I Hate The Homeless

The BBQ Pit
1

I know since I’m on the left I’m supposed to think that the homeless are just down on their luck, but I fucking hate them. The bus I took this morning stunk of vomit. Someone shit in our store doorway - during the day - for the 4th time in 3 weeks! The mess, the stink, constantly being harrased for money, having customers afraid to come downtown - I’m sick of shoppers, workers, and residents being incovenienced by people who give nothing back to society.

The crazies need to be forced to take their meds, the drunks need to sober up and the young people with their fucking dogs can go back to what ever city they hitchhiked here from. Oh, and you church-based charities providing free food: go set up shop in the suburbs someplace rather than in the middle of the historic section of town. Businesses pay an extra tax for the “privilege” of being downtown, why do they have to put up with the dregs of society.

OK, more after the edit. Our free public transportation zone may have to be scrapped because the homeless ride it all day to keep out of the rain. We can’t have public toilests because hookers use them to turn trick, addicts use them to shoot up, and dealers use them as bazzaars.

2

http://www.alternet.org/story/102992/5_pieces_of_advice_for_the_new_paupers/
You might run into somebody like this. Be nice.

3

Well, the only solution I see that isn’t a huge drain on the public coffers is a return to debtor’s prisons and work farms. That might be seen as ‘cruel and unusual’, though.

It seems that the money that went to maintenance of the public restrooms would pay for one portapotty and one security guard. Let 'em line up.

How about special ID cards, issued only to landowners or leaseholders, that has a magstrip to open public lavatories?
Fuck it. Round 'em up and shoot em.

4

Pay toilets.

5

Why would landowners and leaseholders need to use public lavatories?

How would this prevent the homeless from shitting in doorways?

6

Bullets cost money. Pit graves and mass burials, Shove them in and back fill the soil.

Why yes I have had problems with the homeless before, thanks for asking.

7

Class warfare also costs money. IANAE, but I am reasonably sure we could provide warmth, shelter, and food to every person in America and have it cost considerably less than the effects of organized campaign of murder against the poor.

8

If you do not give people an “out” from capitalism, what do you expect?

Why should I have to labour? Of course I should, indeed, have to, in order to sustain myself. But why should I be forced to do it within your economic framework?

I see the homeless as pioneers. (Well, no, I don’t. They stink and bother me with their laziness, but at least they’re doing the only thing they can do overthrow this tyrannical system of wealth accumulation. So, yes, in that manner I do applaud them. It takes a lot of courage [or something] to be homeless.)

If you really want to solve homelessness; if government really did care, we’d have kept Australia [or insert your viable island of choice] as a prison colony. Don’t want to contribute, don’t want to accept prison for infringing upon our ways of governance, exile. Seems reasonable. Seems a lot more reasonable than just throwing unwilling people into jail who’ll commit the same crime again given the opportunity. eh?

9

Making this into a class thing is disingenuous. The poor more than anyone need good public facilities: libraries, parks, public transportation, and public toilets. The problem is that all of these are endangered when you let drunks, addicts, criminals, and the teenage hobby-homeless run amok.

10

It’s always nice to see someone who’s a truly ugly person on the inside.

Oh wait, no it isn’t, it’s deeply disturbing and depressing. Although I’ve really got to put my hands together for the people who think the solution to the homeless conducting bodily functions in public is to make sure there’s no way they have somewhere to do it in private. Stunning logic on that one.

11

I don’t feel one iota of remorse for these people. In my eyes, it’s impossible to be truly poor in America. These guys can’t get welfare checks? Food stamps? They can’t get a Pell grant to go to school? The only way to be poor is to be drugged up, drunk, or crazy.

12

And who is it that preventing public toilets? The fucking “homeless” that turn tricks, vandalize, shoot-up, and deal drugs.

13

Let’s, for the moment, concede that the drugged and drunk do so because of character flaws. But why are you lumping the crazy in with them? What moral failing have they demonstrated to earn your disgust? And what would you propose to do with “the crazy”?

14

Want to try this with no fixed abode sometime?

15

The OP seemed to speak of a downtown business district, where the landed gentry would do some shopping. Public Toilets are not strictly for the homeless.
And yes, even the nobles shit and piss.

16

I have since moved, but for eight years lived in an inner-urban area of Melbourne that was renowned for its population of homeless folk, attracted by such services as St Mary’s House of Welcome, the various soup kitchens and of course the Psychiatric Unit at St Vincent’s Hospital.

And yeah, there were a few stinky folk who boarded the tram/s on my way to and from work each day, necessitating a move to the farthest reaches of the vehicle. And there were a few who hounded me mercilessly once they realised I was good for a couple of bucks. There were some who ranted and raved on the street corners, undoubtedly in the midst of some paranoid episode.

But the worst of the fuckers were the Eastern Suburbs studs who would flock to Brunswick Street on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in search of a good night out! They’d hang out in the bars (then piss and shit in the doorways of the closed businesses, just to leave their ‘mark’) and they’d harass and harangue us locals in a way that was horribly offensive. And when the garbos came across their (almost) lifeless bodies the next morning in the gutter…well, one would be hard pressed to determine which one was a ‘homeless person’ and which one was a ‘well-homed-but-out-for-a-nignt-on-the-town’.

Just sayin’ etc.

17

That’s like an argument. Except wholly without reason, use, or logic.

Why do you put homeless in quotation marks? Are you trying to insinuate that a cardboard box and some newspaper is really a home, and society is being out of control politically correct?

18

I have bad experiences with beggars. Once, I was buying a bowl of noodles from a take-out place and got a few coins for change. A boy, thin, filthy, and in ragged clothes was hanging around and asked for my coins. Since it was only ten pesos (PHP), I gave them to him. A few seconds later, I was surrounded by kids with outstretched hands. I tried to explain that I had spent the last of my money on my lunch, but they would not back off. I tried walking away quickly and they followed me! I crossed the street and they were still there. I managed to lose them in the end, but that was freaking scary.

I’m sorry that they have to beg to eat, but harassing me is not the way to earn my sympathy.

19

Agree. Let the crazies off the hook. Mostly it ain’t their fault.

I work with homeless people in London. My company has people out every night looking for rough sleepers on the street, then we have hostels for them. From there, they go to supported housing(smaller than hostels), which is the level I work at, then they ideally go to their own places.

My company has ‘meaningful occupation’ programmes: we give them stuff to do in the day time. Coffee mornings, voluntary work etc. They pay about £6 to £10 a week to live in supported housing. Housing Benefit(welfare) pays the rest - about £125 a week.

Some people thrive; this is the opportunity they needed. They get off the drugs or booze or both, they manage their mental health issues, get back to work and make a contribution.

Some people turn the houses in to crack dens, never pay their minimal rent and abandon the property owing thousands, and having done thousands worth of damage.

Some homeless people are pricks. Some are not. Some police officers are pricks, some are not. Same goes for social workers, teachers, artists, authors, receptionists, waiters and every other fucking group in the world. Perhaps it’s disproportionate in the homeless population, but there are some that take responsibility for themselves and some that continue to leech.

It’s the former that keep me doing my job, the latter that makes us all despair. I hate the homeless that fall in to that category.

20

I feel badly for the homeless, even when the ones that brought it on themselves. (to an extent)

When I grew up there was a guy named Herbie in my neighborhood. he was older than I was, in his mid 20’s when I was still in Junior High.

Around the time I was in college I was home visiting and I asked a friend about people in the neighborhood I had not seen in some time. When Herbie’s name came up I found out he had been living on the street in Wilmington (DE) for some time. (apparently due to a crack addiction, or so I was told), A year or so later I found out he had been found in alley, dead. Frozen to death.

I have a cousin thats about ten years older than I. He’s on disability, and doesn’t work. He could probably find some kind of part time gig just to pass the time but he claims they’ll take away his disability if he does. Its a shame. When I was kid he was married and his wife was smokin’ hot. He has 2 sons (that don’t really communicate with him). He was a former marine, and he had a gorgeous harley he used to ride around. (Hell, he was also…get this…a black belt in Karate. He used to teach it to kids at the local community center) We used (us kids) think he was so cool. We called him “The Black Fonz”.

But then he had an accident. He was almost killed in a car accident. Someone ran him over when he was changing a tire. then the moron backed up over him! Hence the disability. He was in bad shape. He never recovered. After years of watching him sink into depression and drugs his smokin’ hot wife left him. He began moving from place to place staying with friends. In the late eighties he was staying with a known drug addict in the old neighborhood and i was living and struggling with bills in my parents house. (everyone had died in my immediate family, including my sister.) i told him he could come stay with me if he’d pay 1 third of the mortgage as rent. I won’t go into some of the horror stories about it, it would make this a very long post. Suffice it to say that when I decided to go on active duty I told him he had to move out before I left. (In another horror story I left the house to be rented and watched out by my BIL. He did so many things wrong I had to go to the JAG office to unload the burden.) Anyway my cousin (we caled him Clucky for some reason) moved out to stay with some friend of his. I came home on leave a few years later and he had a section 8 apartment that honestly was not bad. His rent was only about 100 bucks. It was located near the old neighborhood so all of hiss friends were near. I stayed with him while I was home, and then left. I came back a few years later to find he had moved…now get this…into a shed behind someone’s house. Not a big shed either. It was just large enough to fit a cot in it along with the gardening stff and lawn mower etc. The person letting him stay there ran an extenstion cord from their window to the shed so he could plug in a small TV and a space heater. It seems he just didn’t pay the rent on his apartment so they kicked him out.

Of course the shed thing didn’t last too long either. None of my relatives would have him. He certainly couldn’t live with my wife and I (we were in Germany anyway). So he was homeless. He’d stay at a friends house for a night, sleep in a car or an alley a few days and so on. Finally my aunt (not a real aunt but a close family friend we all called Aunt M) got him into church. He cleaned up his act a bit and she let him stay in her house for a time. Currently he’s staying with his brother. I sure hope he doesn’t fall back into the drugs and stuff, because his brother has children and would surely put him on the street.

The thing is Clucky isn’t a bad guy. He drove me nuts when he lived with me, but you know, he’s family, I do love him. And we had a few good times living together. Sometimes he’d almost revert back to his old pre-accident self. Yes, he could have avoided some of the crap he got into, but in some ways I think I didn’t do enough to help him. I was younger than he was, I didn’t have any money or much of anything…but I should have tried to look out for him better. My uncle that died in 2001, did that for me when my folks died. So there by the grace of God I didn’t become Clucky.