No, it was actually at Tom’s Restaurant - a.k.a. the Seinfeld cafe - which is down the street from there. Pretty good place to get a meal on the cheap. Anyway I think I left the waitress three or four dollars for the tip.
I’m laughing my ass off at ‘charity that helps him get away from the alcohol’.
However, there are plenty of do-gooder programs out there that I think lots of people donate to that are awesome and do a lot of good.
It’s partly the nanny-ish aspect of worrying about his alcohol intake. If I have a bad day, I might have a beer when I get home. This homeless guy is pretty much having bad day after bad day, in that he’s homeless and begging. I’d want a beer after his day.
I give the spare change I give to those guys who are looking for cigarette butts. I figure, if you want a smoke so bad you’ll pick up stubs off the ground, then here, take a couple of bucks, go mad, buy some camels. For the record, I don’t smoke.
Yeah, but he’s probably homeless and miserable because he’s a drunk - are you really helping him by buying him more alcohol?
You’re right that I didn’t research each different program offered by each of the 50 states of the US, plus the programs each individual city and county might have, because I’m a bit short on time for that.
Yes, I know that I’m guilty of believing the word of mouth of journalists and newspaper articles and TV reports, and believing the reports from the Posters on the Dope. While you get your information from … personal experience, I assume? Because that trumps everything else? Or by being a real true American?
Oh wait, you haven’t given any information, or made a statement on the real and correct social policies of the US to educate me. You just shout at me. Very convincing.
Ooohh, all those bad anti-capitalists! Wow, your critical thinking skills and factual refutations of claims instead of resorting to ideological pigeon-holing would have convinced me…
Yeah. I do kinda think I am helping him. Do you think you are helping him not be homeless and miserable by not buying him alcohol?
So you mean there are other programs and projects by the state (or even charities) to help homeless people, besides prevention?
And these low-income housing: does this mean that a poor person who’s just lost his job, or has personal problems and is in a depression, can call a number from the city to get counseling and advice for his psychical problems, and a social worker will work with him and the landlord to pay the rent instead of being evicted? Because I hear a lot of stories of people being evicted rather shortly, saying they found no other resources to turn to.
That really surprises me - from your arguments I assumed you not.
Nice strawman there. You must have missed that part of my post where I said that a lot of things could and should still be improved. I would never argue something obviously wrong and dumb, because I certainly know many of the faults of my own system.
So are there additional projects or programs to help people get rid of the addiction, and put the mentally ill into counseled housing projects (where social workers help them live on their own, so they don’t get overwhelmed?
I have read about how many mentally ill people were kicked out of the mental asylums under Reagan to both save federal money and put them into assisted living, but lack of coordination and funding with and for the communities meant that there weren’t enough asssisted living facilities to catch all the released patients, and thus many ended up on the streets.
Are there enough programs now, so that when a mentally ill homeless person clogs up the library, or threatens people on the bus, you can direct him to the approriate program?
Are there enough rehab places for people with no money?
I just read this month’s magazine, topic “Addiction”, they had one article about a woman doing withdrawal with methadon (paid by the general health insurance), working part time in a protected kitchen in preparation for the real job market. She had her baby taken away because she was high, now that she’s been clean and gotten her life in order again, the child (7 years now) has been given back, and she tries to make the most of the remaining years, while still receiving counseling and help on being a good mother now.
The other article was about a young man who started shooting Heroin at age 12 (I was shocked at that young age, too), who now gets dimetr… medical heroin regularly at the University clinic. From the general Health insurance, because back in 2002, seven major cities tried out a new approach of giving hard-core addicts, where withdrawal and methadon no longer worked, pure medical heroin. This cuts out both the medical side-effects from impure street stuff, and the crimes to get the money to buy the stuff on the street. The project was monitored by scientists and enough of a success to convince the parliament in 2009 to pass approval. Now it’s done under controlled circumstances and allows the addicts to get their life back in order.
Do you have similar programs in the US, or would you run into legal problems from the whole “war on drugs” thing? Given that it appears to me that even medical marijuana for pain relief in end-stage cancer and similar is very difficult in the US.
Are there social street workers going around, trying to gain the confidence of the homeless and get them into long-term programs?
Are there programs where they can slowly learn working regular hours again, with help from social workers to join the normal job market later,?
Except that it was an American who accused me of living in an Utopia. I would never use that word because I know there are still homeless around. I said so in the post where I gave the current numbers. Nobody denies that homeless exist in European countries. It’s just that we have a bundle of programs that help most of the people, and certainly not the conditions described by some posters from personal experience.
Why? Is the idea of rehab, counseling, street workers, so weird? Are the rehab programs you have not effective, so that most people end up on the street again? Do you think it’s better to stay alcoholic and die soon from it, than get help? Is it that I called it charity, so you think of a church that makes people sing hymns? (I wasn’t thinking of that.) What exactly is so funny about taking the long-term view, helping people get control of their life again?
Yes, helping people get off the street is only “do-gooder” :rolleyes: but giving panhandlers money for alcohol is so much better because it’s not a moral judgment on him! And you feel that worm glow of satisfaction! And when he freezes to death in the winter because he passed out from the alcohol, or his feet have to be amputated because of medical problems from the booze, or his liver gives out … well, at least he had his comfort from cheap wine.
I honestly can’t comprehend this point of view as being better than helping people, but whatever.
Actually, my understanding of the problem regarding “free range mentally ill homeless” was that there was a serious push by civil rights types of groups. Hey, these crazy people have a right to be free basically. And you see the results today.
As much as I (and most people) love our freedom…lets face it, some folks really NEED forced supervision to keep from going off the deep end.
Ah, yes, we Europeans are so nannish when we try to care about other people. Because we see that some people need a helping hand when they can’t get up themselves, instead of the freedom to stay in the gutter being drunk that the Americans see first and foremost and last.
One beer to relax after work if your life is in order is quite different from the hard liquor that alcoholics need for their illness.
And of course a day on the streets is shitty. So people want alcohol to numb the feeling, so to avoid the feeling that they need to get help from the social workers coming around regularly. But hey, I got money and now I 'm drunk and things aren’t so bad, so I’ll stay here instead!
I wonder have any of you ever heard either the stories of how very ordinary people end up homeless on the street through misfortune at work, or personal problems? And have you ever heard the story of people who came back from the gutter, to get a job and a real flat again? They are boundless, and thankful to all of the people who helped getting up.
But they never remember the people who gave them money to continue in the street.
Rather, it was that people were - rightly- complaining that the insane asylums were badly run, and that many people there didn’t need that kind of enviroment, but could manage their own lifes with some help - rightly.
Then Reagan used this as excuse to turn people out of the mental asylums, because hey, that saves federal money! - but without any cooperation in the communities, and without giving money to the communities to have enough facilities. That was not at all what the civil rights groups wanted or had advocated.
It’s like saying “People have the right to drive in their car where they want to go” - which is basically true - and saying “Well, then we don’t need speed limits, or any traffic laws, or “keep off my property-laws”” which is obviously not what was meant, and certainly unreasonable.
Using a legitmate protest and consideration doesn’t mean that a bungled implemenation is the fault of the protesters.
Yes. Which is why I asked if there are now enough supervised places where mentally ill people can go to today.
People don’t need the Nurse Ratchett treatment; that doesn’t mean they should wander around the streets unsupervised, either. There’s (as always) the middle road of sensible approach, in this case, have a group home with a few live-in social workers, who can tell the people to clean up if necessary, and manage the money for grocery shopping.
You twisted so much of my post that I don’t know why I am even bothering. Also I am breaking my rule of responding to people that put rolly eyes in their posts to me, but what the hell, this is one of those topics that get to me, so I’m in.
First of all, I never once used ‘do-gooder’ in a way to indicate that those organizations are not a good thing. So I find that your lil’ annoying ass rolly eyes and quotation marks were a slick way of you trying to paint my words as if I DID say do-gooder programs were bad. Shame on you for trying that slick shit.
I find that you painting a picture of footless drunks that are hobbling about on stumps because I gave them a dollar to take the edge of on their long and hard days to be shameful also. Tisk tisk.
But the reason I laughed at you is because, no, I don’t believe in AA and programs like that. If you have a cite that those programs actually, by and large, work, then I will retract my laugh and apologize for laughing.
I live in Canada, so kiss my ass.
We have lots of social programs for the homeless. My point was that NOT giving him cash because he MIGHT buy booze is a bit nanny-ish. If I’m going to treat him as a grown-up, I need to treat him as a grown-up.
In fact, our local homeless dude used to work a single corner, which he treated like his own shop. He would push the walk button, shovel the snow, chat with passersby and ask for change. One day he walked off down the street in a new suit and a new life. I suspect he does, in fact, remember the change we frequently gave him, and the friendly interactions we had with him. One size doesn’t fit all.
Well, if do gooder programs do good, then don’t actions that operate contrary to do gooder programs do harm ?
Maybe you just need a buck for a beer mate ?
So, the way to help homless alcoholics is to give em beer money?
Well, I apologize if I misunderstood the intent and gist of your post.
in that case you honestly lost me. First you laugh at trying to help people, then you use the phrase “do-gooder” but don’t mean it derisivly? From the context it’s usually used, I have the impression that “do-gooder” is always meant with scorn or distaste for naive people trying to do good but failing. Did you mean it a different way?
Yes, it’s hyperbole. But I find it shameful to ignore the consequence of helping the addiction.
Well, what programs? AA is a special program because it uses the faith approach. There are other methods, too. Yes, I know there’s a certain fall-back rate - I’ve heard a lot of stories of both addicts and alcoholics who went through several rehab programs, because they slid back after the first one.
But surely you don’t believe they are 100% ineffective? Some might have a fall-back of 70%, which is surely high; other programs have better numbers - again, it depends which type of program we talk about (part of the success is finding the right type of program for the individual in question : there is no standard alcoholic / addict, because the reasons and problems underlying it are so different. What drove a person to the drugs in the first place? Without solving the deeper problem, treating the addiction alone is doomed to failure. Some people are physically more likely to get addicted, no matter to what (different brain chemistry). Some people are psychologically weak and easily addicted. So different people and different reasons need different approaches.
Putting a junkie (yes, you talked about alcoholics, but I read slightly more about drug addicts) in a clinic with cold withdrawal for a couple of weeks, and releasing him back on the street without further support is different (and probably least effective) to putting people on a farm far away and counseling them (although they often slide back when they return to their old friends - they can’t cut off their old friends if they don’t have new ones yet, but the old friends practice the old patterns); and both are different from AA, which at least provides ongoing support. There are success stories from AA. There are people at AA who backslide, but with help from their group keep trying again.
There are people who would never want to talk about in a group like AA, so they need a different approach.
In the past three decades - partly because of the drug problem, and partly because of the growing awareness of alcoholism as real disease and not lack of moral fiber - therapists have made progress in trying and evaluating methods of treatment and their success.
I don’t have exact numbers right now (and have to go bed anyway), I would need to search. However, I believe even with a backfall rate of more than 50%, it’s still worth for those who do manage to kick the habit. And even those who drink again - some of them come back, and keep trying, and suddenly, after the 3rd or 5th therapy, they find something else that makes it worth trying to keep steady from then on.
If you want a success rate of 70% or more - then I don’t think I can give you that. If you think that without a high rate of success it’s not worth the effort - then I disagree.
There’s [thread=541422]another thread[/thread] that may be relevant to the discussion at hand, and perhaps we should all decamp there in order to stop hijacking this one.
Or we can go stink up both, whatever.
I’m Australian and I’m aware that “sawbuck” is a slang term for a $10 note in the US. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to work out that a “Double Sawbuck” is going to be $20.
Seriously, why are people still going on about this? I think it’s nice to see someone trying to put some colour into the language for a change.
Precisely.
Constanze, instead of deciding that ‘do-gooder’ is always used in a derogatory manner, you could actually read my posts in this thread which clearly do not use it that way.
I don’t have to believe something is 100% ineffectual for me to find it laughable. I don’t believe those alcoholic programs work, and in some cases, I believe they do more harm than good. But, hey, that is just my own opinion. AA was actually the one program that I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, based on hearing so many people that I respect recommend it to others. But a few articles and a particularly interesting episode of Bullshit! helped me see that they are laughable too.
No one has to give the bums money. You have every right not to. But lots of bums are really broken, forgotten and desparate people with no real hope. There will always be bottom rungs, in any society. Sometimes, people that are broken can be reached and helped to get back into being a contributing member of society. There are plenty of do-gooder programs out there for that, and for that I am grateful. But there will always be those that will not or cannot get up. And my heart does go to those people, and I have no problem offering them some cash, even though I am pretty sure they will comfort themselves with alcohol that night.
Those that offer them a sandwich, knowing that the real demon in the guy’s life is not hunger just annoy me. That’s all. They are just annoying.
I’m a native speaker of English and I have never heard the term “do-gooder” used without a negative connotation. Not necessarily a strong negative connotation, but a negative connotation all the same.
My understanding is that Constanze is not a native speaker of English… so you can hardly expect him to be aware of the limited edition, connotation-free meaning of the term that you intended when you employed it, surely?
So you’d prefer that people say “Well, I was going to give you some food, because that’s what you asked for. But since I’m supposed to be psychic and know you’re an alcoholic who actually wants grog, and I don’t want to help you get drunk and more messed up than you are now, I’m not going to give you anything. So now you’ve got the shakes and you’re hungry”?
As several people have said, feeding hungry people is understandable and a desirable thing. Helping people who are homeless for whatever reason get shitfaced is a more subjective value call, and the two are- for many people- mutually exclusive.