Or, “Why It’s Unethical to Behave in Defiance of Reality.”
Or, “Why the old saw ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is constantly being affirmed.”
Or, “Why progressive wishcraft keeps blowing up in society’s metaphorical face”
Sanai Graden (left), a University of California at Berkeley senior (presumably you know what that means) was hit up by a homeless man as she visited Washington, D.C. He said his name was Alonzo, and told her he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The sympathetic young woman paid for his medication at CVS. She also got him a hotel room for the night. Sanai was a TikToker , and told her followers that she needed to raise money for Alonzo, whom she called “Unc.” Soon she bought Alonzo, aka. “Unc,” a cell phone, and put him up in a hotel for a week.
Awwww. How Christian! How kind! How progressive!
Her video became a Tik Tok sensation, with millions of views. Graden started a GoFundMe account, and it quickly raised more than $400,000. Her legion of followers multiplied: one admirer set up a GoFundMe for her that eventually raised over $26,000.
Isn’t that a nice story?
Then a report from local D.C. TV station Fox 5 revealed that “Unc” was Alonzo Hebron, 64, a long-time criminal who numbered among his convictions one for a violent assault on a homeless woman. In another, he stabbed a man in the neck with a screwdriver. Donors started asking for their money back.
Last week the Washington Post reported that Sanai has begun refunding all of the money she raised for “Unc.” In a series of TikTok videos posted last week, Sanai Graden explained she had lost contact with Hebron. He had “become evasive,” quickly used up the gift cards she had given him for food, lost or ditched the gift cellphone, and she couldn’t contact him. “I really did try to help him,” Graden swore in another Tik Tok video that attracted than a million views. “I tried to transform his whole life. But sometimes when you want something for somebody, they may not want that for themselves.”
That’s one way of putting it, I guess. Another is that when a man is homeless and wandering the streets, there just might be a reason other than systemic racism and the evils of the world. He might not be trustworthy. he might be nuts, It might not be prudent to vouch for him and to use one’s influence—I’m not even going to go into how disturbing it is that Graden has significant influence—to gull other chumps into giving up their money like you have.
All Graden has learned from this entirely predictable scenario is that Alonzo is the problem, because he doesn’t want what he should want. Berkeley has failed its duty to teach the 21-year-old basic life skills and critical thinking, and she appears to be immune to learning from experience. Lavishing money and unearned resources on people almost never solves their problems, because, aa Buckeroo Bonzai memorably said, “Wherever you go, there you are!”
Leftist cant, following its increasingly Marxist influences, maintains that people like Alonzo just need to take the undeserved bounty from those in better straits in order to reverse their fortunes. Very, very rarely does this work, which is why lottery winners frequently end up broke within months or years, and one of the many reasons why reparations are insane.
I’m not going to worry about Alonzo: he’s as well-off as he was ever going to be, and at least he got a few nights in a hotel out of his chance encounter with this well-meaning fool. I am worried about Sanai Graden. She’s deluded, and intense progressive indoctrination has done more damage to her brain than RFK Jr’s head worm has done to his. She’s spreading her incompetent and irresponsible world view to millions of Tik Tok zombies who are just gullible enough to adopt it.
In reaching this conclusion, I am intentionally putting aside the darker possibility that Sanai, who appears to be a Tik Tok hustler, was really just exploiting “Unc” to increase her social media influence and earning power.
Nah, it couldn’t be that…
Ethics Alarms 
This is why I absolutely refuse to ever give anything to a panhandler.
“Can you spare a dollar so I can buy gas to get to my brother’s?” My response: “No. I can’t.”
If I were to go on, I’d ask, “Why did you head to your brother’s without having enough gas and gas money to get there? I’ve never had to rely on the goodness of others to get anywhere. Why is this happening? In a country with the social safety net the size of the U.S.’s, no one should ever, ever have to beg. I’m also convinced that if you’re mentally ill or otherwise impaired, there is a service available to you. All you have to do is avail yourself of that service.” But I don’t go on.
I think giving money to panhandlers is not only unethical, it’s downright immoral.
And not just panhandlers. I’ve—well, Grace, who was as soft-hearted as they come despite her frequent poses to the contrary—gave money (that we really couldn’t afford to give, as I am finding out more surely every single day—to her family members, our friends, and even mere acquaintances if their stories were desperate and touching. I’ve been taken more than a few times myself over the years.
I’ve had people ask me for gas money when filling my tank. I just say, which pump are you; I’ll prepay for you inside. No one has taken me up on it yet. Well, it’s only happened to me twice, three times at the most.
What, you didn’t say, “And I’ll also buy you a smart phone and help raise thousands of dollars so you can buy a Jaguar and change your life”?
Well Edward, Hah, I guess I take them at their word and assume they are actually in need of gas for their car. Silly me.
They just mumbled something and walked away.
A lady at Costco did that to me once. She was right next to me so I didn’t feel bad handing her my credit card, which she gave back to me shortly.
i will admit I was worried about finding a $200+ charge later, supposing she had a trove of gas canisters in the back of her minivan, but that was just the cynical part of me talking.
I guess you did not consider that just “anyone” cannot buy gas at Costco… you need a Costco membership card or Citi-Costco credit card to run the pump.
I’ve been hit up by people with gas cans asking for money to buy gas, but when I offer to squirt some of the gas I’m pumping into the can for them, they are not interested. A similar response comes from offering to buy a person a sandwich or burger rather than giving them the money; they suddenly become unhungry.
Here in Australia, that is an entirely prudent response, for the same reason that the Salvation Army now declines to accept wrapped Christmas presents for its clientele. Just as some nasty people put nasty things in wrapped presents, so also do some people with previously prepared food. Only an idiot homeless person would accept food as such from a stranger.
You can’t bring them a burger…but as a generalization the average panhandler won’t leave their spot and go down the street to the burger place where they order, you pay, they get what they want, and you never even have custody of the food.
Probably they have an expected cash revenue “on the job” from what they are doing if they are panhandling, there is an expected revenue minute by minute as they are out there. And, the expected revenue exceeds the value of any food you might buy them. Besides, if they have a lucrative spot for panhandling they don’t want to relinquish it.
People fight over the best spots! Panhandlers often know each other by sight and can be friendly and cooperative, but they can fight over a spot, too.
I think the mistake of the naive “mark” is getting sucked into the terms of the debate, which is the stated acute lack of food. The stated lack of food is an excuse, a pretext, to ask for cash.
Where I live “there are places all over town where people can go to get help.” The drawback is that none of those places hand out cash on demand, day after day, week after week, month after month, no questions asked, on a schedule that suits the panhandler.
I bought a tank of gas once for a middle aged Black guy who approached me the Wegman’s parking lot on East Ridge Road in Irondequoit, NY (suburban Rochester). He had a long story, a workers ID badge for a skilled trade with a major hospital, and the longest, most detailed story about a wife sick with COVID in the neighboring town of Syracuse. I still wonder about his story. It was a nice truck, too.
My hunch is that he had some generalized hustle and the use of the the truck, but was supposed to come back with something, anything, at the end of the day. I still wonder about his story which was elaborate and implausible.
My best guess is he went to put gas in the truck and squandered his money without ever filling the tank. But that’s my guess.
“Too many details” is a “tell” for a con man, according to Gavin de Becker in his works such as _The gift of fear_.
From the viewpoint of my Church’a teaching on social justice there are three points that ought to be followed:
Change can not come from the top, it must organically begin at the bottom. Anyone who has dealth with addicts know that rehabiliation begins with self identification and desrie of the need to be rehabilitated.
For lefties, the solution is always another government program and ever increasing amounts of money. Humanity is perfectible. All it takes is … another government program….
My church does not give money to people. We will give gift cards to grocery stores at most. We even paid a couple of mortgage payments or a few electric bills.
The story of the Good Samaritan has merit and value, but the Samaritan did what was necessary in the culture in which he lived which had no social welfare net, even for a crime victim like the one he helped.
We should not shirk from helping people in need, particularly crime victims, but that does not necessarily require we start subsidizing the lives of strangers we just met.
I’m sure she meant well. People have to want to improve their lives. Unc Alonzo doesn’t want to do better, so he doesn’t.
I still do not entirely understand the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Part of the context is that Jews and Samaritans disliked each other intensely, yet it was unexpectedly the Samaritan who came to the man’s aid (presumably the man left for dead was identifiably a Jew…?).
Another part of the context is that the first two travelers who passed by the injured man were afraid of ritual impurity, because (1) the man might be dead, and (2) at any rate the rescuer would presumably get blood on himself (and thus become ritually impure even if the man was still alive).
At my public high school in Rochester NY I had the good luck to have as one of my teachers the late J. Ernest Du Bois of blessed memory. More than once he cautioned us students that if you know the Bible well enough you can quote it to suit any sort of argument you like, even if you are wrong-headed in your basic assumptions or objective.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Panhandling has become professionalized by shameless opportunists and those who are addicts with very short time horizons and an intense interest in immediate cash.
Any reader with a few spare hours to spend surfing the internet would benefit from watching various TV news stories, combing diligently through reddit threads, and reading news articles and every single comment associated with the original articles in order to learn more about the issue.
Reddit and Quora both have useful aggregations of personal opinion and observation.
Not all homeless people panhandle. It is an error to assume that a particular panhandler is homeless. Some panhandlers actually have a nice place to live and a decent car to drive. Others may “couch-surf” so that they are one step from homelessness but get a place to sleep every night if they can pay someone $10 each night.
It is possible that a panhandler toward the end of his “work-day” has collected a substantial sum of money, spent nearly all of it on drugs / alcohol / cigarettes / food / gifts / lotto tickets, etc, and at that moment is still trying to get enough money to pay for their $10 couch spot that night.
= – = – = – =
There are serious research studies and ethnographies on homelessness. My favorite, offhand, is one called _Down and out in America: The origins of homelessness_ by Peter H. Rossi, published by the University of Chicago in 1990. It’s dated, but a serious work of scholarship. I bought it long ago at a library sale and every time I decide to get rid of it I start reading it and like it so much I have trouble discarding it. There must be more recent works as good, but I can’t specify them.
A useful notion I learned from Rossi’s book is that vast majority of totally destititute persons with no cash income are able to avoid being homeless. This is accomplished by living in someone else’s household and contributing by doing something, anything, to make themselves useful and not be so annoying that they get kicked out. This might include cooking, shopping for groceries, cleaning, babysitting, driving, lawn care, elder care, maintenance, being cheerful and pleasant, etc. Even if this is not a long term solution it will work for some days, weeks, perhaps months.
Rossi estimated that the average adult destitute man he encountered on the streets had taken about 2 years to burn through the patience of family and friends before ending up out on the street.
A depressing statistic I have heard, perhaps apocryphal, is that many wards of the state become homeless within a year or two of turning18 and aging out of the system. Many aged out of the system without ever finding a “forever family,” and they have no place to go.
A likely corollary of the above analysis, more or less, is that being (1) highly disagreeable, combined with being (2) unemployed and (3) unemployable, is a good way to end up homeless. This is especially facilitated by abusing substances or suffering from serious mental illness, or perhaps go whole hog and abuse substance and have mental health challenges, too! (Sorry to be flip.)
Homelessness can also be facilitated by (4) periodically getting arrested, (5) not having the skills to get emergency housing or section 8 housing, and (6) being unable to maintain possession of vital documents such as ID documents. I strongly suggest never having a bank account in your life, because it’s easier to live for the day and never have money for rent if you never have a bank account.
(Digression: I am reminded of Jordan Peterson’s observation that 90% of incarcerated persons are male because at the extreme tail of the distribution of “disagreeable-ness” you will find mostly men.
I am speaking, of course, of the “Five Factor” personality model abbreviated with the acronym “OCEAN.” Wikipedia has details. )
My Christian faith commands me to see the face of Christ in every person I encounter. I also think that God gave me a brain for a reason, and it’s stupid to reward behavior that I don’t like. I also hate trying to catch people in a lie–if I ask people why they are pan-handling or what they want the money for.
I generally find the phenomenon of panhandling vexatious. It feels to me like an act of aggression. The panhandler wants me to feel bad for him, and give him money. If I give money I feel like an idiot. If I don’t I feel callous. If I ask the person for their story I feel like I’m encouraging them to lie to me. Thanks, buddy! Everyone driving past you on the expressway offramp is doing their best–some guy got up at 5 a.m. to be on the job site at 7, you think that’s his idea of a good time? On a cold day?
My current strategy is to carry crunchy granola bars, soft granola bars, and nutrition drinks. I even carry a pack of cigarettes to give out of a few cigarettes, even though I don’t smoke. I draw the line at cash. If someone really wants food, I give them food.
Panhandler: “You got a dollar?”
Charlie: “I don’t give out cash. No cash.”
= – = – = – =
Two people who go to my church once discussed panhandlers as following.
Donna: “Joe, isn’t there someplace this poor pathetic person can go to get help? This is terrible!”
Joe: “Oh, Donna, there’s places all over town they can go to get help. The people you see out here panhandling, they don’t want to obey rules and follow instructions to get help. They are out here because they want to march to the beat of their own drum!”
Thanks for reading.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
big shout out to the panhandlers at the 490 expressway offramps.
Reddit thread (old)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Rochester/comments/spl305/panhandlers_on_490_offramps_scammers_or_in_need/
As a final note, I think that young, idealistic, naive, overly agreeable women are especially susceptible to getting into friendships where they “help” people like Alonzo Hebron in the news item above.
These parasitic and dysfunctional relationships can sometimes be initiated via chance encounters on the street. In fact, the recipients of help may specialize in identifying easy marks, and cultivating them in random sidewalk encounters.
It can take a while for the average naive and idealistic woman to wise up. There is always another age cohort to replace the older, sadder, wiser, hard-bitten generation that has learned from experience that it is easy to give out money but hard to change or “rescue” the person who asks for and accepts the help.
The internet age and social media is a double-edged sword. Sanai Graden could be using the internet and social media to learn about the world in all its variety. Instead, she seems to view it as a source for revenue from idealists who can help her to help this Alonzo Hebron chap.