It was rush hour on Thursday night and the train home was packed. Not just busy, but packed, in the way that makes you stand on the platform and strategize about which door to pick based on how many people get off and how many are lined up to get on. I found myself straining my brain over a very New York-specific math problem: if one tall, chubby man exits a train, how many petite ladies with large handbags can comfortably fit in the space he vacates? Show your work.
As the train hurtled uptown from Wall St., a young man made an appeal to the crowds of commuters squished tightly into my carriage. He lived north of the city, he said, and had lost his wallet in Times Square. Now he was trying to collect $12.50, his Metro-North fare home, and asked if anyone in the carriage would help him out. I sat, immobilized by the two commuters pressed against me on either side. But it was more than just their shoulders, jammed awkwardly against mine, that kept me frozen.
Poverty and need are not unfamiliar concepts to me: Sydney, like any other city, has an urban poor, and going to high school in the city’s red light district frequently brought me into contact with streetwalkers, drug addicts and the homeless. I considered these experiences part of my education, a hidden curriculum that my fancy private school would never dare to advertise, but which turned out to be just as valuable as any history or math class; these were lessons in reality, grim though that reality was.
New York City’s poverty and need are confronting because they exist in such close quarters with unimaginable wealth and prosperity. The gentrified West Village, almost suburban in its leafiness, borders the gritty poverty that jars you as soon as you hit 8th Ave. Luxury and need live cheek by jowl in this city, so that, as you pass through any neighborhood, it’s hard to ever say that you are in a district entirely devoid of need. Even in the wealthiest of neighborhoods, poverty waits just around the corner, ever present if briefly invisible.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed that my attitudes toward poverty, and particularly toward those who make appeals like the one I heard on the train Thursday, tend to shift back and forth. During some phases, I’ve given money to everyone who asked me, while during other periods I never give. I try to be consistent, so that if someone on 8th Ave. gets nothing, the same applies when solicited by a person on the subway; if one needy person received my help, shouldn’t they all? After all, what makes one more worthy of help than another, and who am I to judge?
I hadn’t been giving to the people I passed on the street on my way to work every day and so, when this young man asked for help, I didn’t move, pretending instead that the music playing in my ears was drowning him out. In fact, I heard every word. I saw a few bills passed towards him from around the car, but remained resolute in my decision not to act.
Then, the woman seated next to me put her hand into her purse. The woman standing in front of me did the same. Assuming that each of them was searching for spare change or a small bill to pass forward, I instantly felt guilty, embarrassed, and compelled to follow suit. It suddenly occurred to me that I was living a phenomenon I’d learned about in Social Psychology class: norm conformity. Also known as “salting the tip jar,” the best way to ensure that people will give money is to make them think that other people already have. If, as was entirely possible, this were a scam, it ideally ought to have been a two- or three-man operation, with one man asking for money and two more acting as willing donors, whose displays of generosity would pressure the surrounding strangers into also giving.
All this flashed through my mind and was gone before I realized that the woman next to me was in fact fishing around for her lip gloss, and the woman in front of me was taking out her iPod. For a moment I was relieved—group pressure removed, I was off the hook—and then, almost instantly, I was ashamed. I began to question why I had been so determined not to give this man even a dollar, and I wondered how many other people around me had managed to justify their inaction with the same arguments, some of them legitimate, that I had used: “It might be a scam”, or “I don’t give on the street, I give to official charities,” or the ever-popular “Who knows what he’s going to spend it on?”
I tried to imagine how I would feel if positions were reversed. If I had lost my wallet and were stranded, alone, with no way of getting home, I hope that those hands would fish in their purses for more than just lip gloss and iPods. If I were in a similar position to the homeless woman who sits on my friend Sarah’s corner, asking for $36 to get back home to Houston, I would hope that people would help me to get home. Most people feel hesitant and uncertain when asked to give to someone in need. Despite this, I hope that even total strangers in this very big city will be generous when generosity is really needed.
