to a bum on the street, he'll buy a bottle of ripple or a syringe re-load. If children are poor, it's because they're parents are derelicts, probably unwed and slutty.
And the poor aren't really that poor. If you offer to buy Christmas presents for poor children, you find out they want the newest X Box game cartridge. You immediately realize the kid must already have (i) electricity, (ii) a TV, and (iii) an X Box game console.
You're not exactly dealing with an Ethiopian toddler in a mud pit. You're not even dealing with an Irish kid in Five Points, that notorious over-crowded nineteenth-century den of immigrants in south Manhattan that one contemporary described as “a perfect hot-bed of physical and moral pestilence,” and “a hell-mouth of infamy and woe.”
You're not, in other words, dealing with the absolute poor. They're just the relatively poor: “Relative to today's standards . . .”.
So do we give them money?
The practice of giving money to the poor (“alms”) is as old as Christianity (Matthew 25:40). They cleanse our soul, according to St. Francis. Alms can even alter a person's mental landscape radically. When a believer asked how he could come to believe in God, Gerard Manley Hopkins simply said, “Give alms.”
Perhaps we don't have the absolute poor among us today, but the requirement to give alms is an absolute requirement. It brooks no equivocation.
Giving also requires a certain amount of letting go. All giving should be accompanied by a bit of discernment. You don't have to take your money and throw it in the street, letting the divine wind move it to the most deserving, but it's more important not to micro-manage your giving. If you do, you haven't parted with it, you're still controlling it, concerned about it, obsessing about it.
You're not, in other words, really getting rid of it, which is really the most important part. Money in itself doesn't keep us out of heaven. In Jesus' parable about the rich young man who went away, He wasn't condemning wealth, but rather wanted the man to “drive from the soul the vain thoughts about wealth, the excitement and distress related to it.” Clement of Alexandria.
Might your alms be better spent in third-world countries? Yes, I thoroughly support foreign giving. But if you give to foreign causes, how do you know your money is being better spent? Is the organization going to use it for aid or overhead? Will the poor who receive help get it? How many Nigerian email scam artists is this going to feed?
It's all very tricky, very confusing, very fact-driven in a culture that doesn't afford us much time to gather and decipher all the facts.
We don't have to throw our money to every bum and foreign-aid organization on the street. But after everything is considered, you'll know you haven't considered everything. At that point, it's better simply to give alms and trust they'll make their way to do good.
