Fire Post

[garran]

Waiting for the bus on the way home from rehearsal today, I met a man who said that his apartment building was in the process of burning down, and gave him twenty dollars to get into a hostel for the night. (It's possible that it was a con*, but I'm comfortable about the degree to which I was convinced. He was clearly very shaken - he kept crying, just a little - but proud, and struggling to stay together.) He made arrangements to come to Langara and pay me back tomorrow - apparently he is one of those who is very uncomfortable about accepting charity, and hates to feel that something is owed. I might call this 'conscientious capitalism', and it's a little like vegetarianism, in that I don't share it, but I respect the idiosyncracies of those who do.

I feel like I ought to have more paragraphs, but nothing else that happened to me today was so striking as that was.

(*: A confidence game, not a convention.)

Comments

[garran.livejournal.com]

I used to justify myself to myself that way some times, but I've grown less satisfied with it. I gave him the money because I decided that I trusted him; I pretty consciously wasn't going, "Even if you're not for real, your performance has earned it," because, in fact, I wouldn't want to reward that. I don't want to foster, any more than I can help it, an environment in which it's particularly useful to be dishonest (but I do want to foster one in which mutual charity is the norm). At any rate, even if I was mistaken, I don't regret the choice I made.


-Garran