On Buskers and Beggars
I've spent a few nights of my life homeless or at least in a foreign country with no accommodation and as transitional as these experiences were, they were quite taxing. I also for a year and change lived in a tent in my parents Garage, an episode I'm prone to forgetting about completely. Although that wasn't stressful like being on actual streets were with all my possessions to my name, it still had an almost immediately noticeable effect on my self perception - it was humbling, I felt apologetic.
But that aside, I really have no idea what it is to be poor, or homeless, nor have an in-depth understanding of the root causes. Whenever I've speculated on just what lies ultimately upstream I get lost, and I'm sure real solutions shall forever require consultation with the chronically and transitionally homeless. I'm sure a big contributor though is that housing is seen as a category of investment rather than a basic human need.
For my purposes though, at least in writing this, I'm going to talk about my thoughts on what it's like to walk the streets of Guadalajara Mexico, but thought I'd start with this:
For those that can't be bothered watching the video, the gist is that when a homeless man looks like a homeless man, people ignore him and don't give him change. When they dress him as a business man, people give him money, often more than what he is asking for.
I'm not sure what the intent of this and similar videos are, and to the makers credit he doesn't actually draw any conclusions. There's a similar breed of video, where some young dudes will give a homeless guy a whole pizza, then send along a confederate to say they are hungry and see if he will give him a slice of pizza which the homeless guy does, then they'll reward him for his incredible generosity as a homeless man by giving him $50 in return for the slice of pizza etc.
My feeling is, the main emotional drive of such experiments is to shame people and uplift the makers in their own esteem. I don't know if this is the intent, but I'm highly skeptical that the kinds of people that make and share such videos would believe that were they our elected officials at all levels of government they could actually solve homelessness by giving them all a $50 tip or otherwise simply throwing money at it. I hope somewhere inside they suspect that what they might achieve is totally fucking up the entire social safety net system.
I cannot draw the obvious conclusion though that people are awful and judge books by their cover or something. There's to me a too-simple explanation as to why a man in a suit can raise more funds begging than a man dressed in the uniform of a beggar. In one case, people see a short term problem they can meaningfully contribute to, and the other see a intractable problem they can potentially make worse/enable by giving.
Now, on a typical day in Guadalajara, I go on a walk down one of the main streets in the center of town. I also typically have change in my pocket. I like cash cultures, pay-wave isn't really a thing here at all and coins still refreshingly have purchasing power in Mexico, rather than their sole use in Australia as shrapnel you have to fuck around with in order to avoid splitting bills over annoyingly priced items.
I could give my change out in the form of tips to the grocery baggers at the supermarket, nice friendly people whom I recognize and recognize me and that I generally tip for not putting my items into a plastic bag, and like because they all know me as the guy who hates plastic. They are senior citizens and near as I can tell, are paid solely in tips, and they have a nice little honor system of tagging out with each other as soon as one is tipped.
Then there's the regular buskers, the accordion players on other side of the main strip leading towards the Cathedral (and several other Cathedrals, actually everywhere leads to a Cathedral) at any rate, though I do love Mexican and Mariachi music, there are many other street buskers whose music or other offerings I enjoy more (much more) than these accordion players.
The thing is though, these buskers have their children approach people with cups asking for donations, or contributions etc. Like children under ten. Day in day out, 7 days a week for presumably something close to 8 hour days.
I mean, you can probably see the implications of this already, but by comparison in Mexico City (CDMX or DF) there are organ grinders, that are literally people who wear a brown police style uniform and turn a crank on a box to play organ music, and generally they will have an adult colleague who is collecting money in a hat. It is easy in this case to turn down a grown person who has made a two-man job out of what thanks to 20th (last) century technology, is a 0 person job. Especially considering all the buskers that have not only mastered the ability to turn a crank, but can juggle, do acrobatics, hula-hoop etc.
It's much much harder to walk past that kid attached nominally to an accordian player. But here's my question? Are they beggar or busker? There's a number of busking practices I consider underhanded if not unethical, namely playing to a captive audience like busking in a train or tram carriage where it is unsafe for people to leap from the windows while the vehicle is in motion. Also once I got stuck behind a guy enthusiastically 'rapping' his way through a construction caused bottleneck along Swanston St. and he was suggesting people pay him to freestyle, to which I was really tempted to do some pro-bono consulting and suggest he had his business model ass-backwards, he should offer to stop rapping if people paid him. Get into the extortion biz like the Piranha Brother's 'other other' operation.
One wouldn't find this situation in Australia, because the child would be in school until at least age 16 in which case they would still be better off collecting Newstart payments at home than being a walking collection plate for his accordion playing father. Furthermore, if someone tried to run this family business in Australia I presume some government agency would come and take this child away. I make no bones about this either for I feel that weekend child busker 'Jez' should probably have been taken away from his parents (Doubly so in the wake of 'Leaving Neverland'). I can only hope that he has by now lost the hat and can at least put his popping and locking in service of getting himself laid. But no such luck in Mexico, and I'll elaborate on the difficulties a little later. For now though I feel the answer to the busker/beggar question lies within me.
Given that I could give my change to the bag 'boys' at the supermarket, or other buskers or other beggars, opportunity costs come into play. And upon reflection I would only give this street act coins because I feel sorry for the boy (or girl on the other side of the street) because their lives are shit and I can ease that somewhat by giving them some coins. But what it wouldn't be for is because I enjoy and value the father's accordion playing, he just has far too much competition.
Now, it get's more complicated, because I've listened to speakers on 'effective altruism' which is people who actually put cognitive effort into questions of why and how much and where we should donate our time and money etc. It's a complex philosophical undertaking, and while I can't sign on the dotted line and drink the cool-aid myself as far as some effective altruists conclusions are concerned, they have pointed out that often in countries with child beggars, the act of giving them money is in fact just a transfer of wealth to mafia like crime organizations that actually run the street urchin trade. I don't believe in general, Mexico is an exception to this model, but in this case right here my suspicion is that I am transparently giving money to a child knowing the proceeds will be confiscated by his talent-less father, under the pretext that his child is not a beggar but in fact collecting money from his dad's many fans.
I've done some asking around about this, and some economics is involved. Firstly, I don't need to ask anyone to guess why the kid isn't in school and a cup or hat sitting on the ground in the kid's place. My guesstimate is that having a kid approach passersby and ask them for coin more than triples the busker's usual take. Of course a big part of this is because the child is more sympathetic in my opinion than the dad is talented.
More complex is why the father isn't playing a long game and thinking if my child is educated, numerate and literate, he will have far better prospects in the future and be far more able to look after me when I can no longer pump an accordion. My friend's here have told me that you can take your child to your locally zoned primary school to enroll them and they can very often say 'sorry, full' to which point you might have to walk much further only to be told sorry again, or enroll them in an expensive private school.
It needs must be also mentioned that the daily minimum wage in Mexico is 102.68 pesos also known as approximately (as at writing) USD $5.10 or AUD $7.64 and lest that escaped you, that's daily minimum wage not hourly. Further more while in Mexico the average wage is US$9000 per year, the median is US$5000 per year which is indicative of the level of wealth inequality. Such that you can get a situation where busking becomes quite lucrative compared to more traditional, stable gainful employment and public schooling quite costly or unfeasible.
Such that when I pass through my nearest park and see kids practicing 'circus' skills, hula hoops, juggling, stiltwalking, tightrope walking and acrobatic tumbles, I'm watching kids skill up often for a more viable career than say, the hospitality industry. If you do a hula or acrobatic routine at an intersection and on average make 7 pesos per change of lights and there are 20 changes per hour, you are already earning above and beyond what can legally be paid to you for a hard days work in formal employment.
I have some firsthand experience of this peculiar form of wealth-transference in Australia believe it or not, by working in a cold-calling call center for the better part of a decade. A strange situation where you fill a room with otherwise useful people, either in the process of obtaining a degree, or pursuing an unsecured career like artist or musician and they are charged with spending a significant chunk of their week doing something quite unnecessary that also annoys many people.
I always liked to picture the people in a huff, picking up the phone and being annoyed to have their movie or tv-show interrupted, to speak to some artist trying to make rent, rent that was paid for ultimately by this person's tax dollars. They clearly like art and creative output, and they find cold calls annoying, and in my opinion, the research I was doing was near completely unnecessary, so why didn't they just pay me and others to be an artist?
And of course, I can fairly answer that question without being cynical and vindictive. But now I look at Mexico and Mexicans, and one thing it's numerous unemployed and homeless can be accused of, is laziness and lack of enterprise.
I'm told it's not a distinctly Mexican institution, but you rarely have to open the door to an OXXO or 7-Eleven here. There is usually some guy looking out for you and opening the door with a friendly greeting, in the hope for a tip. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say these enterprising hustlers contribute 0 value, but pretty close to it. The economist in me wonders what their service is truly worth to me, in terms of the social contact and the slight caloric effort they spare me by expending themselves. But per customer it's gotta be something slightly short of .1 peso that I would feel is fair.
Which they won't.
Which again is a problem with monetizing manners and politeness: everyone loses. The person being polite and friendly feels pissed off or gipped for the lack of recognition, the person ostensibly receiving the unasked for gesture feels annoyed and frustrated.
For the record, I have a far greater problem with ostensibly good organizations like Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, etc littering the streets of Melbourne with 'charity muggers' people that exploit common decency to try and get people to sign up for a tithe. Compared to that, individuals that are losers in a dysfunctional economy don't bother me at all, particularly since opening doors for people isn't as fundamental to human interaction as smiling, saying hello and proffering your hand for shaking, I don't want the general community trained to avoid such gestures or treat them with suspicion. I've written about this before though.
And it brings me to beggar classic, the non-enterprising individual with palm extended, in complete submission to life. I like these people though I wish they didn't exist. In Mexico again, you see things you just wouldn't in Australia, namely the homeless families with young children. Single mother beggars.
I don't know if the mafia/cartels, run this enterprise or to what extent. While being served a meal I had a particularly insistent urchin tug on my sleeve and ask me for some of my food. I eventually relented and gave him a chicken nugget. It's not something that makes me feel good for being magnanimous or whatever, I feel bad because I've just reinforced a process that is going nowhere.
Somewhat uplifting was seeing this plucky kid then share what I gave him with another who was harvesting the unused sauce sachets left on top of the bins. I found this solidarity, this community quite moving, detached though I myself am.
Most heartbreaking was walking past a woman who has a young boy and a young girl, both I'm guessing under the age of 4. They live on the streets, full time and I happened to pass at a moment when the girl, the youngest burst into tears. Though her distress was no doubt some incidental triviality of the moment, it spoke to my heart in the big picture sense - yeah girl, your life sucks and I feel like crying too.
Although I gave the mother some change once, it's just one of those things that hammers at the hopelessness of the situation. There's no money I could give her and her children that would get them off the streets tomorrow. As far as I can discern, she just basically has to sit there, day in day out, caring for and entertaining as best she can those kids through what must be a meditation-free, shit boring life until they are old enough to release her to do something else.
Judging by the single-mother beggar with one son on the opposite side of the street, who heartwarmingly I see sharing laughs from time to time, she will most likely train her kids to beg, and ask strangers for money, as some kind of game.
Again in Australia, these children would be taken away and placed into foster care or some kind of group home. I have mixed feelings about this. For one, it is much more necessary in Australia because exposure to the elements through winter is much less survivable. When I first went to Uni in the early 2000s, there was a bearded homeless man that basically spent his day hunched over like a Gustav Klimt figure under the industrial AC of Myers Department store entrance, that was powerful enough to maintain a warm and cosy interior while the building was completely open to foot traffic. One day I realized that this man was basically just waiting to die. He was going to die of exposure on the streets one night.
So yeah, in Australia, you have to take those kids away for the certainty of death that awaits them in the winter months. However, our state run child care and foster programs don't in themselves have great reputations for not being horrible things for children to endure. There's also just a basic mental health cost I believe to separating a child from their only remaining parent.
This mother on the street might turn, like the accordian player, or her counterpart across the intersection, to child exploitation. But she will do so for purely economic reasons. What I devised hap-hazardly, would be that it would be nice if there was a beggar day-care service as a basic first step. A place a mother could drop the kids off so they get a feed, a wash, some play and some schooling.
Of course such a wonderful service turns ugly when mum comes by in the evening to pick up the kids for sleeping in the streets. Suddenly you need a night-time shelter service. A women's refuge. Because why not look after the mother as well?
I don't really subscribe to a 'give to the needy, not the greedy' worldview, because it's actually pretty much the libertarian position. To uncharitably characterise libertarians, their philosophy as I understand it is basically 'welcome to the jungle' you don't have a welfare state because it's all about getting the government the fuck out of the way.
When prominent US libertarians like former Senator Ron Paul are asked about their humane alternatives to the welfare state, they basically lump it onto private institutions like the Church, or individuals to pick up the slack when the government slashes it's revenue and expenditure.
So too, I don't think it's up to individuals to handle the redistribution of wealth to take care of the chronically homeless. It is very often the case that giving a kid some coins or a dollar, or giving him a pizza and then asking for a slice of his pizza and then feeling good about what a noble spirit he is, and then giving him $50 simply ensures that he will still be a beggar tomorrow.
These to me much as they don't feel like it in the moment, exercises in hand washing. A moment where we simply become fatalistic. I feel it is an individuals responsibility to the homeless to actually see them and think hard, very hard on the problem. Because it's a really hard problem and it's never been solved.
The history of attempting to redistribute wealth is actually quite horrific and abysmal, and I suspect in part it's because people get more involved in implementing a solution en masse than they do getting involved in conceiving a solution.
And Mexico has a ready model of a solution, which is all the states of the world where social safety nets and welfare work much better. Millions of people's lives would be improved if Mexico just moved incrementally closer to a country like Australia.
How to implement that though is a problem in and of itself. First you have to decorrupt the government, in order to have effective social spending and reform. For that you probably need to address the regional geo-political situation so the neighbors aren't constantly undermining any attempt at reform... and so on and so on upstream.
One form of charity people should definitely stop giving to, is themselves in the term of the common ways people psychologically try to cope with the confronting reality of women and children living on the streets. When I've discussed the complexities of the homeless of Mexico with Mexicans, what emerges are the stories you hear everywhere - that the beggars are scammers, faking even amputations, that they are simply lazy and unmotivated, not wishing to work. That they are career beggars that have been running the same scam for 15 years, or that they are drug addicts by choice and so forth.
All these are little donations we give to ourselves to maintain the status quo. An inability we have to confront the terrifying prospect that misfortune might exist and that we aren't the masters of our own destiny but may instead have to fall on someone else's mercy one day.
I spoke with my mother yesterday and she was talking about the local prize fuckhead federal representative's pamphlet appealing only to greed. I am a big fan of Rumi who wrote 'If you would have mercy, show mercy to the weak.' and on the subject of chronic homelessness and everything that comes with it, this is an example where voting in the interests of others may be in a sense voting in the interests of yourself whereas greed's track record is pretty fucking clear - wealth is concentrating such that most people who vote based on greed, are giving charity to the greedy, not themselves.
But that aside, I really have no idea what it is to be poor, or homeless, nor have an in-depth understanding of the root causes. Whenever I've speculated on just what lies ultimately upstream I get lost, and I'm sure real solutions shall forever require consultation with the chronically and transitionally homeless. I'm sure a big contributor though is that housing is seen as a category of investment rather than a basic human need.
For my purposes though, at least in writing this, I'm going to talk about my thoughts on what it's like to walk the streets of Guadalajara Mexico, but thought I'd start with this:
For those that can't be bothered watching the video, the gist is that when a homeless man looks like a homeless man, people ignore him and don't give him change. When they dress him as a business man, people give him money, often more than what he is asking for.
I'm not sure what the intent of this and similar videos are, and to the makers credit he doesn't actually draw any conclusions. There's a similar breed of video, where some young dudes will give a homeless guy a whole pizza, then send along a confederate to say they are hungry and see if he will give him a slice of pizza which the homeless guy does, then they'll reward him for his incredible generosity as a homeless man by giving him $50 in return for the slice of pizza etc.
My feeling is, the main emotional drive of such experiments is to shame people and uplift the makers in their own esteem. I don't know if this is the intent, but I'm highly skeptical that the kinds of people that make and share such videos would believe that were they our elected officials at all levels of government they could actually solve homelessness by giving them all a $50 tip or otherwise simply throwing money at it. I hope somewhere inside they suspect that what they might achieve is totally fucking up the entire social safety net system.
I cannot draw the obvious conclusion though that people are awful and judge books by their cover or something. There's to me a too-simple explanation as to why a man in a suit can raise more funds begging than a man dressed in the uniform of a beggar. In one case, people see a short term problem they can meaningfully contribute to, and the other see a intractable problem they can potentially make worse/enable by giving.
Now, on a typical day in Guadalajara, I go on a walk down one of the main streets in the center of town. I also typically have change in my pocket. I like cash cultures, pay-wave isn't really a thing here at all and coins still refreshingly have purchasing power in Mexico, rather than their sole use in Australia as shrapnel you have to fuck around with in order to avoid splitting bills over annoyingly priced items.
I could give my change out in the form of tips to the grocery baggers at the supermarket, nice friendly people whom I recognize and recognize me and that I generally tip for not putting my items into a plastic bag, and like because they all know me as the guy who hates plastic. They are senior citizens and near as I can tell, are paid solely in tips, and they have a nice little honor system of tagging out with each other as soon as one is tipped.
Then there's the regular buskers, the accordion players on other side of the main strip leading towards the Cathedral (and several other Cathedrals, actually everywhere leads to a Cathedral) at any rate, though I do love Mexican and Mariachi music, there are many other street buskers whose music or other offerings I enjoy more (much more) than these accordion players.
The thing is though, these buskers have their children approach people with cups asking for donations, or contributions etc. Like children under ten. Day in day out, 7 days a week for presumably something close to 8 hour days.
I mean, you can probably see the implications of this already, but by comparison in Mexico City (CDMX or DF) there are organ grinders, that are literally people who wear a brown police style uniform and turn a crank on a box to play organ music, and generally they will have an adult colleague who is collecting money in a hat. It is easy in this case to turn down a grown person who has made a two-man job out of what thanks to 20th (last) century technology, is a 0 person job. Especially considering all the buskers that have not only mastered the ability to turn a crank, but can juggle, do acrobatics, hula-hoop etc.
It's much much harder to walk past that kid attached nominally to an accordian player. But here's my question? Are they beggar or busker? There's a number of busking practices I consider underhanded if not unethical, namely playing to a captive audience like busking in a train or tram carriage where it is unsafe for people to leap from the windows while the vehicle is in motion. Also once I got stuck behind a guy enthusiastically 'rapping' his way through a construction caused bottleneck along Swanston St. and he was suggesting people pay him to freestyle, to which I was really tempted to do some pro-bono consulting and suggest he had his business model ass-backwards, he should offer to stop rapping if people paid him. Get into the extortion biz like the Piranha Brother's 'other other' operation.
One wouldn't find this situation in Australia, because the child would be in school until at least age 16 in which case they would still be better off collecting Newstart payments at home than being a walking collection plate for his accordion playing father. Furthermore, if someone tried to run this family business in Australia I presume some government agency would come and take this child away. I make no bones about this either for I feel that weekend child busker 'Jez' should probably have been taken away from his parents (Doubly so in the wake of 'Leaving Neverland'). I can only hope that he has by now lost the hat and can at least put his popping and locking in service of getting himself laid. But no such luck in Mexico, and I'll elaborate on the difficulties a little later. For now though I feel the answer to the busker/beggar question lies within me.
Given that I could give my change to the bag 'boys' at the supermarket, or other buskers or other beggars, opportunity costs come into play. And upon reflection I would only give this street act coins because I feel sorry for the boy (or girl on the other side of the street) because their lives are shit and I can ease that somewhat by giving them some coins. But what it wouldn't be for is because I enjoy and value the father's accordion playing, he just has far too much competition.
Now, it get's more complicated, because I've listened to speakers on 'effective altruism' which is people who actually put cognitive effort into questions of why and how much and where we should donate our time and money etc. It's a complex philosophical undertaking, and while I can't sign on the dotted line and drink the cool-aid myself as far as some effective altruists conclusions are concerned, they have pointed out that often in countries with child beggars, the act of giving them money is in fact just a transfer of wealth to mafia like crime organizations that actually run the street urchin trade. I don't believe in general, Mexico is an exception to this model, but in this case right here my suspicion is that I am transparently giving money to a child knowing the proceeds will be confiscated by his talent-less father, under the pretext that his child is not a beggar but in fact collecting money from his dad's many fans.
I've done some asking around about this, and some economics is involved. Firstly, I don't need to ask anyone to guess why the kid isn't in school and a cup or hat sitting on the ground in the kid's place. My guesstimate is that having a kid approach passersby and ask them for coin more than triples the busker's usual take. Of course a big part of this is because the child is more sympathetic in my opinion than the dad is talented.
More complex is why the father isn't playing a long game and thinking if my child is educated, numerate and literate, he will have far better prospects in the future and be far more able to look after me when I can no longer pump an accordion. My friend's here have told me that you can take your child to your locally zoned primary school to enroll them and they can very often say 'sorry, full' to which point you might have to walk much further only to be told sorry again, or enroll them in an expensive private school.
It needs must be also mentioned that the daily minimum wage in Mexico is 102.68 pesos also known as approximately (as at writing) USD $5.10 or AUD $7.64 and lest that escaped you, that's daily minimum wage not hourly. Further more while in Mexico the average wage is US$9000 per year, the median is US$5000 per year which is indicative of the level of wealth inequality. Such that you can get a situation where busking becomes quite lucrative compared to more traditional, stable gainful employment and public schooling quite costly or unfeasible.
Such that when I pass through my nearest park and see kids practicing 'circus' skills, hula hoops, juggling, stiltwalking, tightrope walking and acrobatic tumbles, I'm watching kids skill up often for a more viable career than say, the hospitality industry. If you do a hula or acrobatic routine at an intersection and on average make 7 pesos per change of lights and there are 20 changes per hour, you are already earning above and beyond what can legally be paid to you for a hard days work in formal employment.
I have some firsthand experience of this peculiar form of wealth-transference in Australia believe it or not, by working in a cold-calling call center for the better part of a decade. A strange situation where you fill a room with otherwise useful people, either in the process of obtaining a degree, or pursuing an unsecured career like artist or musician and they are charged with spending a significant chunk of their week doing something quite unnecessary that also annoys many people.
I always liked to picture the people in a huff, picking up the phone and being annoyed to have their movie or tv-show interrupted, to speak to some artist trying to make rent, rent that was paid for ultimately by this person's tax dollars. They clearly like art and creative output, and they find cold calls annoying, and in my opinion, the research I was doing was near completely unnecessary, so why didn't they just pay me and others to be an artist?
And of course, I can fairly answer that question without being cynical and vindictive. But now I look at Mexico and Mexicans, and one thing it's numerous unemployed and homeless can be accused of, is laziness and lack of enterprise.
I'm told it's not a distinctly Mexican institution, but you rarely have to open the door to an OXXO or 7-Eleven here. There is usually some guy looking out for you and opening the door with a friendly greeting, in the hope for a tip. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say these enterprising hustlers contribute 0 value, but pretty close to it. The economist in me wonders what their service is truly worth to me, in terms of the social contact and the slight caloric effort they spare me by expending themselves. But per customer it's gotta be something slightly short of .1 peso that I would feel is fair.
Which they won't.
Which again is a problem with monetizing manners and politeness: everyone loses. The person being polite and friendly feels pissed off or gipped for the lack of recognition, the person ostensibly receiving the unasked for gesture feels annoyed and frustrated.
For the record, I have a far greater problem with ostensibly good organizations like Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, etc littering the streets of Melbourne with 'charity muggers' people that exploit common decency to try and get people to sign up for a tithe. Compared to that, individuals that are losers in a dysfunctional economy don't bother me at all, particularly since opening doors for people isn't as fundamental to human interaction as smiling, saying hello and proffering your hand for shaking, I don't want the general community trained to avoid such gestures or treat them with suspicion. I've written about this before though.
And it brings me to beggar classic, the non-enterprising individual with palm extended, in complete submission to life. I like these people though I wish they didn't exist. In Mexico again, you see things you just wouldn't in Australia, namely the homeless families with young children. Single mother beggars.
I don't know if the mafia/cartels, run this enterprise or to what extent. While being served a meal I had a particularly insistent urchin tug on my sleeve and ask me for some of my food. I eventually relented and gave him a chicken nugget. It's not something that makes me feel good for being magnanimous or whatever, I feel bad because I've just reinforced a process that is going nowhere.
Somewhat uplifting was seeing this plucky kid then share what I gave him with another who was harvesting the unused sauce sachets left on top of the bins. I found this solidarity, this community quite moving, detached though I myself am.
Most heartbreaking was walking past a woman who has a young boy and a young girl, both I'm guessing under the age of 4. They live on the streets, full time and I happened to pass at a moment when the girl, the youngest burst into tears. Though her distress was no doubt some incidental triviality of the moment, it spoke to my heart in the big picture sense - yeah girl, your life sucks and I feel like crying too.
Although I gave the mother some change once, it's just one of those things that hammers at the hopelessness of the situation. There's no money I could give her and her children that would get them off the streets tomorrow. As far as I can discern, she just basically has to sit there, day in day out, caring for and entertaining as best she can those kids through what must be a meditation-free, shit boring life until they are old enough to release her to do something else.
Judging by the single-mother beggar with one son on the opposite side of the street, who heartwarmingly I see sharing laughs from time to time, she will most likely train her kids to beg, and ask strangers for money, as some kind of game.
Again in Australia, these children would be taken away and placed into foster care or some kind of group home. I have mixed feelings about this. For one, it is much more necessary in Australia because exposure to the elements through winter is much less survivable. When I first went to Uni in the early 2000s, there was a bearded homeless man that basically spent his day hunched over like a Gustav Klimt figure under the industrial AC of Myers Department store entrance, that was powerful enough to maintain a warm and cosy interior while the building was completely open to foot traffic. One day I realized that this man was basically just waiting to die. He was going to die of exposure on the streets one night.
So yeah, in Australia, you have to take those kids away for the certainty of death that awaits them in the winter months. However, our state run child care and foster programs don't in themselves have great reputations for not being horrible things for children to endure. There's also just a basic mental health cost I believe to separating a child from their only remaining parent.
This mother on the street might turn, like the accordian player, or her counterpart across the intersection, to child exploitation. But she will do so for purely economic reasons. What I devised hap-hazardly, would be that it would be nice if there was a beggar day-care service as a basic first step. A place a mother could drop the kids off so they get a feed, a wash, some play and some schooling.
Of course such a wonderful service turns ugly when mum comes by in the evening to pick up the kids for sleeping in the streets. Suddenly you need a night-time shelter service. A women's refuge. Because why not look after the mother as well?
I don't really subscribe to a 'give to the needy, not the greedy' worldview, because it's actually pretty much the libertarian position. To uncharitably characterise libertarians, their philosophy as I understand it is basically 'welcome to the jungle' you don't have a welfare state because it's all about getting the government the fuck out of the way.
When prominent US libertarians like former Senator Ron Paul are asked about their humane alternatives to the welfare state, they basically lump it onto private institutions like the Church, or individuals to pick up the slack when the government slashes it's revenue and expenditure.
So too, I don't think it's up to individuals to handle the redistribution of wealth to take care of the chronically homeless. It is very often the case that giving a kid some coins or a dollar, or giving him a pizza and then asking for a slice of his pizza and then feeling good about what a noble spirit he is, and then giving him $50 simply ensures that he will still be a beggar tomorrow.
These to me much as they don't feel like it in the moment, exercises in hand washing. A moment where we simply become fatalistic. I feel it is an individuals responsibility to the homeless to actually see them and think hard, very hard on the problem. Because it's a really hard problem and it's never been solved.
The history of attempting to redistribute wealth is actually quite horrific and abysmal, and I suspect in part it's because people get more involved in implementing a solution en masse than they do getting involved in conceiving a solution.
And Mexico has a ready model of a solution, which is all the states of the world where social safety nets and welfare work much better. Millions of people's lives would be improved if Mexico just moved incrementally closer to a country like Australia.
How to implement that though is a problem in and of itself. First you have to decorrupt the government, in order to have effective social spending and reform. For that you probably need to address the regional geo-political situation so the neighbors aren't constantly undermining any attempt at reform... and so on and so on upstream.
One form of charity people should definitely stop giving to, is themselves in the term of the common ways people psychologically try to cope with the confronting reality of women and children living on the streets. When I've discussed the complexities of the homeless of Mexico with Mexicans, what emerges are the stories you hear everywhere - that the beggars are scammers, faking even amputations, that they are simply lazy and unmotivated, not wishing to work. That they are career beggars that have been running the same scam for 15 years, or that they are drug addicts by choice and so forth.
All these are little donations we give to ourselves to maintain the status quo. An inability we have to confront the terrifying prospect that misfortune might exist and that we aren't the masters of our own destiny but may instead have to fall on someone else's mercy one day.
I spoke with my mother yesterday and she was talking about the local prize fuckhead federal representative's pamphlet appealing only to greed. I am a big fan of Rumi who wrote 'If you would have mercy, show mercy to the weak.' and on the subject of chronic homelessness and everything that comes with it, this is an example where voting in the interests of others may be in a sense voting in the interests of yourself whereas greed's track record is pretty fucking clear - wealth is concentrating such that most people who vote based on greed, are giving charity to the greedy, not themselves.
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