A sedan is not a home: can you spare some love?

A while hack, my car was stolen from in front of my house in San Francisco. The police called a few days later to inform me that it had been found, undamaged. It wasn't until I paid the towing fees and got the car home that I noticed the back seat was piled with dirty laundry and a worn blanket, a package of chocolate chip cookies, a box of cereal, a metal container of aspirin.

Then the police called again. They had caught the thief and wanted to know if I was going to press charges. The law-abiding voice inside me would normally have replied "of course," but all that stuff, and the implication that someone had been living in my car, held me back. I asked the police to tell me about the thief and they did so, a bit sheepishly. When my car had been spotted, in the Tenderloin District of the city, someone had in fact been living there: a sixteen-year-old, visibly pregnant girl. Because she was in pain, not moving much, the police took her to the hospital. She wasn't doing too well, during her ninth month of pregnancy, and the doctors were unsure how the newborn would make ont.

No, I did not want to press charges, I said. Pressing charges was the furthest thing from my mind. I thought a lot about the girl-woman, still nameless to me, with no better place to go than the back seat of my car. I imagined myself taking some kind of responsibility for her but the police weren't volunteering a name. Besides, that felt like someone else's gesture, the plot-line from Grand Canyon. I vowed instead to write larger checks to charities that help the needy and to spend the occasional morning serving breakfast at the shelter down the road. I wondered when the memory would fade, and wondered too at my own moral incoherence.

Shortly after this episode, I spent several weeks in the colonial cities of Mexico. The street poverty I encountered there had its own distinctive rhythms. Over what must have been a very long time, so familiar to everyone were the patterns of behavior, begging had become institutionalized. While a few of those asking for money were young mothers carrying infants, mostly they were men and women whose ages I couldn't begin to guess. Their limbs were twisted like the branches of trees, their fingers curled arthritically into hooks, their backs were bent as if bearing an impossible weight. Their faces were weathered like cracked leather and some bore the bitten-off look of lepers.

An American doctor would have to refer to old medical books or texts concerning the third world in order to diagnose the maladies of these people. Even in the poorest hollows of the rich nation we live in there is nothing remotely comparable, nothing to prepare the visitor who imagines himself accustomed to the phenomenon we call homelessness.

Since the Mexican polity, itself economically hard-pressed, mostly ignores these people, they face a Hobson's choice: either live off the small kindnesses of strangers or accept the prospect of starvation. And so they come, one by one, to the zocalos, the plazas where the inhabitants pass their idle hours drinking licuadas, reading the daily paper, getting their shoes shined. Or else the beggars crouch in the shadows cast by the baroque cathedrals frequented by the pious and the curious. Wordlessly, they extend a hand to passers-by. A hundred peso coin brings a smile. A thousand-peso coin, about thirty-three U.S. cents, is just about enough to live on for a day. The coins sagged in my pockets when I walked around the Mexican streets.

These poor people seem not to inhabit the same moral universe as the adolescent refugees from the suburbs who cruise my San Francisco neighborhood. The latter are mostly spaced-out, looking to score their next high, and their panhandling technique can be aggressive. As I walk down Haight Street, bearing its corroded memories of the Love Generation, one of them sticks out a foot to stop me. "Come on, richie," he says, not a nickname but a statement about my supposed wealth, "gimme a buck."

I am absolutely unmoved by the demand. Indeed, I sense the stirrings of a contrary instinct to seize him by the tuft of his Mowhawk, toss him in a shower, and call some adult-in-charge, the truant officer or a welfare caseworker, who can hanl him away. The fantasy catches me short, makes me think about whether I am turning into my habitually indignant parents, whether this is what compassion fatigue means.

In a country English church I once visited---all shiny brass fittings, sprays of gladiolas at the altar that have been left by the church ladies, gravestones suitable for rubbing---there is a small plaque dating from the eighteenth century. The inscription promises a loaf of bread each week to the poorest family in the parish. I try hard to imagine just how this determination used to be made. What weekly self-abasements did those poor families endure to ward off starvation? How did the almost-but-not-quite-poorest family make do? In this act of imagining, I learned something about why we think of welfare as a public good--about why we acknowledge a social responsibility to the poor, not just a grudging personal duty. Going to Mexico made me feel like a time-traveler, as if the beggars I encountered, transposed to eighteenth-century England, would have received their weekly loaves of bread from the good parishioners.

Those of us whose chief complaint abont how the United States treats the poor is not that we are being taxed too heavily but rather that we give too little, take comfort from programs like AFDC, food stamps, and Medicaid. Although the U.S. is, far and away, the most miserly among industrialized nations, at least we do not ask poor people to surrender every bit of their self-respect to stay alive. But my shadow encounter with that sixteen-year-old pregnant girl makes me wonder about the nature of that achievement. The tacit bargain this country has made with its poor, the American ritual-in-the-making for encounters with the homeless, goes something like this: We will spend modest sums of money and they will stay out of sight. Even in famously liberal San Francisco, busloads of the homeless were moved out like so many sheep during a recent travel agents' convention. The mayor, ex-police chief Frank Jordan, is now promoting a ballot measure that would punish "aggressive panhandling."

This social bargain surely helped the sixteen-year-old--it got her free hospital care--and it will help others who are in desperate straits. But many of those on the streets really need more than dollars impersonally transferred by an indifferent state. This mother-to-be needs concrete gestures of caring, emotional hand-holding, and practical skills for survival in what will surely be tough times. Maybe that's what the Haight Street adolescent angrily demanding a dollar needs too--something that might be called the public equivalent of love.

I know what is wrong with this idea. It is turn-of-the-century progressivism, warmed-over. It's what the orphanages, asylums, reformatories, and homes for wayward girls were supposed to, and mostly failed to, deliver. A generation ago, we regarded deinstitutionalization--shuttering these places, sending people back to their communities--as a good deed of a humane society. Now we realize things are much more complicated, that the communities in question have mostly zoned and gated and frozen out the unwanted, dumping undesired infants in hospital wards and undesired adults on the streets. Yet that realization only reframes the issue. Are there Jane Addamses for our time, secular saints for whom the very idea of a public equivalent of love is not an embarrassment and an irrelevance?

DAVID L. KIRP 

David L. Kirp is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and author, most recently, of Learning by Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America's Communities, and AIDS in the Industrialized Democracies (both Rutgers University Press).