There seems to be a curious degree of certainty among the dissenters that the choice of the vagrant to purchase alcohol with his donatives is, in fact, a poor one. Bill Goodwin goes so far as to call it enabling self-abuse, which is an unambiguously pejorative description of a highly variable state.
In fact, drunkenness, like fatness, has gotten a bad rap. The fat have their defenders, including intellectuals like Fr. James Schall, S.J.:
Of the four greatest minds with whom I commune regularly, to wit, Aristotle, Aquinas, Samuel Johnson, and Chesterton, three were obese. Aristotle was merely solidly built. If modern campaigns against obesity had occurred in former times, half the intelligence of the world would have been undermined!
Modern drunkards, meanwhile, might mumble something about Hemingway and point to the liberating effects on the pen by pints and pinots. Mike Steinberg, in Slate, will tell you why expensive wines are worth it. The New York Times will even go so far as to celebrate the time wasted in drinking, even when it runs into the decades. Consider Tim Kreider’s words:
There is really no drinking half as enjoyable as daytime drinking, when the sun is out, the bars are empty of dilettantes, and the afternoon stretches ahead of you like summer vacation. The gleeful complicity you and your drinking buddies share in the excellent decision to have one more ill-advised round, knowing full well you’re forfeiting the day — you can almost physically feel something lifted from you at this moment, even if you know it will fall back more heavily later on. We used to raise a toast: “Gentlemen — our lives are unbelievably great.”
He’s praising daytime drinking, for Pete’s sake!
Conspicuously absent from this minor litany is any mention of the benefits of drinking under the sun when you’re impoverished. No, I don’t mean a sentimental panegyric from a Buckleyite on the virtues of cheap wine for graduate students, nor the romantic accounts by global nomads of getting faded on fermented breast milk in a bushman’s hut. I’m talking about what Sublime sang about.
The fact is, alcoholism is perfectly acceptable if you’re wealthy enough for it to be tragic or witty enough for it to be publishable. If you’re neither but still prefer airy inebriation to responsible living, you’re immediately called things like “self-abuser.” Certainly, there are costs to being drunk, and many of those living on the streets have drunk themselves out of their minds. But who are we to claim that a life of drunken delusion isn’t actually better to the unfortunate circumstances some of these folks find themselves in? I certainly don’t want to encourage drunkenness, especially not to the crippling, life-destroying degree it can reach, but I also don’t want to make sweeping assumptions about an entire class as Mr. Goodwin seems quite happy to do.
Giving a fellow a dime or even a drop is not a necessary evil.
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