'Gimme.'
The stigma of begging is gone.
He was a young boy and he was brazen, and this startled the stranger.
The youth looked to be about 11 years old as he bounded down the hill one day after school and angled toward the bodega on a corner of Dudley Street in Roxbury. But first the kid spotted his meal ticket - a man he did not know - and ran up to greet him.
"Do you have a dollar?" the boy asked.
"For what?" the man wondered.
"Candy."
At another time, in another place, the man was ambushed by two more members of the gimme generation. This time he was eating lunch in South Boston when two blonde 20-somethings dressed like collegians ducked their heads into the sub shop on Broadway.
"Do you have a dollar?" one of them asked.
Because the man did not immediately reach into his pocket, the young women quickly danced around the corner and into another doorway.
It's true that inflation has ballooned the old bromide: "Buddy, can you spare a dime?" But that's not the only noteworthy transformation to hit the spare-change universe.
The ethos of begging has spilled over from the palms of panhandling paupers to those of everyday people. These days, everyone from the kid on the corner to the sob sister in cyberspace, from the youth-sports fund-raiser to the Wall Street gazillionaire, seems to have a hand out.
Yet, it's too easy to blame it all on the Great Depression of 2008. Think of the parsimony spawned by the original Great Depression.
"When parents didn't have the money, kids just did without," says Laura Hansen, assistant sociology professor at UMass-Boston.
Today, the prevalence of panhandling, combined with the loss of stigma attached to the activity, has led to a culture of begging that has been codified from tip jars on coffee-shop counters to pass-the-can events held by student-athlete organizations.
"The fact that panhandling seems to be so widespread and accepted . . . certainly has created an acceptance of extending your hand," says Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank, whose article this summer on "The Professional Panhandling Plague" sent a buzz through the bumming community.
Of course, whether online or on the street, the panhandling would evaporate without a willing base of donors. Those who give may be motivated by Judeo-Christian sensibilities, or the more secular concept of karmic payback.
"It gives them some intrinsic pleasure in helping out a fellow human being," says Hansen. "For some people, they believe in 'what goes around, comes around.' "
The Boston Chargers community track team is a visible component of Beantown's begging society. Kids wearing the squad's black-and-orange colors have become commonplace in the city, as they pass the donation can between the beautiful people in the Back Bay and the motorists idling at the intersection of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Mass. Ave. in Roxbury, the crossroads of all cadgers.
Ten-year-old Charli Jacobs was working the Newbury Street crowd last Saturday, asking the sidewalk throng: "Would you like to make a donation for track and field?"
The runner from Hyde Park was near the end of a stint that she said usually ran four hours, brought in about $50, and funded Charger uniforms and participation in track meets. An adult supervisor who declined to give his name or age was about six storefronts away.
Groups like the Chargers do have to get a "certificate for solicitation" from the state attorney general's office and file annual fund-raising reports.
Jacobs said she enjoyed what she was doing - "it's actually fun" - and considered the activity "donating," not the begging of some street people.
"We don't use it for stuff like they do," she said, "like liquor."
Beggars have become so boundless that there's hip slang for them: "spangers," a shorthand for "spare changer," defined by the urban dictionary as: "A person (usu. a homeless person or young adult) who asks people for spare change. . . . "
There's a website called NeedCom (pbs.org/weblab/needcom) that bills itself as "market research for panhandlers" and offers a place where street people and their "customers" can discuss the ins and outs of begging.
For potential donors, this "quick poll" question: "Between the two, who would get your spare change?" Would it be "Joseph, wearing dirty rags" or "Robert, wearing clean clothing and a tie?"
Meanwhile, beggars can offer their takes on how "panhandling is better than committing crimes." As "Richard W" says: "I believe, whatever a person does, as long as he ain't robbing and stealing and mugging and snatching the purse, and ain't selling no drugs, God bless him, to act in almighty Jesus' name."
On the other end of the Internet, cyberbeg.com claimed last week that $22,047.46 had been donated to its members as of Wednesday, and implored the hurting masses: "Start begging now!"
And so the hard-luck stories flow down the page like tears: "I want to help my mom beat Colon Cancer" . . . "surgeries, 5 kids, dialysis 3x/week, 3 transplants, 1 fire". . . "DISABLED WITH KIDNEY DISEASE, MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS AND CANCER". . . "77 yr. Senior with car repairs and IRS debt". . . "I'M A GREAT KID WITH OCD THAT NEEDS HELP WITH COLLEGE". . . "**INEEDBRACES**PLEASE HELP."
A poor-little-rich-girl named Karyn Bosnak helped set the standard for Web-begging when the laid-off TV producer confessed to the world that she was a hopeless shopaholic.
"SaveKaryn.com started in June 2002 when, after losing my job, I realized I couldn't pay my credit card bills - credit card bills that added up to over $20,000 - credit card bills I ran up by shopping," she reflected online. "Yep. Too many
But don't despair, Ann Klein addicts. Bosnak devised a solution to retire her debt that did not include working overtime - or even working at all, for that matter.
"While lying in bed one night," Bosnak wrote, "I thought to myself, 'Self, $20,000 isn't that much money. If 20,000 people gave me just one dollar, then all my yucky debt would be gone!' So on a whim, I created a silly little low-budget website asking people to help me pay off my $20,000 credit card bills. All I needed was 20,000 generous individuals . . .
"Before I knew it, people around the world were logging on to savekaryn.com and sending me money. . . . In 20 short weeks, my website received over two million hits and all my debt was paid off."
But Bosnak's heart-warming story did not end there.
"People often ask me, 'Me, how could you have run up $20,000 in credit card debt from shopping?' and 'Me, how in the world did you come up with this crazy idea?' and 'Me, is it true that a big Hollywood movie company is going to make a movie about you?' Well, for those answers you're gonna have to buy my book. (Work it Karyn, work it . . .) A link is on the left."
Cue up the 1966 Motown hit, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg."
Sociologists say that any traces of crimson shame that once accompanied the act of asking for handouts have been drained from young people. The culprits may include the "You have to love yourself before you can love somebody else" goadings of enabling parents, purple TV dinosaurs, and soccer coaches who refuse to keep score lest their team lose.
"If your focus is on your immediate need," says Hansen, "you won't necessarily care about what the perception is."
The result, sociologists and others say, is a narcissistic me-generation that believes its lives are an open book - the steamier the better - to be woven into the scripts of reality TV shows, highlighted in the promos for Dr. Phil's next episode, or peddled as poor-me appeals on the Web.
"At some point in our broader culture we began to argue that people's faults are not their fault. In that context, it became OK to testify about your faults," says Malanga. "It makes you appear more human, more like the common man."
Thus, the Wall Street whiz kids turned junket-junkies could blithely ask taxpayers for a $700 billion bailout.
"That's Wall Street saying, 'I'm not financially responsible for my mistakes, so help me here,' " says Hansen.
The instant-gratification cravings of this instant-messaging crowd appear on the opposite end of the economic spectrum as well, she says, from a first-time homeowner who moves into a house he can't afford with no money down to his child who lacks even the loose change needed to satisfy a sweet tooth. Both seek a shortcut and a freebie flight to the promised land.
"For an eleven-year-old," says Hansen, "the American Dream is candy."
Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com. 