The Last Page
Mills, Nicolaus
Like most New Yorkers I know, I regularly give to panhandlers. How much depends on how much change I have in my pocket, but my rule of thumb is a twenty-fivecent minimum. If West Side...
...We don't have an effective way of dealing with the problems he cites...
...Key to any successful panhandling encounter is that it be quick and anonymous...
...Food-forvouchers does the opposite...
...We have lowered our threshhold for what we call normal in order to cope with the problems created by singleparent families, crime, and mental illness...
...Even reasonably healthy companies are cutting their payrolls...
...Nonetheless, it is the kind of lowering of expectations we don't need these days...
...Then both parties are free to move along...
...The idea comes from a similar program in Berkeley, California, and its aim is to make sure the city's panhandlers don't use the money they get for booze or drugs...
...When it happens, it does so in an instant...
...That's a reasonable fear, given the times we are living in, but all the same the food-for-voucher program is one I'd like to scrap...
...I see it as part of a nineties-style toughmindedness that emphasizes the small picture at the expense of the big one...
...To me the new toughmindedness is epitomized by the concept of "defining down" that has been embraced as the latest wisdom by so many urban policy makers and pundits...
...But most of all, I cannot imagine any of the men or women I regularly see panhandling saving up their vouchers, walking into a grocery store, and counting them back out in front of a watchful clerk...
...Labor Secretary Robert Reich summed up the kind of defining down I have in mind when he recently wrote, "There used to be an unwritten contract in America between top managers and workers: If you did your job conscientiously, you could count on having that job as long as the company stayed in business...
...If West Side Cares, a new food-for-voucher program in my neighborhood has its way, I won't be doling out quarters any more...
...How much depends on how much change I have in my pocket, but my rule of thumb is a twenty-fivecent minimum...
...It defines panhandling down by extending the burden of it...
...Senator Moynihan's argument is appealing...
...Like most New Yorkers I know, I regularly give to panhandlers...
...For more than a decade, the most serous defining down we have been doing has been of our expecta tions...
...I cannot imagine anyone I know going into a store, buying a roll of food vouchers, then carefully putting them aside for ready distribution when the occasion should arise...
...Moynihan's point is that deviancy has become so widespread in America that rather than face up to it, we have defined it down...
...NICOLAUS MILLS 304 • DISSENT...
...But I also think that in a larger sense his fears are misplaced...
...Instead, I'll be passing out twenty-five-cent vouchers that can be redeemed at local stores...
...But that implicit contract is being abandoned, at an ever-faster pace...
...Defining panhandling down certainly doesn't rank with defining down the right to keep a job or the right to an affordable college education...
...A panhandler never gets the chance to walk away and for a moment just be someone with a little extra change...
...In the name of a Puritanism that can't work—Does anyone think a food voucher is going to stop a drug habit?—it only makes life harder for the poor...
...The phrase is Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's, and it comes from an essay, "Defining Deviancy Down," that he wrote in the American Scholar last year...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
