I’m hoping it will wear off after a while. But, being exposed to Donald Trump for these many months has made me more sensitive to, and wary of, being conned.
When you are exposed for so long to so much that is false and dark in humanity, your view of fellow humans becomes darker. At least that is what has happened to me.
So, I was more annoyed than sympathetic when a man approached me as I was loading groceries into the trunk of my car. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “But could you help us out?”
He was a small, thin man about 40 in a faded red jacket and a scrunched black cap. “We need to get to the El. Can you help us out?”
The “us” was a woman, equally small and thin, who held a baby in her arms. She and the baby looked at me.
I looked back in annoyance. Maybe the deep selfishness of Trump and his supporters had – subconsciously perhaps – infected me, made me more callous, more me-centric.
How much did he need?
“Could you let us have $3?”
Three dollars? How did I know these people were poor? Maybe they were con artists. If they got $3 from 33 people every day that would be almost $100. Pretty sweet racket.
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But, I could foil their nefarious scheme by withholding my $3.
But, what if it wasn’t a scheme? I didn’t know what to do.
But, it turned out I did know what to do. The worthiness of a cause is only part of giving, and maybe not the most important part. What right then was important to me was whether I was the kind of person who judged others and their needs – and usually found them not up to my standards – or whether I was the kind of person who helped someone when I could.
Though I had been bombarded for months by Trump’s gospel of who is on a long list of the unworthy, I decided I wanted to be the kind of person who sought to include rather than exclude.
So, in a way, it didn’t matter if the man who asked me for money really needed my $3.
What mattered was that I wanted to help, that I wanted to give him $3.
Which I did.
Thanks to that man, I was able to re-affirm to myself that helping others is an American value.
Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.