CARLTON FLETCHER: Pride may come before a fall, but there are times when it’s a virtue

Early morning, April 4, a shot rings out in the Memphis sky. Free at last, they took your life; they could not take your pride.

— U2

I looked at the man with a touch of pity. No matter how annoying it was to have someone walk up to me on the street and ask for money, I couldn’t help but wonder what circumstances had led him to this.

Looking back, especially at my time in Albany – trust me, growing up in small-town Ocilla was a lot different – I realize I used to be an easy touch. If someone approached me with a sad story, I would invariably give them as much money as I felt I could spare, and sometimes all the money I had.

That ended one evening when one of the “regular” panhandlers who hung around the old Herald building asked one of my colleagues for money to get something to eat. Said colleague, who is a lot nicer guy than I, was the same kind of soft touch I’d always been. If he had it, he would give it to those who said they had a great need.

On this night, my former colleague told the regular that he only had a $20 bill. The regular assured him that he would take the money to a nearby restaurant, get some food and bring back the change.

I know most of you are thinking ahead and see where this is going. My colleague never got his change, and the regular stopped hanging around for a while, certain he’d be asked for the change from the twenty.

Unbelievably – at least to me, remember, I still carried a significant amount of naivete around – that same regular approached me when I was leaving work one evening about a month or so later and asked if I’d give him some money. I kinda lost it.

“Dude,” I said, “I can’t believe you have the nerve to come around here begging for money after what you did to (my colleague). This is a man who has been way nicer to you than anyone else around, and you took his money. That’s about as low as a person can get.”

I’d given this man money on a number of occasions, and more than a few times gave him food that I’d brought to work for my own meal. At that moment, though, pity was the farthest thing from my mind.

“I understand that you’ve had some bad times in life,” I said, “but nothing that’s happened to you gives you the right to treat a good person the way you did. He’s a forgiving soul, but I’m less so. So don’t you ever ask me for another dime.”

I thought about that man the other day when a new downtown “regular” asked me if I’d give him money to help him get back to somewhere he needed to go. I politely refused, and he just moved on to the next person a few buildings down.

I thought about that Linda Ronstadt song as he walked away … “Love Has No Pride.” And it hit me that pride was something that is missing in these people who will ask anyone for money rather than using their time to seek employment so that they can earn their own food money. (And, let’s be honest here: Only the most naive among us would not be aware that these folks are trying to get money to buy alcohol or drugs.)

I wondered when the disconnect came in their lives; when they gave up on working for a living and took up the “job” of asking others to support their needs and their habits. And I thought of the kids we see out in public, kids who are ignored by their parents and left to fend for themselves in what can be a mean world.

Did these regulars I spoke of live under such circumstances? Were they pretty much abandoned by their parents and left to take care of themselves? Do they refuse to seek or keep a job because the people who raised them have spent their lifetime relying on government subsidies, waiting – as the cliche goes – for each month’s check?

It’s hard to think about things like work and self-sustenance when you’ve lived in a family that’s three or four generations deep in relying on others – the government, churches, the kindness of strangers – to meet their needs.

Except for our president and those like him who have inherited their way to riches, we live in awfully hard times. It’s obvious politicians don’t care about the millions who are going to be insurance-less and searching for new food sources in this idiotic measuring contest in which these cretins are worried about saving face, not about those who are headed full-speed toward poverty.

So there likely will be more regulars out there in days to come, more people asking strangers for money. Sadly, though, these people are likely going to legitimately need it to survive.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].