THE BAREFOOT BOY AND THE SCAMDEMIC

While in Masaya, Nicaragua four years ago, I saw a twilight pick-up basketball game involving young teens on an outdoor court next to the big, beige San Geronimo Cathedral. Ordinarily, I would jump into such a game. But I had walked about 20 miles the day before and my legs were beat. So l just sat on a park bench and watched. It was just as well; Nicaraguans are way better at futbol than baloncesto.

After about ten minutes, a 12 year-old boy approached me. He was wearing no shoes. He told me that he wanted to be able to play with the other kids but that his parents, about whom he told me some sad story—I forget the specifics—lacked the money to buy him sneakers. He asked me if I could buy him a pair.

Nicaragua is the Western Hemisphere‘s second poorest nation. Most people live in tiny houses with cinderblock walls and zinc roofs. They wear very basic clothing. Nearly all travel in jammed, old US schoolbuses, not cars. Packs of emaciated stray dogs wander, and sometimes lie dead on, the streets. While I was staying in Masaya, that city of 186,000 had no running water. People told me this was not unusual.

I felt bad for the shoeless boy. It bothered me more that a kid couldn’t play with other kids than it later bothered me to learn that a 90 year-old in a nursing home had died with Covid. It’s fundamentally unjust for a kid to miss out on being a kid, as has happened in the US for the past two years. In contrast, an old person dying seems within the natural order.

I had already eaten dinner, so I reached into my pocket and gave the chico all of the money I was carrying: the Nicaraguan equivalent of seven US dollars. Enough there for sneakers.

He silently took the money and walked over to the kids playing ball about forty feet away. Interrupting the game, he told the other kids, loudly enough for me to hear, that he had just gotten 150 cordobas from the gringo by telling him he had no shoes. They all looked over at me and laughed. Then the chico went over to where he had hidden his sneakers, put them back on and left the park.

As he left, I noticed, for the first time, that his clothes were not tattered and that he didn’t look underfed. He was likely poor in the way that most Nica kids are poor: it’s a no frills life, but he wasn’t starving or shoeless. As I thought about it, I realized that although I had, by then, been to many parts of Nicaragua during seven weeks, I couldn’t remember seeing any other barefoot kids in-country, except at the beach.

I had naively bought the chico’s story, which centered on a heartbreaking cliche: the barefoot overseas orphan.

Various people will have various reactions—each predictable—to this scam. And let’s face it, the world is full of scams: simple or elaborate, illicit or ostensibly legitimate, and small, medium, large and XL. Many profitable industries are built on deceit: the News Media, Used Car Sales, Pharma and Timeshares spring to mind. But being chumped piqued me if, for no other reason, I could have given that money to any number of other Nicaraguans who needed it more, or who ran honest businesses. I also was more displeased that a twelve-year-old would scam me than I would have been if an adult had done the same thing. Then again, maybe not. It always feels bad to know you’ve been deceived.

Maybe the chico bought ice cream for himself or his family. It would have amused me to learn that he had. Or maybe he used it to buy some glue to sniff, as one sometimes sees down there. No bueno. Ultimately, seven dollars is only seven dollars. Though if I gave seven dollars to every Nicaraguan I met who needed it more than I did, I’d be broke by lunchtime. And they would have spent the money by/on dinner. Thankfully— and this is another reason the chico’s scam worked—very few Nicaraguans ask for anything.

More than anything, this nano-scam reminded me that, regardless of scale, while we sometimes think we’re doing something to help other people, our assessment of a given situation and the actual situation can be 180 degrees apart. We rely on bad facts. We think in tropes or stereotypes. We take to heart images or slogans. We let sympathy obscure the evidence before our eyes. We think we can control things that are beyond our control. For these reasons, and others, our response doesn’t yield the desired result.

A well-intended, but simple-minded response can even be destructive. As one of many examples, shipping sacks of wheat to poor nations gluts agricultural markets abroad. This depresses prices paid for other, locally grown food and causes farmers there to go broke. Additionally, wheat donated—often sold, not given— to governments—is often less nutritious than locally grown food. As Warren Buffett has pointed out, “Philanthropy can be very tricky.”

The road to Hell, paved with good intentions, circles the Earth at the Equator 188.7 billion times. While only an estimate, this figure may be more accurate than official Covid case and death stats.

Plainly, the Covid overreaction was top-down political theater. But the scam wouldn’t have lasted unless a fearful, gullible public bought it. Sadly, many people saw the phony stats and the news images of people laid out on gurneys or tubed up to ventilators and freaked out. They didn’t consider that there are 330 million people in the US, that 7,600 Americans die every day and that, just like ostensible Covid victims, most of those who normally die are old, obese or fundamentally very sick; on any given day, thousands are laid out on gurneys or are hooked to ventilators. The hand-wringing Corona death toll reciters never celebrate, or even consider, that every year, including 2020 and 2021, the US adds millions more people through birth and immigration than die. People also failed to consider what they saw with their own eyes: no healthy person they knew had died of Covid. At least before the vaxxes, only a tiny fraction knew people who got sick from the virus. Yet, nearly everyone was locked down and injected. After the shots, everyone knew many more who injected and became ill. An XXL coincidence, I guess.

Coronamania lockdowns have caused tremendous damage. Isolating people has widely worsened mental and physical health. Two years of normal life have been permanently stolen from people; this has been especially costly to the young. Printing, and giving away, trillions of dollars will impoverish hundreds of millions of people. Neighbor has been divided from neighbor, brother from brother. Not only did the vaxxes fail, people were injured or died after taking them; their long-term effects are also unknown. None of the disruption saved any lives. It has cost lives.

Those who bought the Corona scam were driven by emotion, not facts or reason. No one likes to admit they’ve been scammed. The difference between me in Nicaragua and those who have bought two years of Coronamania is that I’ll admit that I was.