N.Y. Journal: Cons and contributions

When a grimy person walks onto the subway and says the I'm sorry for disturbing you, ladies and gentleman, that begins the panhandling pitch that all hungry New Yorkers have memorized, I admit I usually look the other way. But when a man walked onto the subway and began his plea for charity by pulling food out of a sack and offering it to any homeless people on the train, I wasn't impassive. I was angry.

The man was collecting money for the United Homeless Organization, a supposedly charitable group just exposed as a scam. The UHO is a daily presence in New York City, with its scruffy donation collectors manning spindly card tables, set at busy corners and adorned with jugs for collecting money.

Some of the collectors---as they plead for just a penny to help the homeless---are clear about the fact that they're homeless themselves. There is probably something fishy going on when people are collecting money for a homeless organization and they're still homeless, right? Right. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed suit against the UHO for the reason most New Yorkers already assumed: The whole thing is a scam. A New York Times editorial said the blunt truth:

All those pennies bought nothing---no soup, no winter coats, no heating oil, no addiction treatment. Nothing went to the poor, Mr. Cuomo said, except what little the workers took home and spent on themselves. Hundreds of thousands of tax-exempt dollars, meanwhile, poured into the pockets of U.H.O.'s founder and director to be spent on cable TV, restaurants, trips and shopping, according to the lawsuit.

Now, just days after the news came out, I was riding the subway and here was the UHO, still collecting money. The collector pulled food out of a black sack and said that he was offering it to any homeless people on the subway. No one was homeless of course, so the food went back in the bag and the pitch flowed out. He went into a long spiel gently rebuking churches for their lack of compassion and speaking of the good UHO did where the churches failed. He didn't ask for money, but people knew what to do when he walked down the length of the car holding a cardboard tube with a slot cut in the lid.

His manipulation irked me. Part of me wanted to loudly decry the dishonesty and part of me knew it was pointless---that I would just be marked as the cynical crank who was everything wrong with the world the nice man was trying to fix. But part of me felt guilty because his speech was technically true: Christians---and by Christians I mean not the many compassionate Christians pouring out their lives to serve the less fortunate, but I mean me---should do more. I didn't give to the panhandlers because I always reasoned that it wasn't true compassion but a perfunctory gesture that assuaged my conscience and filled them with food in the best case (and liquor and drugs in the worst case) for just an hour or two. True, but then I don't give to the organizations that actually do lift the homeless from addiction and poverty.

So when I stepped off the subway, I walked past another familiar sight: the Salvation Army ringing their bells next to a red bucket and a man singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" in a rich baritone. This time though---thanks to the mild rebuke of a con artist---I turned around and gave.