I’m not sure why or how, but this city has very good services for the homeless. There are two large homeless shelter complexes downtown as well as two large addiction treatment centers and several free clinics. Food, shelter, clothing and medical care are free for the asking. Apparently, someone could bounce from program to program and back again for years. We have a family acquaintance - single, no dependent children - who has done just that for the past ten years.
I work at the main downtown library and we have many regulars just as the OP describes - able-bodied and literate, who seem to have no other life than spending all day, every day on the library computers. Somehow they manage.
Actually, around here there are a couple of them. One is called the “Love Squad” that trawls the underpasses handing out food, blankets and Bibles. The other is “Operation White Flag.” When the weather is particularly hot or cold, they drive around in vans with blankets/ice water, looking for people to transport to shelters.
Couldn’t you find yourself a nice, white-collar crime? Aren’t people convicted of things like tax evasion sent to lower security prisons, where the population is a bit less, um, dangerous? Faced with the option of total on-the-street-every-night homelessness or a stretch in a minimum-security prison, which would you choose?
Yeah, actually there are church groups that do that here, I forgot. But the governmental people aren’t going to be doing that.
The other part of the story is friends and family. If you’re willing to trot out a sob story, you could stay with friends or family for months at a time until you finally burn all of them. How many friends do you have that would let you sleep on their couch for 2-3 weeks? When you finally run out of friends is when you really hit homelessness.
It reminds me of part of a John Varley story. There was a social movement of extreme passivism, where people would have their arms and legs surgically removed. This wasn’t as big a deal as it sounds, since major body reconstruction surgery was commonplace, and being a doctor is regarded as a skilled but undemanding profession, like hairdresser or auto mechanic. So these people could be restored to normal, they just chose not to. Anyway, these people would just sit there, and if no one fed them or helped them they’d starve. I forget what kind of point they were trying to make.
But the reality is that working social services, church groups, panhandling and such would become your job. In a lot of ways it would be less demanding to get a part-time job at McDonalds than to put up with the bureacracy and lines and hassle and discomfort and danger of getting everything for free.
I’m not doubting that you may have known a person like this (assholes exist in every socio-economic class) but this statement always strikes a chord with me. It’s one of the accusations frequently made against welfare recipients, a claim which has always seemed to me to be particularly degrading and dehumanizing. It implies that women on welfare are emotionless money-grubbers who want children only for a bump in benefits.
There may be a rare individual who would do something like that, but most women wouldn’t. There are a lot of reasons why a woman on welfare could get pregnant. Irresponsibility is the primary one, but it can also happen when birth control fails, and some women’s religious beliefs preclude birth control. Yet some people seem to automatically jump to the conlusion that if a woman on welfare has a baby, she did it “just for the money.”
In our society, we tend to almost automatically classify the poor as immoral. Sometimes, it’s a defense mechanism-- you don’t have to feel sorry for people who deserve what they got, in other words.
Did the woman tell you this was the only reason she was getting pregnant? I’m not challenging you-- I’m genuinely curious.
Yes, she got pregnant twice to keep the welfare money coming in. I’m certain this is not true in most cases, but some woman actually do that. And I think it happens more than people realize. Like other posters have said, Welfare told them they could get help if they got knocked up.
I’ve always felt that raising a child on welfare is a type of child abuse. I know of several “second generation” welfare babies–children raised on welfare who are now mothers living on welfare. In one of the most extreme cases, the 14 year old daughter of a 29 year old welfare mother had a baby.
When able-bodied, willing to work me applied at our local Employment Agency, I was told every time I went there to GO ON WELFARE! It really really pissed me off–here I was, with skills and experience, and they were trying to get me to GO ON WELFARE. I later found out that the system is desperate to get people on welfare who will soon go off welfare. It proves that “welfare works.”
[QUOTE=Annie-XmasI’ve always felt that raising a child on welfare is a type of child abuse.[/QUOTE]
I really, really can’t convey how offensive I find that statement- remember, you are talking about people’s mothers here. By far the vast majority of people on welfare are mothers who ran in to some unexpected circumstances (a divorce, an illness, etc.) and rely on welfare to keep their kids housed and fed for a brief period while they get back on their feet.
I did not say the mothers who “reply on welfare to keep their kids housed and fed for a brief tperiod while they get back on their feet” are commiting child abuse. I said “mothers who RAISE their children on welfare” and I now add “all their children’s lives.” For a child to grow up seeing no way to getting money but receiving a welfare check is not learning the value of actually working for a dollar and contributing to society. IMHO, raising a child with such a wrong idea of society is definitely abuse.
There is nothing wrong with going to welfare. But living on welfare as a parasite your whole life if you are able to work is definitely wrong
I happen to be reading a book about welfare right now, called The Myth of the Welfare Queen by a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, David Zucchino. One interesting thing that he points out is that when welfare was originally created, it was intended to allow women to stay home and care for their children. It was not created to transition them into the state of single, working mothers with kids in daycare.
Obviously, things have changed. Women’s opportunities in the workforce have increased, etc. But the change in what society was trying to do with welfare was largely informal and uncoordinated. So the fact that a generation or so of women didn’t “get the memo” is no surprise.
There’s a Chinese folktale about the Laziest Man in the World. Once his wife wanted to go visit her mother in another province, but the trip was so long it would take her 30 days to return. She knew her husband was too lazy to feed himself, what to do?
She hit upon an ingenious solution: She baked 30 biscuits, one for each day of her absence, strung them on a loop of string, and hung them around her husband’s neck like a necklace. She figured as long as food was right on top of him, he wouldn’t starve.
When she retuned, she found him dead! He had eaten the ones in front of him, but had been too lazy to pull the string to get more from behind!
Due to the way the mental health industry is working lately, I’m seriously skeptical that honest commitment without accompanying insurance due to “too lazy to go work for food” for last more than 72 hours.
Two weeks, ABSOLUTE TOPS, and your happy tail will wind up discharged unless you present or pretend to present something some fool psychiatrist will think are genuine symptoms.
I’d submit that the act of pretending to be bipolar/schizophrenic/etc would be work by the OP’s definition, so… the mental health commitment angle probably doesn’t work unless we cheat.
It is appalling that one must fall into a category of either dysfunction or more profound need to qualify for assistance. TellMeImNotCrazy’s tale is not uncommon, but is terrible to consider. She WANTED to work, and there was no help to bridge the gaps. None.
(soapbox up) Apparently we’re far too busy digging ourselves into a nightmarish debt due to war to even pause for a moment to consider the needs of Americans. ( soapbox down )
Not around here he wouldn’t. Even though vagrancy is a crime and there are ordinances against panhandling. We get phone in complaints all the time about panhandlers & beggers. But if I were to arrest a guy just for being a bum, not only would he not be prosecuted/jailed, I’d get my ass chewed! Even aggressive panhandling isn’t always charged.
I’ll tell you what a lot of them are doing: they call 911 and claim an injury, heart attack, whatever, and are transported to county ER where they spend the night.
Or they walk into mental health and start yammering how they’re going to kill themselves so they get put up for 72 hours. This happens a lot in the winter.
The OP doesn’t mention substance abuse. Some shelters will not allow anyone to stay if they are using. This is a good share some homeless people.
For readability, revise my first paragraph in my most recent post to:
Due to the way the mental health industry is run lately, I’m seriously skeptical that an uninsured, lazy and honest person whose only defect is “too lazy to go work for food” would remain in a psychiatric treatment facility for more than 72 hours.
Is there any city/province/nation anywhere on earth that will provide long-term food, clothing and shelter for “a reasonably intelligent, able bodied adult, (who simply refuses) to do work of any kind”?
