Why Did a Homeless Guy Refuse My Money?

It's last Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol. I'm driving out of the Safeway parking lot in my Jeep Wrangler when this happens:

I can't tell you why a stranger with a sign seeking money decided to refuse money from me. But Twitter offered a few funny GIFs and a ton of thoughts.

Some folks made me laugh:

Some tried to diagnose him:

Some folks thought that I needed reassurance. And yes, I'll admit that somewhere deep down inside, my inner child was thinking Waaah why don't he like meeeeeee. Those folks came to my aid with comments like:

Most saw it as wrong and offered varying degrees of outrage. But many took it farther and put this dude and me into our larger American context:

I'll admit to you that my assumptions trended in this direction, too. But maybe my assumptions are all wrong. Perhaps this was just a man asking for money who, for reasons having nothing to do with the differences he perceived to exist between us, decided not to accept money from me. I'm open to that reading of it.

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Regardless of the man's "why," the interaction unnerved me which is why I immediately went to Twitter to vent, and for reassurance. The experience felt to me like evidence that even the most basic things we used to count on in our society – that a stranger can aid a stranger who is asking for aid – no longer work anymore. I found it troubling. More than that, I found it deeply confusing.

Confusing like fake news (we can't agree on whom to trust), election outcomes (we can't agree on facts), COVID responses (we can't agree on science), and the ballot box (we can't agree on how to ensure access). This is not an exhaustive list.

And if my little interaction on the sidewalk outside a Safeway is fundamentally like these much bigger disagreements, then it feels like there's a profound misunderstanding at the heart of everything. But if that's true, can't we fix it? Can't we still sit down and say Wait, let's talk, let's unravel this so we can get back to a starting place we can both agree too? Or are we too late for that.

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Perhaps I shouldn't have driven away from the man. Maybe I should have pulled over and opened a conversation along the lines of Dude, you're looking for help and I'm offering it. What's going on here? (I know some of you will reply: but that might not have been safe; let's take safety off the table as that's not the point of this question.)

Instead, the way I handled my encounter with this self-described homeless man felt like an acquiescence to the way things are unraveling. A tiny morsel in the bucket of slop of all the things that don't make sense to me anymore. Can we use this little interaction as a teaching tool for how to think about the way forward? Pls comment below about:

We're all trying to make things better, aren't we?

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