IOW, your sum total contribution to the homeless problem is some forgotten water from the back of your car, and, oh yeah, you let some hippie friends sleep on your couch. Yet, you want the government to address the problem. Why?
Jeez. I didn’t claim to be Mother Theresa. Yeah, I’ve volunteered, or donated when I had the money, but I don’t claim to be taking on homelessness single-handedly.
Why should the government address the problem? Well, my first response is that these are human beings who are living in filth, malnourished, and lacking even the most basic things like clean clothes and a warm place to sleep. Compassion, I think that’s what that’s called.
Also, I think that there are a lot of people out there who are only a few mishaps away from being homeless. A medical catastrophe, downsizing, identity theft, car accidents, natural disasters- any of these things can send a person living paycheck to paycheck onto the streets. Should they be punished for being poor, and for lacking the support of friends and family we all take for granted? What about Sarge, whom I posted about earlier? He lost his leg, and then his wife, in a brief span of time, and then the government dragged its feet so that he spent almost a year with no income or means to support himself. How is that his fault? Why shouldn’t he be given a second chance at a normal life?
Don’t we have Medicaid, disability, welfare, food stamps, and Social Security as social safety nets? You know, so that the streets aren’t clogged with beggers and vagrants? Isn’t that one of the benefits of modern society, that we spread the risk and share the burden? So that, Og forbid, if you suddenly lost a limb through no fault of your own, and had no one to support you, you wouldn’t be lying in the gutter.
Call me a bleeding-heart liberal all you want, but I think that members of a society have a certain responsibility to help each other, even if it’s for purely selfish reasons like knowing that someone will be there to help you out if you need it.
What are the alternatives? Would you rather eliminate social programs, even though it would mean tripping over a few more bodies on your morning jog? Or should we send them away from the cities, to fend for themselves in the woods?
But it doesn’t matter, does it, because they’re worthless people anyway. They decided they’d rather spend their lives in the bottom of a bottle than being a productive member of society. They chose to have hallucinations, or delusions, or depression. They can snap out of it anytime, right, and they’re weak, subhuman filth for not.
That’s it. I can’t believe I was so wrong before.
:rolleyes:
How do you propose we fund this government-mandated “Compassion”?
Oooh! Who will call in the world’s geniuses to implement Carol stream’s’ brilliant plans?!?. They seem so useful and easily implementable! Maybe if we all hated with true compassion, the world would be a better place!
How big do you consider a “vast majority”? This August 2007 report (pdf) notes that 41% of the entire homeless population consists of families. Do you include young children among those whom you regard as “100%” responsible for their own homeless situation?
With taxes. Social safety nets are one of the most important uses of taxpayer revenues.
Gosh, I dunno, maybe the same way we normally fund social programs like Medicaid and Social Security.
As I said before, Pinellas county voters recently approved by an overwhelming majority the “Penny for Pinellas” program, which adds an additional 1% sales tax to all taxable transactions. Good gracious, the voters have imposed a tax on themselves to pay for things in the community like schools, roads, and social programs.
Well, why not earmark some of that money for a better solution to the homeless problem? That obviously won’t help everyone, but it’s a start.
But let me ask you something, Carol. If you’re so against a program to help the less fortunate who are sleeping on the streets tonight, do you also oppose the programs like TANF and SSI and food stamps that are keeping thousands more off the streets?
Having spent ten years working with the homeless in three different cities, I’d say this is generally correct.
That’s not to say that there aren’t other factors – mental illness being a very prominent one – nor to say that there can’t or shouldn’t be more help made available.
But assuming you’re talking about the hard-core homeless who stay that way over a period of months, I have always found that there is at least some level of choice in the matter. It’s usually part of a chain reaction from other choices (“I quit my job because my boss is a jerk”), but the opportunities exist for those willing to make the move off the streets. I’ve seen plenty do it.
I’ve also seen guys whom I well knew were choosing to live on the streets – had them say exactly that – pull out the dewy-eyed sob story about the wife leaving, and the layoffs at the mill when they saw a twentysomething they could hit up for a couple of bucks.
Often as not, of course, the sob story was true; it was just also true that the response to adversity was give up and climb inside that bottle.
That’s a bit naive, Kim. What makes you think those who govern us would, if they got their hands on more money, spend it for safety nets rather than newer limousines, bigger staffs, nicer offices, and wars?
You might as well launch a War on Homelessness just like the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror. A Social Security type fund for homelessness? I suppose that at the very least, it would be another solvency issue for future presidential debates.
Well, there’s always some waste and fraud in any sizeable bureaucratic system, whether it’s government-run or a private enterprise. We the public do need to be watchful about that, and it would indeed be naive to expect that watchfulness isn’t needed.
But it would be even more naive to imagine that we can address serious social problems like homelessness in a large and complex society without the involvement of any sizeable bureaucratic systems. And the only systems up to the job in this case are the ones run by the government. Private-property interests of comparable size can’t be bothered with caring for the homeless, because there’s no money in it.
If we refuse to tackle social problems as a society until such time as we can be confident that there will never be any greed or fraud or waste involved in administering our compassionate efforts, a hell of a lot of homeless people will starve and freeze on the streets during the intervening centuries. Might as well buckle down to the task now, relying on the imperfect tools available to us at present, and attempting to improve them in the process.
In fact, one of the great benefits of Social Security itself has been its reduction of poverty and accompanying homelessness rates among the elderly in particular. We might be able to make some headway against the homelessness problem just by piggybacking on existing Social Security programs of supplemental income for the disabled and so on. But I think a more direct federal approach would probably involve working through Housing and Urban Development.
I live near St. Pete and did some research into homelessness last semester. Good on you for protesting the city’s shitty treatment of homeless people.
That’s not necessarily true, but there are certainly plenty of examples of private charities spending money on frivolities and bonuses rather than charitable works (gotta compete with comparable CEO wages in the for profit sector, yanno.)
My favorite right-wing chestnut. No antipoverty program is OK unless eveyone who supports it has impoverished themselves trying to solve it.
So you personally don’t have enough compassion to help them, but you would like to pass laws so that others, who are equally lacking, are compelled to.
But not you specifically - other people have that responsiblity, but only if laws are passed to force them to live up to it.
Do you have a reliable cite for this? Your cite mentions
In other words, many of those alleged 41% are “homeless” in the sense of “having to share a bathroom”, which is not quite the same thing as sleeping on a park bench.
And your cite also says -
So, of the 41% mentioned, a third (roughly) is an adult.
So 59% + about 13% = 72%. I suppose you could quibble about whether or not three-quarters is a “vast” majority, but it seems a pretty substantial amount to me. YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
Ah, the right-wing mantra:
“I got mine. Fuck you!”
What the hell? Why is it always “attack the OP” in the pit? Did you and Carol actually read RedRoses posts? She also mentioned volunteering at St. Vincent de Paul and helping in soup kitchens. But you guys are fluffing off her concern and complaints because in your minds she’s not doing enough personally to help the problem. I think she’s doing a hell of a lot more than your average person and why the hell does she even need to devote her entire life to solve a problem she’s concerned about? Do you guys do that?
Yeah, the government should help solve this problem but at the very least they should not impede those groups and organizations that are trying to help the homeless which is what St. Pete is doing right now.
I doubt it’s a question of RedRoses (or most other liberals) not having enough compassion, but simply of her not having enough money, canned goods, or floor space to provide resources for the homeless on the scale that they’re needed.
We want governments to help tackle this problem not because we’re too selfish or lazy to help out homeless folks ourselves, but simply because they’re the only institutions with the capacity to achieve results on the necessary scale. Saying “Oh, let’s let individual charity and compassion take care of the needy” is a recipe for continuing inaction. It’s naive to expect even caring and compassionate people to have the time or resources, as individuals, that it takes to deal with truly large-scale social problems. That’s why we caring and compassionate people pool some of our resources into government entities that we authorize to act for us.
I don’t doubt that’s true for many of the homeless, especially if they’re prone to adiction and mental illness. I had a certain person in mind when I made that statement.
He spent his childhood on the streets because his mother had addiction and mental illness problems. He also started drinking before he was a teenager, and spent several years in the bottom of that bottle.
But when we were talking once about alcoholism, he told me from that first drink he ever had, he was hooked. Couldn’t get enough. It took several years, and what he describes as a sort of religious experience, for him to climb out of that bottle.
So I was thinking of people like him, that don’t know when they take that first drink it’ll lead to a lifetime struggle with alcoholism. Also, the other problem for the homeless with alcohol problems is that alcohol withdrawal is life-threatening, and needs to be medically supervised. You can’t just stop cold turkey when you’re living on the streets, because you might end up dead. And, at least in my county, the only program that accepts indigent patients into their detox program is in the next city, probably 3 busrides and a long walk away. And they’re often full.
So, yes, there is some amount of choice in the matter, but for those with substance abuse problems, who need serious support or medical supervision, they don’t have accesss to the sorts of programs they need.
Wow. How do I not have enough compassion to help them? Why do several years of volunteering at a soup kitchen (NOT court-ordered and IN EXCESS of the 150 hours required by my school) not count? What about every time I’ve given somebody my last dollar? When was the last time YOU saw a homeless person on the side of the road and remembered that bottle of water/old clothes/blanket/granola bar you had in your car, and stopped to give it to them?
No, I haven’t made it my life’s work to help the homeless. But they are still people, and I help when I can. Fuck, what am I supposed to be doing so that the naysayers in this thread will acknowledge that I have, in fact, done something to help the homeless. Giving up my Saturdays when I was 15 isn’t enough? Do I have to single-handedly organize and fund my own fucking homeless shelter?
Once again, how am I shirking this responsibility? Is it because I’ve donated time and old clothes but not money except for the odd dollar or spare change? Is that why you keep repeating this notion that I am not personally doing anything and want others to do it for me?
If you’re talking about taxes, yes, I’d gladly give up and extra percent or two out of my paychecks, or pay a slightly higher sales tax, to fund programs that offer a long-term solution including rehab, mental health services, and job training.
But of that 72%, how many are paranoid schizophrenics or manic depressives? How many are physically disabled? And tell me why an indigent person with an illness, deformity, or disability doesn’t deserve government assistance to live a normal life. You do realize that it’s just a roll of the genetic dice and you might have been the guy talking to himself on street corners, and just the
capricious hand of fate that’s keeping you from losing a limb and your means of supporting yourself.
Sorry, missed the edit window.
I wanted to add that in the threads I’ve seen about school funding, someone invariably asks “Why should my taxes go to the public school system if I don’t have kids?”
And the reply is always: By being a member of society that provides public education, you will benefit from having a well-trained, competent workforce. You reap the benefits of educating little Timmy down the street, when you have a heart attack and little Timmy, all grown up, performs a triple-bypass on you. Or when little Timmy gives you great financial advice and you add thousands to your retirement fund. You get the point.
Well, if programs are put in place aimed at getting the homeless off the streets permentantly instead of for a night or two, you’ll reap the benefits by having more contributing members of society. More people in the workforce, paying taxes. More people to share the tax burden. If you get the homeless kids off the streets and into school, maybe they’ll be the little Timmys performing your surgeries or telling you to buy Microsoft.
Fuck you, Lib. Like I said many years ago, if you want to argue against government and taxes generally, open a thread entitled “Government Is Evil” or “Repeal All Taxes,” and argue your POV.
For awhile, you’d gotten away from hijacking every damned thread you got into with your “Government and Taxation are Evil” arguments, but damned if you haven’t been back to your old tricks lately.
So shut up, fuck off, and let the grownups have an argument within the frame of reference of the U.S. as it is, rather than using every thread you join as a forum for making the same argument, over and over again, that gummint and taxes are inherently evil.
IOW, quit acting like a spoiled teenager who thinks everything should be about him.