I happened to be stopped at a busy highway exit ramp today and watched a man with a sign asking for money. He had just finished a bag of chips and carelessly tossed it on the grassy area where he was standing while he begged for contributions. It wasn’t the fact that he was asking for help that bothered me, but the fact that tomorrow the city would be paying someone with a long pole to come and retrieve the garbage he had left while he was asking for help.

It occurred to me that he was creating work that was also going to cost the very same people he was asking for assistance. And truly it would be work that he was capable of doing. It was an interesting cycle of thought.  We are creating the messes that we are having to pay to clean up. I wonder that people receiving their support from the hard work of others often care very little about taking care of that with which they have been entrusted.

Spending someone else’s hard-earned money on my own needs includes a heavy duty guilt that I am not sure everyone shares. It has sometimes not been the case, but often carries a weight that I can’t wait to be free of and get back to providing for my own needs. We may all have times when we have to depend on the good graces of others, but I cannot imagine it as a lifestyle.

I think that is why we do tend to help out some people rather than others. We all have our own lens through which we see someone’s difficulties as being some what their own fault. If we have never walked in those shoes we see it one way, perhaps. If we have, we have even higher standards we expect them to live up to. I often wonder if one were to track the contributions to a person on the side of the road asking for money, how many different stories one would find as to why people stopped to offer money.