Take a stroll through downtown Santa Cruz sometimes. These people are homeless because they are lazy. It’s ridiculous to allow people to behave that way in a civilized community. The piss and shit in the streets, the vomit, the drunks, aggressive panhandling, lack of public toilets… fuck them.
But you can’t “not” allow it without providing a viable alternative. Addiction and mental illness cannot be treated in the same way that “down on their luck” homeless people are treated. What do you suggest?
Yeah, I’m not sure what to do. Throw them in jail? That costs money and doesn’t really fix anything. Well sure, they’re no longer on the street bothering people, but what about when they get out? It’ll be even harder to get a job. Seems like it would be cheaper* to provide some sort of “treatment”, although that requires some willingness to receive it.
*than prison. I don’t have numbers though.
I don’t have a problem with people who are genuinely homeless. I’ll give 'em a couple of bucks if I can, and I’ll put up with their craziness and their smell. There but for the grace of God…
But I do have a major problem with the aggressive beggars, most of whom are not homeless at all (the genuine ones aren’t in your face if you say ‘no’). There was the guy (about ten years ago) who admitted in a newspaper article that he made $600-$700 per week by hitting the commuter trains, or another guy who made the same paper (a liberal/left-leaning broadsheet, BTW) for asking for the usual “two dollars for a train fare”, and then being seen running a bag of coin through the counting machine at a downtown bank.
Those guys can FUCK OFF.
As for the pissing in doorways, it’s usually smashed British backpackers (yes, yes, I know we do it in London too).
It’s a tough problem. You’re right…jail isn’t the answer. It’s expensive and temporary. Many homeless neighborhoods are created because mental patients are more or less dumped there. Addicted homeless are treated, and sometimes it takes…sometimes it doesn’t. Shit…addiction treatment for the gainfully employed / insured usually doesn’t take the first or second or third time around. The problem is complex; we can’t expect the solution to be simple. Homeless people have incredibly complex fucked up lives, whatever the cause. Compassion and thoughtful solutions will go further toward solving the problem than scorn.
Sounds like lack of shelter and public restrooms are more to blame than anything else. In a stratified society, there will always be a bottom stratum. Better to provide a minimal baseline of support than to deal with these things eh? If they had a roof to be under and a shitter to shit in, you wouldn’t see any of this stuff, no matter how bitter you might be about actually helping people for free. :eek:OMG…
Bullshit.
There are plenty of “normal” people who have no qualms about trashing houses and pissing/shitting wherever, regardless of available resources.
Add in the factors of poverty, drug addiction, and mental illness- you’re going to have issues even if there was a bathroom on every street corner.
Sad.
Does it help if I see this as a class war, but from the bottom?
My condo will be auctioned off in the public square in December, and I’m living in a tent behind a shed. Work’s so thin I can’t pay both rent and child support, so guess which I chose?
But only because I lack the moral character to have a lot of money.
Yes, I work five part time jobs, and I’m barely hanging onto my car and cell phone.
Recession, my ass. I call it a depression.
It seems like the general take home here is that if you are poor or homeless that it must be some sort of a moral failing on your part. I mean, I though we got over all of that Calvinism bullshit a long time ago, but it seems that I am mistaken.
Here’s the deal people: If you want to have Capitalism where we reward unbridled greed and acquisition, you are going to have to have poor and homeless people. Addiction and mental illness are a part of the human condition. Deal with it. If you don’t like what that makes your community look like, come up with a viable alternative other than “fuck the homeless”. Fuck you.
Are you serious? What happened?
I’m a public librarian at a large downtown library, which I’m sure people are really tired of me saying every damned time this comes up. And you know what? I hate the fucking homeless people too. Now, some of them are mentally ill, and for that I have sympathy. Some of them are looking for work. But you know what? I don’t SEE those people because they’re busy looking for a job, not bugging me about the fucking newspaper all the time and having to be thrown out by security because their drunk asses got in another fight!
The acutely homeless need help, and often get it. Those are people who live in their cars, or temporarily live in shelters, and who maybe come into the library for help finding a job. I’ve read that the average homeless time period for them is less than two weeks. Those are not the people we’re complaining about as homeless people.
The chronically homeless are sometimes mentally ill. I know one lady who was the World’s Second Most Horrible Person until she got the appropriate meds, and now she has a job and is a productive taxpayer! Now that’s a program I can get behind! Shit, I’ll pay for her meds myself if it means I never have to deal with her as Evil Hat Lady again!
However, most of the homeless people I see every day are not mentally ill and they are not acutely homeless. They don’t want to work. People come in every so often looking for day laborers and can’t find a one, while I can look right now from my desk, because it’s a cold day, and see maybe 40 able bodied men who could work but don’t. I don’t get it, either, because they’re here before I am in the morning and to me that’s the hard part of working - having to be there every day! Now, if you don’t want to work and some dumb do-gooder wants to enable you, fine. But there’s a ton of people who won’t come to the downtown library because of them. They smell. They’re drunk, they’re rude, they steal library cards and try to look at porn on the internet. For a while we had a problem with hookers giving $5 blowjobs in the 900’s, and that’s with very good (usually) security!
So yeah, those chronically homeless people with no excuse? Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em hard and fuck 'em somewhere else. You lose your compassion real, real fast working here.
ETA - by the way, my boyfriend is trying hard to make it in these hard times as a retail store owner now, and they’re paying a crapload of money for location only to have panhandlers hassle their customers. Nobody gave him any fucking money to run his own business, but people who expect somebody will give THEM money are making it a hell of a lot harder for him.
Oh, and don’t EVER believe anybody in a city who tells you they can’t get enough to eat, because that is bullshit. There are enough soup kitchens and food banks in every city I’ve ever been in that anybody willing to take the charity is not going hungry. Unfortunately, you can’t get a fifth of whiskey at First Baptist’s free lunch. A lot of these guys get checks every month, you know - pension, welfare, disability, VA, whatever. The library is like a tomb at the first of the month because they hole up in cheap hotel rooms and drink until the check runs out.
Feed them to the drunks.
just joshin’.
[Modest Proposal 2008]
Eat the homeless
[MP2k8]
Since when do welfare checks and food stamps make someone less homeless? For the very short time I was on public assistance, it wasn’t nearly enough to pay the rent. And I was neither drugged up, drunk or crazy. Underemployed with a family to feed is a lot closer to the truth.
Fuck that. You’re telling me that if I don’t like what someone is doing it’s my responsibility to provide them something else to do? If someone robs a bank because they couldn’t find a job is that my fault because I didn’t give him money or find him a job? Guess what? You’re not a fucking dog. You know where to shit. Find a fucking bucket or something if it’s THAT dire but don’t shit in the doorway to my business you filthy fucker.
The guys that run all over the intersections begging for money from stopped cars are great examples of this. These fucking people CAN get jobs. Washing dishes, mowing lawns, shoveling shit, whatever menial labor task you want to put here. They CHOOSE not to. They don’t WANT to. So they spend their days approaching uncomfortable people trapped at stop lights to beg for money instead.
Don’t come in here and tell me all the ways they can’t get those jobs because the fact of the matter is that they CAN but they don’t WANT to.
Who gets the backstrap?
Geez, are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?
You don’t have to feel for them, thats up to you. But it is possible to desperately poor and not on drugs, drunk or mental illness.
The stunning lack of compassion expressed in this is really quite honestly mind-blowingly unbelievable. And I don’t think I could possibly fill my previous statement with any more terms to assist in describing my utter dismay.
I absolutely cannot fathom the mindset that it is better for people you don’t even know to *live a life of misery *or possibly even have the exciting potential to freeze or starve to death, than to provide some minial food, shelter, and clothing.
I mean, these people, even if it only some of them, might be taking advantage of our largess. And preventing that, friends, helps me sleep far better at night knowing that not no one, not no way is gonna take me for a free ride. Better that those (potentially lazy) slumps suffer and die.