▸ Column · Modern world of men — Diana of Themyscira answering as an Amazon envoy walking among us
WONDER WOMAN replies.
Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Cheetah.
The letter
Three weeks I'd waited for an appointment at the records office, and the morning of it I realized my wallet was gone — no way to pay the fee, nothing. I was crying on the steps outside when a woman I'd never seen, maybe late sixties, in a yellow rain slicker, sat down, heard my whole pathetic story, and pressed two twenties into my hand. She wouldn't take my number to be repaid. "Pass it along sometime," she said, and went back inside. I've kept that forty in its own pocket ever since, waiting for the right moment to give it forward — but every chance I weigh feels too trivial or too staged. How do I know the genuine moment when it arrives? Or am I overthinking it, and should I just hand it to the next person who looks like they're having a hard day?
Wonder Woman replies
The story you've told yourself is that generosity is a marksman's shot — one correct target, and you'll waste the whole thing if you loose it early. That is not how the woman in the yellow slicker understood it. She did not audit your worthiness. She saw a person weeping and she moved.
When I first came from Themyscira into this world of men, Steve Trevor spent the last money in his pocket on strangers more than once, and I asked him how he knew they had earned it. He laughed at me, friend. He said you don't — that's the whole of it.
You are standing guard over forty dollars as if it were a relic, because the waiting feels safer than the giving. But a kindness held too long curdles into a kindness withheld. Give it. Soon. To the next person who needs it, even if the moment seems too small — small is where most of the world's mercy actually lives. Don't make them thank you. Don't take their name.
You will not find the moment. You will choose it. Pass it along, and stop guarding a gift that was never yours to keep.
— Wonder Woman
Cheetah weighs in
How tidy. A stranger drops forty dollars in your lap and Diana wants you running the chain like a good little carrier pigeon. Let me translate what happened, little one: the woman in the slicker bought something — the warm glow of the full belly handing scraps to the empty one. You were her moment. Now you crave yours. That isn't generosity, darling. It's appetite wearing a halo.
The money is yours. It has been since it touched your pocket. If you must move it, move it where it buys you a name remembered, a debt owed. Diana "saved" me once and has never once let me forget the price. Every kindness has one. Mine, at least, come itemized.
— Cheetah
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