Poverty and homelessness are a major problem in the District. According to the D.C.-area non-profit group Help the Homeless, as of 1999 almost one-fifth of the city’s population lived in poverty. Nearly one-quarter of the city’s renters could not afford a one-bedroom apartment. The result? An estimated 9,000 people?almost two percent of the city’s population?are homeless on any given day.
At Georgetown, this crisis is sterilized, mocked and ultimately ignored by the time-honored tradition of giving money to the enterprising 36th Street panhandlers who are known to almost the entire student body as “the Wisey’s bums.” Day in and day out, students take part in the biggest inside joke on campus: Walk by Wisemiller’s and have a guy sitting on a bucket grin and call you “playa.” Walk out of Wisemiller’s and “hit him on the way back.” Get it? This is an expensive school, and he’s a bum!
The joke is wearing thin. It does not matter if the panhandlers’ success at making the whole charade a part of campus life is more indicative of their entrepreneurial prowess or the student body’s liberal guilt. It does not necessarily even matter if they’re homeless. Do they “need the money?” Who doesn’t? Can they make more money panhandling than working a job? So what?
What does matter is that the entire ritual is a tasteless joke that bespeaks of our collective ignorance. The Wisey’s bum tradition, chronicled in student-made films and even in the yearbook, is sufficiently entertaining that the campus buys into it. A small rotating cast plays the role of “bum,” and the rest of us get to play the role of well-off college students who are nonetheless sufficiently hip to be able to be friendly with a guy who asks for change. Some may consider this an exciting brush with the exotic. It’s more like a reduction of our nation’s serious socioeconomic problems to a predictable shtick.
So if you have extra money that you really want to give to the guy in front of Wisey’s, then fine. But if you sincerely want to help the homeless, walk the extra block to the Volunteer and Public Service office and ask them how you can make a real difference.
