Scarcity

Today, after reading the news about Muslims being detained at our airports and weekly lists of crimes by immigrants and the green light from the White House for the Dakota pipeline and lying and the red light from that same place for reproductive healthcare and science, I went shopping with Louie for new pants. Somehow he has managed to put holes in the knees of all the pants that fit him. I imagine we will be going through a lot more pants in our future. It's dark and gloomy outside, literally and figuratively, but we have to go about our business.

As we walked to the store from the subway stop, we passed a woman asking for money while carrying a baby. We passed her without stopping. But when we were walking back, finished with our purchases, I decided to stop when we saw her again. It's not my habit to give money to panhandlers. I'm not really sure why I decided to be generous today. I told her that I didn't have any cash, but she asked me to buy clothes for her kids. She told me that she was a single mother, recently here from Romania, with three kids, no job. I don't really know if any of that story is true. As we browsed for clothes for her kids, she told me more. How hard it was. How people didn't look at her. How sick she was. How stupid she was. How her teeth hurt. How she couldn't get a job. How she had no money.

She picked out a bunch of t-shirts, a little jacket for the baby. She kept looking through the racks. And I thought, is there a point when I say no? No, you can't have that for your child. I won't buy that for you, though I can relatively afford it. I felt for that limit in the pit of my stomach as she spoke about her hardships. How far does my impulsive generosity go? I decided that I would buy whatever she wanted. Because Louie was with me. And if I'm going to pretend to care about the world around me, I may as well act now, in whatever way I can, for anyone who asks, without conditions.

So we spent more money today than we had planned. And I don't know what difference this will make for that woman and her kids. I didn't know offhand about any resources in Fresh Meadows where she lived or in Jackson Heights, where we were. Maybe she's just going to resell those clothes. Maybe she's the "wrong" kind of immigrant or what's making America not great. But I told Louie that when someone asks for help and we can help them, then we do.

This isn't a feel-good post. It's made me think about scarcity and how we're being sold a doctrine of scarcity. That there is not enough in this world for equal rights or equal access to economic and social benefits. That those who are asking for more should be ignored or villified. That we should hold onto what little we have and not risk anything. That our value is relative and based on what we have-our possessions, our positions in life. This is the world that we inherited, and we are in grave danger of passing on the same limited vision to our children.

So today is just another small, insignificant step with my son in hand towards a generous, loving, kind, capacious world. Increasingly, I am understanding this to be the moral task of our day and age.