I... Don't Know How to Respond to That
Here at the wonderful University I will call Odd and Strange University, they have food drives periodically, and my church group is helping participate in one. Last week, we went to a few neighborhoods in the area and left notes and plastic sacks explaining we would be back on Monday to collect sacks with canned goods in them. Last night was Monday night--the night we planned to collect food.
We gathered in a large group and planned to form smaller groups in order to return to the neighborhoods we had previously visited and collect the food. Our group of six split into two groups of three, with each group walking a different side of the street and meeting at the end. I walked with two other girls, Anjai and Jessie. The first house we stopped at hurriedly gathered some canned food in the sack we left for them and gave it to us, and we all thought to ourselves, "Hey, this won't be too bad. And only thirteen more houses to go to!"
Until we arrived at the second house. It had a "No Soliciting" sign on the door, but we figured that we weren't really soliciting, were we? I mean, we weren't selling door to door encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners or something like that. We were collecting food for the needy. So my friend Anjai knocked on the door.
"Hi! We're from OSU, and we're collecting food for the Linn-Benton FoodShare program and we wondered if you had any goods to donate."
The man who has answered the door gives us a surly look, and pulls the door partially closed to point to his sign. "Can you read? Do you see this? No soliciting! Go away!"
Anjai opens her mouth, "It was..." But she sees any defense of our actions will not be listened to, so she finishes with, "We're sorry."
As we turn to go, the man begins to pull his door shut, but he opens it wide enough to shout one last clever rejoinder, "Just f--k off and die!"
In our group we blink and look at one another blankly. That response had not even crossed my mind as a possibility. Huh.
Luckily for the starving and undernourished of Linn and Benton counties, the rest of the neighborhood was much more generous, yielding six sacks full of donated food.
The funny thing is, another house with a "No Soliciting" sign gave quite generously. I suppose some people are just jerks, and that's all there is to it.
We gathered in a large group and planned to form smaller groups in order to return to the neighborhoods we had previously visited and collect the food. Our group of six split into two groups of three, with each group walking a different side of the street and meeting at the end. I walked with two other girls, Anjai and Jessie. The first house we stopped at hurriedly gathered some canned food in the sack we left for them and gave it to us, and we all thought to ourselves, "Hey, this won't be too bad. And only thirteen more houses to go to!"
Until we arrived at the second house. It had a "No Soliciting" sign on the door, but we figured that we weren't really soliciting, were we? I mean, we weren't selling door to door encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners or something like that. We were collecting food for the needy. So my friend Anjai knocked on the door.
"Hi! We're from OSU, and we're collecting food for the Linn-Benton FoodShare program and we wondered if you had any goods to donate."
The man who has answered the door gives us a surly look, and pulls the door partially closed to point to his sign. "Can you read? Do you see this? No soliciting! Go away!"
Anjai opens her mouth, "It was..." But she sees any defense of our actions will not be listened to, so she finishes with, "We're sorry."
As we turn to go, the man begins to pull his door shut, but he opens it wide enough to shout one last clever rejoinder, "Just f--k off and die!"
In our group we blink and look at one another blankly. That response had not even crossed my mind as a possibility. Huh.
Luckily for the starving and undernourished of Linn and Benton counties, the rest of the neighborhood was much more generous, yielding six sacks full of donated food.
The funny thing is, another house with a "No Soliciting" sign gave quite generously. I suppose some people are just jerks, and that's all there is to it.