I am low on money these days and my life is hell for it. I have to do with substandard everything in my life I recently had an incident where an elderly woman asked me for money while roaming the street with her family begging for money. I had no money to spare, but had I had any, I wouldn’t have given a penny to her (Life is tough, I can’t give away money I didn’t earn)
But, she later said something which melted my heart, “Majboori hai beta!” (Hindi) “We don’t want to do this, but we have to do it son” (now add some emotional value to it), I didn’t know what to do, I was on my cycle and I could feel their eyes on me as I passed them and I just peddled faster with teary eyes.
I didn’t know how to deal with that. i.e., I don’t have enough money for medical necessities or to improve the standard of living of my own life, but I was being asked to spare change by a poor family that was demonstrably in a worse spot than me.
I was always taught that if you give beggars money, they will spend it all on alcohol (not blaming them), and given the number of beggars who have come to be smelling like alcohol and death with wobbly balance, it has been a rule not to provide them with money. Also, let’s not forget, if you’re really poor (homeless and have nothing to lose) and you are really desperate, you are often dangerous i.e., not someone around whom your kids can roam, again, not blaming them. But… I don’t know what is right or wrong in this situation!
How do you deal with external problems you can’t solve around you? What is the moral thing to do here?
edit: This kinda reminds of a story about Jesus where a prince once came to him and told him that he isn’t at peace with himself no matter what he does, and Jesus told him that to get peace he must give away everything to the poor and follow Jesus around and the prince refused (something along those lines).
I know what the most moral thing might be in this case, but even if you tell me that I should give money to those who live in abject poverty, I probably won’t do it as often as I should.
tl;dr I don’t have an answer for your problem, but I have some thoughts on it that hopefully might contribute to you finding an answer.
I think it’s probably bad to think of the homeless, etc. as being drug-addled and especially as being dangerous. Usually, if they do have a drug problem (especially alcoholism) it came after becoming homeless and not before, and functions as a way to self-medicate to ease the pain of their terrible conditions. There is, of course, a strong correlation with mental illness that they are often also self-medicating, but “mentally ill” does not mean the same thing as “dangerous”. You probably don’t want to have them as a baby sitter, but that’s much more because of mental illness impairing their ability to care for others (and often themselves) rather than there being a realistic chance they would actually hurt the child directly.
People, religions, politicians, corporations and so on speak of charity as a great thing, and it’s certainly not a bad thing, but there being a need for charity for people to survive is a symptom of a system that doesn’t care for a substantial portion of the population that lives in it, and typically brutally exploiting those people. Charity is like a bandage, it can help to tend to a wound that has been inflicted, but we must ask “Why is there a wound in the first place? What inflicted it? How can it be prevented?” Your society, like mine, is organized in part to hurt these people in order to exploit them. No amount of charity can change that fact, only a change in social organization can change it.