My First Radio Interview, and More Thoughts on Giving Money to the Homeless

"They'll just spend it on drugs" is a really skewed way to look at the problem

Last week I was invited on to the Drew Mariani show to discuss my reflection on giving money to the homeless. If appearing on a radio station doesn’t fall into the ‘something to write home about’ column for you, please bear with me! This was my first time doing something like this. You can listen to my interview here.

How Was My Experience?

I didn’t feel confident going into my interview. On top of it being my first time calling into a radio show, I had spent the entire previous night in an emergency room waiting area. My friend’s health scare had been serious enough to elicit a stern order to visit the emergency room, but mild enough to put us at the very bottom of the triage chart in a hospital swamped with grievous ailments. We got there at around 9pm, and we left at around 7am.

Needless to say, I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I felt more than a little nervous as I waited on the phone line for Drew to introduce me. Was I about to make a fool out of myself on a live, nationally syndicated program? Would I even be able to form coherent sentences?

Thanks be to God, the answer was ‘mostly yes.’ I didn’t stick the landing every time, and I tripped over my words more than once. But overall I’m satisfied with how things went given the circumstances. Besides, I got to share a good message and I had fun while doing it.

What Stood Out to Me

Two things stood out to me during my interview:

First, experiencing the dynamics of a radio show from the inside helped me appreciate the creative side of live radio

With writing, what you see is what you get. The dish is already cooked by the time it reaches the customer. On a live radio program, you cook the meal together with someone, and get feedback in real time from the people you are serving it to. You do come prepared with material. But you also have to work with what you receive from the audience and weave it together under time pressure. Bouncing my ideas off of Drew and hearing from callers in this fast paced and unpredictable format was stimulating and exhilarating. I’d definitely be open to doing something like this again.

Second, Drew rocks

After my interview I told the producer that being on his show was like stopping at a Chik-Fil-A after three dingy Burger Kings in a row. In a media landscape all too often filled with cheap rage bait, it was truly refreshing to listen to and be a part of a program permeated by such sincere and heartfelt joy.

I was similarly impressed with Drew’s audience. I told the producer that I had braced myself to receive the same type of reactionary pushback I was trying to hedge against in my reflection. But every caller approached the topic with a generous and gladdened heart. I don’t think this was merely because the call screening operators kept out the cranks. Drew seems to have cultivated a truly happy listenership.¹

More Thoughts on Giving Money to the Homeless

Although the interview was about my reflection, we went into ground that I didn’t cover there. To recap and further elaborate, here are two additional points I’d like to make:

First, “They’ll just spend the money on drugs” is an extremely skewed way to look at how homeless people spend their money

If you give a homeless person five dollars, and they spend that five dollars to buy fentanyl pills, you could think to yourself ‘they spent my five dollars on drugs.’ But it would be more fair and accurate to consider their purchase in light of their total income.

For example, if the homeless person has fifty dollars to their name, and they spend five dollars on drugs, that means they spent ten percent of their income on drugs. If you apply this percentage to your five dollars, it means that fifty cents of your dollar went to drugs. But four dollars and fifty cents went to other expenses.

So it simply isn’t true to say that your donation won’t do any good. No matter how hopelessly addicted someone is, they still need to ride the bus. They still need toothpaste. They still need socks - and so on. Even if you insist on saying that all your five dollars went to drugs, that’s still five dollars they didn’t have to take away from their overall income. You’ve still increased the percentage of their income that they now have available for other expenses.

True, drugs are often a disconcertingly large expense, and they’re one that shouldn’t be there in the first place.  But this financial impropriety will not be rectified by you not giving money to them. Overcoming addiction is one of the hardest things a human being can do. It requires tremendous interior strength, consistent effort, and unwavering support of doctors, friends, and family.

And in case you haven’t noticed, homeless people do not have an overflowing supply of interior strength and unwavering support from others. Their lives, their support network, and their capacity to improve their situation have been utterly shattered. When you see a homeless person, you’re seeing someone who has and is dealing with unimaginable hardship and trauma, not the least of which being the fact that they are homeless.²

This is why I have little patience for the grandstanding of thinkers like Pelagius, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and the pundits of today who speak as though everyone were capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. At best, they propagate a wildly naive and unhelpful view of human nature. At worst, (and, I think more commonly) they supply convenient rationalizations for greed, selfishness, and apathy to a society already awash in these vices.

Second: not every encounter will turn into a feel-good story

During the show people shared their stories about how giving to a homeless person turned out well. I have no doubt that Drew could have filled his entire program with touching testimonies of gifts that were gratefully received, or of how someone was blessed out of nowhere after giving.

But it’s important to remember that at the end of the day we give because it’s the right thing to do. God can and does bless us for giving - trust me, he is not outdone in generosity. The number of times I’ve received an unexpected financial gift after giving to a homeless person is uncanny. And I’ve had encounters with homeless people where it felt like the heavens opened up. God has never felt more real to me than in these encounters with people who live and breathe complete trust in God.

But other times, the encounters have been unpleasant. Sometimes homeless people are annoying, smelly, disruptive, aggressive, ungrateful and generally unpleasant to be around. Like all human beings, they have character flaws, and homeless people live in situations that don’t make self improvement easy. But the question is not: does giving make me feel good? It’s ‘will this help the person?’ For reasons I went over in my first reflection, my interview, and in this piece, I strongly believe yes.

Mother Theresa would refer to the homeless as ‘Jesus in his most distressing disguise.’ I’ve also heard of and referenced her saying that they can be Jesus in his most annoying disguise. Whether you can see through the disguise or not, he’s still there, and he’s waiting to see whether you will help him.

1. I would guess he did this primarily through the segment that came before mine. At 3pm every weekday, he prays the divine mercy chaplet with his listeners and takes their prayer requests. It was beautiful to listen to people call in with their worries and difficult situations. I could tell they knew they would be received with compassion and encouragement, and that people around the country would be praying for their situations.

2. Seriously, can you imagine how stressful it would be to not have a place to sleep? To have people judge, ignore and pretend not to see you all day? To be incapable of living a normal life and having normal interactions with people? How psychologically broken down would you have to become to get used to that situation?