Apparently, I Should Be Ashamed of Myself

My sister and my nephew came to town yesterday and we decided to go uptown to see the new space show at the Planetarium. My nephew had his Celtics jersey on and for all anyone knew we were a group of out-of-towners. While we stood on the subway platform at 50th Street a slightly disheveled man came and stuck a copy of The Onion newspaper under our nose and said he was selling it to help the homeless. (There are publications that are distributed and sold on the street to raise funds for the homeless. As far as I know, The Onion is not one of them.) He said he had a wife and either 4 or 6 children to support -- I think he lost track somewhere. I shrugged him off and then he turned his attention to my nephew and he started calling him a "Redsox hater" (meaning a Yankees hater because he was wearing Boston garb). I came to my nephew's defense and told the guy I lived in the neighborhood, that we were not tourists and that we weren't buying what he was selling. I tried to defuse the situation and explain that my nephew was just a misguided New Yorker whose father had not quite raised him right because he rooted for all the Boston teams.

"Where do you live?" he asked.
"50th Street," I said.
"50th and what?"
"50th and Eighth," I replied.
"You've gotta be loaded to live there. You must be paying $3,000 a month," he said to me as he became increasingly agitated.
"No, that's not my rent," I said turning away from him.
"You live there and you're not willing to help the homeless? You said he wasn't brought up right? You weren't brought up right!"
"I'm not going to have this conversation with you, man," I said, as he became more and more menacing.
"You're damn right you don't want to have this conversation. You should be ashamed of yourself not wanting to help the homeless."

As someone who spent a year of my life working with the homeless in inner-city Atlanta in the early 1990s, he picked the wrong guy to try to guilt into giving him money. He walked away disgusted and a minute later I saw him down the platform with his arm around some tourist with a big grin on his face. I respect his right to ask for money. I just wish he'd respect my right to tell him to buzz off.