Virtue, certainty and conscience.

Of all the Hobo signs, this is the one that stopped me in my tracks. Cowards. Will give to get rid of you.

What does the visual mean...the square, jagged at the bottom, sitting behind the unbroken square in front? Is the front shape meant to imply a coverup of the one with a flawed foundation? Obviously, a fake, a fraud is implied. The kindly, giving hand is not what it seems. Not dispensing compassion, but a bribe and an insult. A slap of rejection.

I used to cast around for some nice, smug moral or spiritual floatation device. This is the right thing to do... But paradox took a bite every time, and the deflation was rapid after that. I'd be left treading water in an ocean that kept providing sharks when I was looking for a rescue helicopter to take me to certainty.

Once I was in serious discussion with an astrology client who, I believed, was heading into some deep trouble if she didn't examine her basic paradigms about life and stop running from her own shadows. What, I asked her, is the most important thing in life?

"Kindness," she said.

"And if you knew that someone had to be told a hurtful feeling truth, something that might make them feel bad, and you knew that if you didn't tell them, they would be in a world of trouble...what would be kinder - to tell them, or to spare their feelings." She didn't hesitate.

"I wouldn't tell them because it would hurt their feelings."

Cowards. Will give to get rid of you.

Let she who is without sin cast the first stone. Understand, I have a sack full of stones for myself. Stones for every occasion.

For years, I gave to an NGO - one of those organizations that put children with at least one perfectly good parent up for "adoption." I pledged the money during the famine in Ethiopia. The organization was running a program on a PBS station. I watched those gaunt children, all distended stomachs, stick legs and dead eyes for all of two minutes and I called. Then, I dived for the remote to shut the television off - as if it had suddenly begun to pump hunger, thirst and hopelessness into my living room like radioactive fallout.

Perhaps my small donations bought a school book or helped sink a pump into the ground to provide water for a village, but I hated the guilt I felt reading the letters I got from that beautiful, brown-eyed child. Letters so obviously dictated, so correct, so Christian, that they left me certain the child in the picture had nothing at all to do with them, past being made to sit and print them out laboriously in some rural classroom. Forced gratitude, I thought. Why should the child be made to express gratitude for what was, to me, skipping a restaurant lunch twice a month? For what should have been her right.

I hated the things I later found out about how many NGO's operate. That knowledge of waste and fraud and mismanagement, against the knowledge there was a chance that a village might drink clean water. Mostly, though, I hated the unclean feeling that the money I sent was hush-money for my conscience.

I do believe in many of the traditional virtues...charity, love, kindness... And I think people demonstrate them daily, all over the world. So maybe it isn't paradox that disturbs me, really - but falseness. What masquerades as virtue but hides something else.

Cowards. Will give to get rid of you.

I try to check myself, to ask myself hard questions now - when something needs to be said, when I pull out a dollar for someone on the street, when I claim to love people. What do I want here? What are the conditions I'm putting on this? What am I secretly wanting back?

I've come to think that none of the virtues exist at all without the virtue of self-honesty at their core.

I've come to think that now. We'll see whether the universe wants to send Jaws or the helicopter.