nonbinarypastels:

the idea that no one should donate money to individuals (whether online or offline) ever because there are some people who lie in order to receive donations has always struck me as rather cruel.

like, by all means check out a person before you give them money online — talk to them if this is an offline situation, gauge their sincerity — and decide for yourself whether or not they’re genuine. that’s good, you should do that. and if you would rather donate money or good to organizations rather than to individuals then that’s fine, too, that’s your right.

but coming from a person who has been on both sides of this (both poor as fuck and having to beg for help and still poor as fuck but having a bit of extra cash that I could afford to give to someone else without it severely impacting me for the week), i would always rather help a thousand people who didn’t actually need it than to turn away a single person who did – who i could have helped but didn’t because there are some people out there somewhere who try to take advantage of other people’s good will. i literally never want to get to a place in my life where i refuse to help anyone because of the possibility that someone i help might not need it at all or need it as much as they say they do.  

because there is just….something distinctly uncomfortable about seeing people who are quick to criticize this “donation culture” and “e-begging” that happens online but who never say a word of criticism about what has driven people to have to do this in the first place. the fact that living expenses have only risen and risen while our minimum wage has stagnated and how so many of us are living on a week to week (or even day to day) basis where the slightest emergency, a broken down car or an unexpected illness, can literally ruin our lives and finances in one single swoop. all of this happening while rich people continue to get richer, continue to profit off of the exploitation and oppression of the poor, continue to build upon an impossible wealth that they will never be able to spend in a single lifetime – that their children and their children’s children will never be able to spend – because it is so very much.

criticism of “e-begging” is framed as being about greed—people being so greedy for money that they’ll beg random strangers for it—rather than the desperation that poor people live with every day, but it’s the desperation (and the visibility of it) that really pisses people off and drives their criticism. people like the poor to be invisible until we “make it” and we can be the rags to riches story they can tout out to other poor people to say “see? if only YOU worked hard, this could be you”, a way to ignore how difficult it really is to escape poverty because if they acknowledged that then they’d have to actually acknowledge that poor people aren’t poor because it’s their own fault.

with the way people asking for donations online has become common and normal, though, it’s much harder to ignore the poor. the same classism that makes people sneer at someone standing on the street with a cup held out for donations and ignore them because “they’ll probably spend it on liquor and crack” rears its head online as well because the fact is that people absolutely hate poor people who have the audacity to be poor around them, to ever draw attention to the fact that they are poor, and, even worse, to ask for help. the more desperate you are—the more dire your situation is, the more you’re willing to openly talk about it—the more they hate it and the more they criticize.

because poor people are supposed to be invisible, their poverty unnoticeable and easy to ignore, their existence and their struggles only brought to light when people more well-off than they are can use them to feel better about themselves, only helped when those same people can use their charity to brag about their own generosity. poor people are never supposed to ask for help except in the most contrite, down-trodden way possible but not so down-trodden that they make the people they’re asking for help uncomfortable with the realities of their poverty, and when they are helped they’re supposed to fall over themselves in gratitude and then go away – forgotten – to never bother their rich betters again. poor people asking for donations online (and offline) blows those expectations out of the water—suddenly they are visible, their poverty is visible, their struggles are visible, and considering that poverty is not a situation that can be cured through one donation post (unless you’re extremely lucky but most people aren’t), the poor people asking for donations don’t go away. they give updates on their situation, they ask for more donations, what was first a need for rent becomes a need to pay a light bill which becomes a need for money to pay for food — a situation that is normal, daily, routine for poor people but which rubs others the wrong way because they can’t grasp that poverty is an ongoing struggle not simply a single emergency that can be easily cured and then everything is right as rain.

and the entire “donation culture” online just absolutely galls people, particularly rich people, because it spits in the face of everything they want poor people to be (which is basically: as easy for them to ignore as possible) and so they criticize it, criticize people who ask for donations, and urge people not to donate at all because someone somewhere is probably lying about why they need the money (the same justification they use for ignoring the homeless on the street – “some of them are homeless because they’re drunks, it’s their own fault, some of them don’t deserve my help so none of them get my help”).

meanwhile, however, they never criticize the systems that are in place that continue to contribute to mass poverty, they never criticize the systems of capitalism which are run on the blood of workers that are used and used until they are no longer useful, they never criticize rich people who accumulate billions upon billions of dollars and are willing to let people die so they can get just a single penny more—so much money that it could solve all the poverty in the world, multiple times over, and yet it sits rotting away in bank accounts never to be touched because greed is more worthwhile quality to fund rather than compassion and basic humanity.

they never criticize any of that, because it is so much easier to look down on people who have the nerve to ask strangers for help with their basic living expenses than it is to look down on the classism and capitalism that put them in that situation in the first place. because, to them, the former is more worthy of scorn and shame than the latter.