The setting: a State Street bus stop on a cold and windy fall day.

Woman: “Do you have a dollar?”

Me: “Sorry, no. (To guy holding bus schedule:) Excuse me, do you know if the 4 has come yet?”

Woman: “Huh. If you don’t have a dollar, I don’t know when the bus comes.”

Guy: “Wow, someone got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

Woman: “I slept in a park.”

The wind was biting through my new fleece jacket and making me want hot soup despite my full stomach. Not a day anyone would choose for camping. I was in a position to know that I really didn’t have a dollar, that in fact my checking account was somewhere around $50 in the hole, but suddenly it occurred to me that the woman would have been perfectly justified in hating me. She must have been so cold. I wouldn’t have told me a damn thing either.

And then the bus came, and inside it was nice and warm, and, if I remember right, my evening eventually included hot soup. And no doubt the woman slept in a park.

Obviously, it’s not news to anyone that Madison, among its students and fading hippies and legislators, also includes homeless people. Today I counted eight panhandlers on the way to class. They’re hard to miss.

I can’t write from any perspective but one of privilege. I don’t know what it’s like to go to bed hungry, unless a ridiculously drastic diet is involved. When I’ve slept in a park, I’ve been on a camping trip or drunk.

Whenever I, as one of the lucky ones, think of poverty, I just feel overwhelmed and helpless. You know how it is when you have so many things to do that they swarm around your head like Pigpen’s dirt cloud, and there are so many you can’t pick one out of the oozing, bulging mass of stressors, and so instead of getting anything done or even making a to-do list, you rock back and forth, mumbling, “So much to do, so much to do,” and then go play “Super Mario” while your stomach begins to hurt? It’s like that.

With so much pain and poverty in the world, where can you even begin to help? Anything one person can do seems laughably ineffectual, like harvesting wheat with tweezers. And the problem will never go away. There will always be human misery. In the face of suffering you can’t allay, it’s easiest to take the ostrich approach.

And even though that’s basically what I do, I know it’s not right.

Panhandlers, however, make the ostrich approach impossible. Charity begins at home, right, but even that is problematic. The official line is that we shouldn’t give money to panhandlers because they’ll just use it to fuel their various addictions.

That’s probably true in many cases. There’s always a guy who just needs 45 cents for bus fare, and an hour after you give him 45 cents, he’s standing in the same spot, making the same request to everyone who passes by. Fueling substance abuse doesn’t help the problem one bit.

Unfortunately, giving money to panhandlers is the one form of financial charity that actually feels useful. I admit I don’t necessarily do it on the rare occasions when I’m carrying money. When my friends do, sometimes I think, “What a nice person;” sometimes I think, “Sucker.”

But at least it’s direct. The clink of coins in a cup feels like something real. You can imagine the panhandler buying a bowl of soup, being warm and happy for a short time. You can avoid thinking about that bottle of Mad Dog or the sheer impossibility of saving up for, say, a security deposit by sponging off passersby.

I know it’s important to do something about poverty, and charities abound. I should get my act together and start helping. It’s just that nothing seems like it could possibly do any good.

Maybe the key is to give on autopilot; if I actually think about the problem, I just want to stick my head in the sand, down as far as it can go.

Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.