In the case of the first unwashed fellow mentioned in my earlier post, it didn’t even require a subjective determination. When he would sit down beside me and my eyes would start watering within ten seconds, I could objectively say that he stank.
This is true.
So do not make such a statement, if you can’t back it up.
Two and a Half Inches of Fun has done a couple things here: examined a societal ill and proposed a solution to it. I suspect that Fun has been on the receiving end of some uncomfortable interactions with the homeless and sought to provide a solution. However well-intentioned it might have been, Fun’s solution has been rightly shown to have more than a few holes. Yet those same people who so effectively tear down Fun’s assumptions offer little in the way of counter-solution.
I’d like to think that there are a few things that we can all agree upon…
• Homelessness is a problem worthy of solutions.
• People who need help should have access to help.
• Those seeking help must participate in their own recovery.
• Some people have conditions which preclude them from being responsible for themselves. This neccessarily means that someone or something else needs to take responsibility for them.
• A functional society needs to be tolerant and respectful of one another. In the important case of odor (in this thread anyway), all of us fresh-smelling people have to be tolerant of people who don’t have the facilities we take for granted; just as advocates of the homeless need to appreciate that there is a point at which odor can become so strong that it will drive the majority of fresh-smelling people (who have rights too) away. Both sides have to give a little.
• It’s understandable that one person’s goodwill can be eroded by behavior they (rightly or wrongly) deem exasperating.
• Harrassment, by or of, the homeless, only adds to the problem.
• As Algher pointed out, the “homeless” are composed of many groups that require specialized remedies, not some “one-size-fits-all” answer and each one of the groups is complex enough to warrant it’s own thread. I think any fruitful discussion needs to address them as such.
It is a myth that most homeless people are mentally ill. According to NCH, approximately 16% of the adult homeless population is mentally ill and 5-7% suffers severe mental illness, so you might be able to institutionalize 7% and walk around the rest for now, but I have a feeling the malls, libraries, and laundromats will have crowding issues soon. Hospitals and jails are expensive. It would cost less to subsidize housing and local mental health clinics.
Well, about 40% of homeless men have already served in the military. There are many reasons for the homeless crises, but poverty is the fundamental cause.
Please don’t forget that many (as many as a third) of the homeless are veterans. An increasing number are vets of the war in the Middle East… And about one-third of the homeless are children. Do you want to lock them up too or just leave them on the streets without their parents?
Some of the mentally ill have clinical depression. One of the symptoms of the illness is a lack of energy. Some of you call it laziness. You want to punish someone for having a symptom of his illness?
Some of them would be grateful for medical care and the medications and treatments that would give them some relief. Some of you have no idea how painful mental illness can be. You don’t just lock someone away that is suffering like that.
My objective standards tell me that would make the jailkeeper an animal.
I have never understood the (to me totally ridiculous and out of touch with reality) attitude that “There are a zillion jobs out there. If you’re not a lazy bum, if you’re willing to work, you can get employment. ANYONE can get a job.”
I am not and have not been a lazy bum. Sorry, can’t provide a cite on that, I’ll have to ask you to take my word for it.
a) For most of my working life, from age 18 in 1977 through my first professional gig in 1993, I wanted to be employed; I wanted to receive the good will & preferably the admiration of whatever employer I had for how hard I worked, what good quality work I did, and so on. I was a person who did well in school and was consequently an approval-junkie. But that did not happen. Prior to owning a professional degree that qualified me to work in a slot where no one without an advanced degree of that sort could replace me, I was often considered to possess an “attitude problem”. I don’t know specifically how that manifested itself in their eyes, but I can tell you that it did not take the form of showing up late, not working hard, refusing to do what was asked of me no matter how unpleasant, or giving any kind of back-talk. In my eyes, which are of course, & admittedly, biased eyes, this “attitude problem” consisted of not fitting in with the others and/or of having a way of thinking of myself that was different from how my employers thought of themselves and/or me, and one which struck them as constituting “me putting on airs”, if that makes any sense. Anyhow, between the ages of 19 and around 23 I estimate I held more than 50 jobs, less than 100, with an average tenure of about 1 week. I was very often unemployed.
b) During this stretch, at a couple of points, having been on the books at one job long enough that when I was booted I actually qualified for Unemployment Comp, I went to the unemployment office where I would fill out the stupid forms. The stupid forms would require only that I document 5 places I had applied for work in the course of a whole WEEK! What I was actually doing was picking a main business road and starting at one end and asking in every single solitary one if they could use a worker, and fill out the employment apps if they had them, then going to the next, 20 or 30 or 40 places per day; and then reading all the local newspapers’ want ads sections and applying for everything I was remotely qualified for, calling the ones with phone numbers. I’d say 0.00% percent of this effort ever landed me a job. I always got my jobs by word of mouth. Someone knew someone who was hiring. As bad as I was at social networking, of knowing plain-old ordinary people who might have such a tip, such tips were few and far between.
c) Being a professional meant dramatically far less likelihood of being FIRED. But I did have one organization go out of business, and was unemployed for a year, and it was not easy snagging a minimum-wage crapjob to get me through until I could get an offer commensurate with training & prior salary etc. I could have done that job back when I was in my 20s but I’m not entirely sure they would have hired me then. Whatever “attitude problem” people find in me seems to be less of an issue for them coming from me as a middle-aged guy, maybe?
You — whoever you are — may find it to have always been easy & straightforward to become an employed person. To pick from a plural number of opportunities, even. To always be able to land a gig, even if it was not ideal for you. If so, cool beans, you rock, must be nice. Well, it’s not like that for everyone.
Now take my entire story and keep in mind that I’m a white male English-speaking person in good health with all the middle-class mannerisms and speech patterns, did well in school and therefore even without credentials did not come across as uneducated or ignorant; and despite my “attitude problem” must have displayed a familiarity with the general world of workforce expectations and role behaviors (although apparently the ones I internalized as a kid work far better in a professional setting than for unskilled labor & pickup work). Swap that out for various sets of characteristics of the homeless folks you’ve observed (leaving out, for the moment, laziness or craziness, and for the moment assume clean clothes and a recent bath and general grooming). I would think such a person, if they were otherwise a lot like me, would find it even harder. And that they would have even less of a clue than I have had about how to obtain employment.
I’ve found that “attitude problem” can frequently be accurately translated as “doesn’t kiss the boss’s ass”.