the soft bigotry of low expectations

yesterday i was walking along Murray ave. and a panhandler approached me and asked for "any nickels, dimes, quarters . . . "  I fished around in my pocket and found a bunch of change, handed it to him.  both he and I noticed that what i had thought was mostly silver turned out to be a couple of nickels and dimes but the rest pennies.  I said, "oh, let me see what else I have in my wallet."  he then proceeded to jostle the coins around in his hands while I searched for more and scoffed, "yeah, I mean, this is basically 20 cents."  I replied cheerily, "oh, yeah, I guess it is, my bad."  And handed over a crumpled one dollar bill.  "Take care," I said, and walked off.  

While it was going on, I was aware of how absurd it was that I was being shamed for the paltriness of my first offering, but I didn't care.  Apparently I'm not the only one who's not too guarded about being taken on a small-scale basis.