How to Solve Homelessness

Great Debates
21

If you disband the “war on drugs” to pay for it, I’m all for it. No more fear of incarceration; if you wanna quit, there will be help available for you.

This is a really dangerous road to travel. I would urge you to think about this one pretty seriously.

I would be very, VERY much against doing anything to anyone against their will “for their own good” (excepting criminals and related cases such as making serious criminal threats). This “I know what’s good for you better than you do, and I’m going to force it down your throat” idea has been, IMHO, responsible for some of the greatest atrocities in human history. That the intentions were good is irrelevant. (The road to hell etc).

To give you some idea of just how repugnant this is to me, consider this. I’m probably “mostly” sane, but for the purpose at hand here let’s say I was not a danger to anyone, but was (as an adult) involuntarily committed for mental health reasons. I am not a violent guy. I don’t like confrontation, and I am (almost) always polite and friendly to people. I hold doors open for people, and I’m kind to small animals. But I value my right to self-determination more than my life - even where you might feel you know better than I do what’s good for me. If involuntarily confined like that without having committed a crime, I can and would kill to regain my freedom, and feel morally justified in so doing. I feel very strongly that that situation is equivalent to kidnapping.

I am not bullshitting here. Nor am I grandstanding. I am just trying to give you some idea of how strongly this sort of involuntary “I know what’s best for you” committment repulses me. I see it as contrary to the freedoms that my ancestors fought and died for.

Please be wary of that road, no matter how seductive it may appear. Please.

peas on earth

22

I think you people need to open your minds. Listen to people with REAL knowledge of the problem: http://www.theonion.com/onion3539/homelessness.html

Nothing I write about any person or group should be applied to a larger group.

  • Boris Badenov
23

There was a newspaper reporter here in Edmonton who caused a bit of a sensation a few years ago because he drove around looking for panhandlers and offering them a job. Nothing complex, just ‘Come with me and help me clean my garage and I’ll give you $50’. A decent wage for a couple of hours worth of work.

After asking dozens of people all day, he never found a single person who would take him up on it, including a guy who was standing with his whole family on a streetcorner with a sign that said, “Will work for food.”

24

I have, twice (took me that long to learn), offered food from my grocery sack to a guy w/a a “Will work for food sign” and had the food refused w/a request for cash thrown in. A few years ago a friend of mine pointed out that the WWFF signs aren’t out on the street at 7-8 AM when somebody might be recruiting day labor, but there on the job for the evening rush hour (casual observation seems to bear this out).

I was homeless for three months. Actually, now that I think about it I was homeless twice for three months. But it was planned both times. The time I was originally thinking about came second; the summer before my last semester in college I had figured that, with the odd work I’d lined up I would be able to eat and have my tuition in place for the fall and be ready to take on my part of a lease if I could forego housing expenses for the summer. So, I just made myself very useful to a select group of friends (did a lot of dishes and laundry) and made a point to move around so I wasn’t crashing at any one person’s place two nights in a row. I think I spent max five nights on the street that summer. But I spent enough time on the street that a friend confided the summer students were starting to ID me as one of those street people.

The other time I went on a hitchhiking backpack tour of the western U.S. for three months. Since I had no apartment at the time, I guess I was homeless.

Both times I had opportunities to interact with other street people on a level that’s foreign to my life of the last twenty years. I think the observation that manny of the homeless are such by choice has much merit. That’s not to say that there are not those who’ve been overwhelmed by the circumstance of life. I do, though, think if you’re motivated and not incapacitated by substance abuse or mental health problems, you can get yourself off the street in a short time.

25

As a person who has been homeless (but thankfully never w/o a job) you must understand, homelessness is not about not having a place to live.

It is about being in a position where you have lost all your support systems. Most people have the support that if they lose a job or get sick they have friends or family who will help them out or take them in. Homeless people do not have these systems.

It is very hard to start over in life. I have done it twice, with nothing but the clothes on your back.
In order to understand this, ask yourself, if you were to take the clothes on your back and the money in your pocket right now and walk out into the street would you make it. How would that affect you??

I mean I have had problems dating as you meet someone and they want to see photos of you when you were young. I have none. I have not a picture of any of my family. They can’t believe it could be and yadda yadda yadda.

So there is tons more to being homeless than finding a home. It is so hard to pull yourself up by your boot straps. But you can do it. But I can’t imagine how you could even start if you were not in your right mind or drunk or sick. It is hard enuff when you got your health and mind going for you.

26

I guess I should be thankful that I’ve never asked a woman out who said, “I won’t go out with you unless you show me a picture of yourself when you were young.” (I mean, I DO have pictures of myself when I was young, but it seems like kind of a weird request.)

27

Diane wrote:

http://www.theonion.com/onion3539/homelessness.html

Seems an Onion editorial agrees with you. :slight_smile:

28

Actually, tracer, I can’t believe you forgot to include a link to this page: http://www.theonion.com/onion3539/homelessness.html
Do your homework next time.
tee hee

29

Yes, Boris, but did you know about http://www.theonion.com/onion3539/homelessness.html ?

30

Yes, and I proved it, at 6:41 on October 27.

31

Quite fighting, or I’ll stop this thread, I swear! I’ll turn this thread right around! Don’t make me come back there!

Yer pal,
Satan

32

He started it! He made me do it!

Okay, then, the devil made me do it!

Uhh, a homeless guy made me do it?

Seriously though, I was just kidding. Please don’t turn the thread around. I want to go to Disneyland so bad! Aww, please?

33

Most people who are homeless are pretty happy about the situation. I lived on the street for six months while traveling all over the Southwest US, and I just wanted to clear up a few of the prevailing and I think wrong headed attitudes I’ve seen in this thread.

  1. There are all these home-less people who don’t want to be turned into productive citizens and that is somehow ‘sad’

This strikes me as funny, because I recall many of my homeless compadres thinking just the opposite: that there are way too many home-ful wage-slaves who are too weak to live as free people. Of course, now I make 6K more than the average US family of four, and I still feel sorry for people who are dumb enough to work two jobs for minimum wage out there; but I figure I got mine. But I’m sure plenty of street dwellers still feel this way. That people should some how be guilted into working at tedious jobs to enrich big corporations by “homeless outreach” groups (also usually funded by big corporations) and society in general is what is sad.
2) We should put people who don’t want to be wage slaves in the nut house.

I think bantmof summed this up nicely.

  1. The world doesn’t owe poor people jack.

Hmm, but if I’m rich and live off the interest I earn from money in the bank, that’s OK? I mean, the bank just lends that money to big corporations to cut down rain forests, do third world mining operations in Indonesia et al., and generally work to exploit the labor of other people in one way or the other. I fail to see why poor person A is any less deserving of food, clothing, and shelter (or at least not harrassed where they lay their head) than rich person B, just because rich person B has access to a limitless supply of green colored pieces of paper. There are other arguements to be made here – most people don’t do anything productive for society anyway, considering all we really need from human labor – from the homeless point of view – is food, shelter and clothing. My apologies to farmers/fishers, weavers, carpenters, and the like). The rest of you don’t kid yourselves – why do all the rest of you deserve jack?

  1. The poor are somehow taking advantage of you charitable types.

Ridiculous. This is an entirely sybiotic relationship. Admittedly, the people who give away food can be real “Soup-Nazis” (gutterpunk slang, not mine) sometimes, trying to impose their value system on you in exchange for food (usually a capitalist system sometimes in the guise of religion). But, ultimately, these charity-people must enjoy (and/or get paid) for what they are doing, or they are idiots (see #1 above), in which case to redux bantmof, screw them.

  1. Homelessness can be cured by any draconian plan ala the war-on-drugs

If you really want to cure homelessness, quit you job, default on all your corporate loans, and live on the street. Just make sure about 200 million of your closest friends do so at the same time. Once the economy collapses, we can all move back into (squat)our former abodes rent and mortgage free. We can all plant victory gardens in our yards, learn to spin cotton, and live pretty darn well IMHO.

34

Oh, BTW, I didn’t care much for that Onion link when I read it 2 weeks ago. I don’t think anyone needs to panhandle to survive on the street in most cities; and drunks are certaintly an annoying representation of the homeless population in general. Because of their “A-camp”-y (hippie slang for agro) behavior they are the most visible (smellable?).

Anyway, here is a competing link:
http://www.tmcm.com/comics/comics%2090_99/h91morebums.html

35

jmullaney wrote:

Um, no. That’s not what big corporations mostly do. That’s not even what most big corporations do at all. It’s as stereotyped and inaccurate a view of large companies as the stereotype of the drunken-bum-as-homeless-person that you complain about elsewhere in your post.

Yes, big corporations do pay very small wages in countries that don’t have the U.S. minimum wage. But they pay these small wages to people who are willing to work for those small wages. Generally, these workers would otherwise make even less money for the same work, were it not for the big company that moved into town and offered additional employment.

Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

36

Hmmm… last time I heard about striking mine workers in Indonesia they were merely arrested and lined up and shot by corporate Thugs. Oh, well, NASDAQ, the stock market for the next hundred years. I forget the Stock Ticker for that corp., but last quarter’s result were very promising : ).

But, you are right: I was exagerating. I don’t even know if those stories I heard about MBNA lending money to companies to tear down the rain forests is even true.

My point is that people here or anywhere else who aren’t willing to work for whatever wages shouldn’t be institutionalized or otherwise mocked. Is it only OK to be homeless in Indonesia, or shall we mock them as drunks (before our savings accounts help buy the bullets to shoot them) too?

37

Oh, if you don’t believe me, here’s a link:

ftp://ftp.alternatives.com/library/bizmine2/freeprt.txt

The server is really slow. It must be in Australia or something.

The list continues at:
http://www.alternatives.com/libs/bizmine2.htm

Please don’t tell me this was way back in 1996, so it doesn’t apply anymore…

38

From the OP:

I’ve heard that in the USSR, the Communistic Party went through the following reasoning:

  1. Marxism is obviously true.
  2. Anyone who disagrees with Marxism is therefore obviously insane.
  3. The insane are a danger to themselves and others.
  4. Therefore, all dissidents should be locked away in insane asylumns “for their own protection”.

But of course, that could never happen in good ol’ US of A, right? Naaah.

dhanson
Member posted 10-26-1999 10:22 AM

I’ve always been partial to wild claims with no references. They’re so darn convincing.

Are you saying that payments to individuals and debt payments aren’t part of running the government? I guess when you say “The price of actually running the government is almost trivial”, what you really mean is “The price of actually doing what I think the government should be doing is almost trivial”. If you think that homelessness can be cured by getting rid of welfare, Social Security, and other “payments to individuals”, then I think you’ll be included in Flora’s round-up.

39

I think you misunderstood dhanson, Ryan. In fact, I think you got his statement almost exactly backward. All he was pointing out was that the preponderance of the non-defense federal budget is made up of transfer payments and are (for all intents and purposes) non-discretionary. Yes, technically we could go back on the implicit promise we made to Social Security recipients or the explicit promise made to bondholders. But we’re not.

So what’s left after all of that is actually not a ton of money, from which can be cut not a ton of waste. dhanson’s point, I think, was simply that there really isn’t as much “waste” in the federal budget as the sheer size of it would leave many to intuit.

Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine

40

Thank you, Manhattan. Pretty close.

I brought up those points specifically to refute the notion that we can fund a gigantic new social program by just tweaking government and getting rid of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.