I call him the Six Dollar Man. Like Steve Austin (Lee Majors), he looks like a man barely alive, but it would be safe to say that no one is going to devote any costly technology to rebuilding him. He has the sallow, chapped complexion of someone who spends most of his time outside; his grimy, insufficient clothes hang slack on his diminished frame; he’s unshaven and heavy-eyed; and he requires precisely six dollars from you or a sausage roll or donair — at least that’s what he’ll tell you.

I know he’s the Six Dollar Man because I ran into him twice in one day, and both times he was quite specific about the six dollars he’d be needing. The first time I saw him, I fished out a toonie and he observed that I should probably help him get closer to that ideal sum. I walked away. The second time I saw him I was with two friends and he briskly informed us that for just two dollars each, we’d be able to equip him with a dining-out budget. We declined.

Of course if you’re accustomed to walking down any major thoroughfare in Edmonton, you’re probably used to getting braced for a hand-out. People asking for spare change are part of the urban landscape. But over the last year, things have taken on a more sinister dimension. The city felt behooved to start cracking down on “aggressive panhandlers” and those signs in shop windows that scold you for distributing loonies to people on the street have become ubiquitous. There was also the well-covered story this time last year of the poor guy who was, according to media reports, stabbed in the neck on Stony Plain Road when he failed to come across to two teenaged “panhandlers,” though the accounts I saw failed to observe the distinction that people who ask for money then stab you when they don’t get it are not “panhandlers,” but “muggers.” Still, such events colour your interactions with needers a little.

It’s interesting how the kind of panhandler you encounter can reflect the values of the culture where you find them. Catholic Spain and Portugal are full of self-flagellating beggars who were so shamed by their abjection that they would lie facedown on the cobblestones with one palm upturned to atone for their need for charity; in Thailand, where the warning labels on cigarette packages look like stills from a Japanese horror movie, I remember seeing a man in army fatigues dragging himself through a packed street market brandishing a gaping, bloody wound in his leg at would-be donors; in Egypt, industrious panhandlers had to compete with some of the most merciless touts on the planet and would find a way to demand baksheesh (a tip) for such services as pointing at a monument you couldn’t have helped but notice on your own or lifting your luggage up and setting it down again in almost the same spot.

In Alberta, there seem to be a lot of storytellers around — panhandlers who believe they can talk you into a donation as long as they can spin out a semi-respectable explanation of why they need, say, six dollars just now. Maybe they’re trying to scrape up bus fare for a job they have waiting up north, or they desperately need to borrow five bucks to fill a jerrycan for their stranded car. Recently I was inveigled into a theological debate with a drunken change solicitor about the Christian notion of generosity and why my paltry alms might seem impious. I make it my policy to not enable diseases of poverty such as alcoholism, but part of me still finds it hard to begrudge someone who’s clearly down on their luck the occasional consolation of oblivion.

I think the tendency for panhandlers to work our sympathies or camouflage the true nature of their want is that Alberta has a long history, especially rich during the Klein Era, of separating people who deserve our help from people who don’t. As homesteading, bootstrapping pioneers, we Albertans don’t always have much sympathy for the sort that can’t bear their hardships stoically and use their God-given entrepreneurial skills to improve their circumstances. Under King Ralph, such deadbeats came to include people on various kinds of assisted living, the elderly, the disabled and the mentally ill — all those who would insist, in Ralph’s famous formulation, on a hand-out rather than a hand up. Long-winded explanations and tall tales about why you should fork over your loose coins might serve to mitigate that made-in-Alberta suspicion of the disenfranchised.

This also explains why so many of us have to make that decision every day to give or not give some remnant of our hard-earned money to an ostensibly needy stranger on the street. Just like parents who had to start volunteering at schools and holding bake sales to make up for deep budget cuts to education over the past 15 years, helping people with limited means has devolved in part to a street-level activity.

The city’s well-publicized long-term plan deal with some of the root issues of poverty and homelessness give much to hope for, even as detractors reiterate Ralph’s refrain that it will make our city a destination of choice for our creeps and bums.

Presently, though, we severely normal types just have to keep reckoning with disadvantaged folks, their inconvenient needs and our own charitable consciences out there on the sidewalk in the sight of God and everybody, where hopefully our pat morality will serve us well.