Cleansing beggars from streets saves them embarrassment
I still remember the first time in my life that I was accosted by a beggar. I was walking the mean streets of Rotorua at age 17 with a school mate when a group of slightly younger Maori youth addressed us as we passed by. ‘‘Got a dollar?’’ was the query posed by the biggest of their number. ‘‘Yes’’, replied my friend with more wit than I could muster, ‘‘but you’re not having it’’.
The moment passed quickly. The mixed feelings of insecurity, revulsion and anger that it evoked, though, have kept it alive in my memory. Because I had never before been asked for money in that manner, my initial presumption was that we were about to be what the Americans call ‘‘mugged’’. When, a second or two later, it became clear that no violence was in the offing, that these kids were in effect casually panhandling, yet still preying on the presumed weakness of the lily white Pakeha, the fear gave way to rage. These guys were brazenly begging, in broad daylight, in New Zealand? Where was their self-respect? Why didn’t they ask their parents for some pocket-money or, better still, get a job? How was it my concern that they were short of cash? If their families were that financially embarrassed let the social welfare system take up the slack.
As perfectly juvenile and naive as this reaction may seem, I don’t think that in the three decades since I have much changed my mind. Perhaps our culture has so fundamentally altered since the early 1980s that prostrating yourself on the footpath, looking mournful and shaking a tin cup has some semblance of respectability. Myself, having grown up in a society where beggars were either pathetic figures in Victorian melodramas or associated with the harsh realities and/or religious inanities of the Third World, I’m still of the opinion that they are something we should not see in a country of
As much as beggars might add colour or at least noise to street culture, they are frequently obnoxious and occasionally even offensive.
comparative affluence. Let those who cannot or will not work be provided for humanely but let them not clutter the streets advertising their own impoverishment with ‘‘Brother, can you spare a dime?’’ routines that should have gone out with the Great Depression.
Such is also the reasoning of lobby groups in both Auckland and Hamilton. A proposed new bylaw in the country’s largest city would ban begging outright. While the initial draft of the legislation sought to limit the ban to those cases where solicitation for money or food was occurring ‘‘in a manner that may intimidate or cause a nuisance to any person’’, public feedback on the issue has inclined the Auckland Council toward a total prohibition. As in Hamilton the political lead has been taken by businesses concerned for the welfare and spending disposition of potential customers. If folk are giving away their hard earned money to layabouts or otherwise frightened by the stand-over tactics of aggressive have-nots they will fail to do their duty as good consumers.
As a very small business owner I, too, have an interest in the survival of Hamilton’s maligned and ever shrinking CBD. Having unhappy, confused or belligerent persons seeking charity outside one’s shop is no kind of incentive to inner city commerce. As much as beggars might add colour or at least noise to street culture, they are frequently obnoxious and occasionally even offensive. One local begging stalwart sometimes augments his standard wolf whistling schtick with misogynistic, guttural utterances. I would not like to be a woman in his general vicinity.
For all this, there is a whiff of fascism about the idea of wholesale beggar cleansing. It brings to mind stories of Brazilian hit squads sweeping the streets of urchins in preparation for a visit by the Pontiff or the nasty Chinese demolishing Beijing slums so that their Olympics could look all the prettier.
If there is to be action taken against the panhandling underclass let it be motivated by something other than a bourgeois sensibility. The point should not be so much that they embarrass us as they embarrass themselves. We should seek to get beggars off the street for their own good more than our own.
The problem is clearly a bigger one than can be addressed by local government. The funding of relevant welfare agencies and support groups is likely lacking but, more broadly, society as a whole has become desensitised and open to obscene extremes of wealth and poverty.