Today ought be a special day. For, for the first time in my life, I heard not a handicapped street begger, but a real handicapped street performer near my workplace today.

She was very obviously blind and her face looked weired, imaginably having lost one eye socket - but she was singing. Not singing slow Christian music to beg the guilt of passing Christians, nor was there in her voice the desperate self-pity that, hiding behind the latest popular hits, cried out, "I'm useless, please be the kind person you think you are and give me some money." Instead, her voice was delightfully bright. And so were her songs. The last number I heard her sing was Dancing Queen. Not the most effective kind of material one would use had her best asset been her handicap. And I'm not saying her singing was "uhm okay" - she was good. Someone-should-have-turned-the-disco-lights-on kind of good.

Yes, I was impressed. I loved her dignity. I loved her not trying to sell her handicap, but rather, to have overcome it, and to have found within herself something that was bright enough a gem to offer the world.

Put bluntly, the rest of the lot should be taken off the streets. Selling their self-pity, hoping to elicit the sympathy of some unsuspecting passer by. If their handicap were their greatest marketing asset, then how incomparable the darkness of their hearts must be beside their blindness, how crippled their spirits must be beside their lameness! All the more, it would be a sin to give to them. Cheap charity is but the giver masturbating his own selfish consience, unwilling to pay the full price to set the needy free.

I know, America is doing it. The rich are doing it. But still, the next time someone on the street tries to sell you tissue paper and yet says "please help me out", do them a favour - don't buy it. Buying a packet of tissue paper is never all that you can do for anybody.