Should you feel guilty when you decline to give a dollar to a
homeless person asking for money?
Guilt isn’t a beneficial
emotion for anybody involved. It’s self-judgement and self-condemnation, and
judgement and condemnation are merely human follies borne of spiritual
immaturity. It’s the depriving of yourself of
receiving necessary spiritual nourishment, or the ‘holding down’ of oneself, in
an attempted atonement for one’s perceived wrongdoings. In Conversations with
God book 3 by Neale Donald Walsch, God and Neale have the following
conversation about guilt:
Seek only to be genuine. Strive to be sincere. If you wish
to undo all the "damage" you imagine yourself to have done,
demonstrate that in your actions. Do what you can do. Then let it rest.
That's easier said than done. Sometimes I feel so guilty.
Guilt and fear are the only enemies of man.
Guilt is important. It tells us when we've done wrong.
There is no such thing as "wrong." There is only
that which does not serve you; does not speak the truth about Who You Are, and
Who You Choose to Be.
Guilt is the feeling that keeps you stuck in who you are
not.
But guilt is the feeling that at least lets us notice
we've gone astray.
Awareness is what you are talking about, not guilt.
I tell you this: Guilt is a blight upon the land—the poison
that kills the plant.
You will not grow through guilt, but
only shrivel and die.
Awareness is what you seek. But awareness is not guilt, and
love is not fear.
Fear and guilt, I say again, are your only enemies. Love and
awareness are your true friends. Yet do not confuse the one with the other, for
one will kill you, while the other gives you life.
Then I should not feel
"guilty" about anything?
Never, ever. What good is there in that? It only allows you to not love yourself—and that kills any
chance that you could love another.
Elsewhere in Neale’s books it
mentions that regret is the feeling that tells you that you do
not want to do a thing again. Regret is a normal, healthy emotion, as opposed
to guilt which is often employed instead.
I wrote more about the difference between guilt and regret
here: To the Decriers of Anger and Regret
As for whether you should give the homeless person a dollar
or feel regret about not giving it to him, if we go by the above text it all has to do with whether that decision reflects
who you really are and who you choose to be.
But personally, I think giving money to the homeless is the
‘right’ thing to do. It signifies compassion, and it’s a better use of that
dollar than whatever you would have spent it on because a dollar means a lot
more to someone who has almost nothing than to someone who has a place to live,
water, food, clothes, medical care, etc. The amount of wealth
a non-homeless person versus the amount of wealth a homeless person has
entails a huge imbalance, a travesty of justice. The least you
could do is discharge that imbalance slightly by giving the
man a dollar.
At least it’s a better use of that dollar than what you would spend it on for yourself if you consider other
people’s well-being to be as important as yours.. and why shouldn’t you? What makes you so
special in the universe? What kind of a world is it where everybody is selfish
and out to please themselves even at the expense of others? (I’m not
necessarily implying that declining to do something charitable is “at the
expense of” another—that’s arguable—I’m just saying that selfism on a
collective level makes everybody hurt.) You could say that everybody has to
look out for Number One first, because nobody else will, and there is some
truth that, but taking care of yourself in the ways that only you can
does not preclude correcting a gross imbalance of goods
between you and another, and nor does it preclude significantly caring about
other people on a fundamental level.
You could argue, of course, that the homeless person should
get a job, or that it’s not fair that you work for that money and he would get
it for free, but I think it’s idealistic to think that the homeless should just
get jobs. Do you think that they live in the atrocious conditions they live in,
suffering a lack of the most basic necessities of life, being reduced to
wearing rags and begging on the street all day just because they’re lazy and
hence prefer that to working? No, the homeless person always has some kind of
psychological (or physical, or both psychological and physical) issues that
make it impractical for them to work. Not everybody is cut out for the
workforce; some people slip between the cracks of capitalism, and some of those
people slip between the cracks of the welfare system, insurance and other such
safety nets as well.
You could argue that it’s pointless to give a homeless
person money because they’ll just use it for alcohol or drugs, but 1) you don’t
know for sure what they’ll use it for, everybody needs a bite to eat now and
then, so it’s better to err on the side of compassion than on the side of
harshness; and 2) if alcohol is really what that homeless person wants to drown
the pain away, even more so than the supposedly more useful things that he
could spend it on such as food or soap, then who are you to say that it’s not
worth it for that homeless person to spend a dollar on alcohol? Apparently that’s what benefits him most in his situation.
You could think that the homeless person is just going to
continue to be homeless regardless of what you give him and therefore you’re
not really helping any thing, but regardless of that
the fact is that any amount of money you give will proportionately improve that
homeless person’s life, even if only for that day, and that matters.