Yo, Fire Ant Boy. Hail Your Ass in Here a Moment!

The BBQ Pit
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Hail Ants in this thread :

Look, you little multilegged biting insectile slap-worthy carrion-eating antithesis of ignorance-fighting, I don’t know why the fuck you think you have necessary and sufficient reason to attack the down and out by alleging that most of us who’ve ended up homeless chose it for ourselves, but it’s a lot more than merely ‘politically incorrect’ to say so: it’s factually incorrect and implausible to anyone who lacks a compelling reason to convince their cowardly selves that it could never happen to them and that they do not need to concern themselves with those whose plight they find disturbing.

In this thread I was asked by BamBam what percentage of homeless people I’d met when I myself was homeless were people who had chosen the lifestyle. I had to answer that I’d never met anyone whatsoever who was homeless by choice. Are there any at all? Well, I, too, grew up hearing tales of “hobos” and “hobo culture”, of men (mainly men) hopping freight trains and living in “hobo jungles” at the edges of towns and hiring themselves out one day at a time doing yard work and so forth, and of how the “lure of the open road” was more enticing to them than the (presumably available) option of “settling down”. Truth, or yet another urban legend? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I never ran across any, and I doubt if the combined eyes of the Teeming Millions have encountered them in a significant proportion to the homeless folks who are homeless in the everyday mundane sense of having lost their homes and lacking the wherewithal to acquire a new one.

Here’s how I became homeless, Ant Bite: I had a job in an auto body repair shop in a small town in New Mexico. My boss did not give me regular hours–instead, he would have me sign out for the day when there wasn’t enough for me to work for the full day, and I’d only get paid for the hours I’d put in. And one slow month in late summer of '84 I was sent home early several days one week, then the following Monday told to quit at noon and not bother coming in again until Thursday. I went home, did the math, and saw that I would not have rent money for next month even if I stopped buying food. So I took my mostly unspent income tax refund check and turned it into traveler’s checks, gave notice at work, and stuffed my belongings into my backpack, attached my sleeping bag, and hitched to the big city where I’d heard there were more jobs. My plan was to rent an unfurnished room and live out of my sleeping bag, and find a job, any job, and improve my circumstances from there. But because of changes in the availability of cheap rental (single room occupancy) space in the cities, it was well nigh impossible for me to rent a room even when I had several hundred dollars on me. I interviewed for available rooms and traveled by bus or commuter rail for days and finally found a person who was looking for a roommate and I paid him in advance one week and breathed a sigh of relief. I then went out to seek a job. Came back in late and found my backback and sleeping bag missing, my clothes dumped out on the floor, and the real landlord stating that the person I’d rented the room from didn’t live there and had faked the documents I’d been shown. I got back my traveler’s checks (also stolen) by being able to prove my identity at a bank that sold them. Kept looking for jobs and/or a place to live. Slept in the stairways of older apartment buildings with no doormen, up towards the top on one of the landings; or in churches with inadequate locks or unlocked windows I could climb in; or once on a couch in a clinic office where I asked to use their bathroom and they forgot I was in there and closed up with me inside. More than one of the people I interviewed with for apartment-sharing was looking for a lover and often didn’t have any separate space for someone to live in. Temp agencies sent me out on jobs and kept a portion of my wages, the jobs kept not working out (many long stories, but I assure you it wasn’t because of me arriving late, not working hard, being intoxicated on the job, etc). Eventually my money ran out and I was still on the streets.

Anteater Bait, the first tactic in the fight against ignorance is the search, and if you’d bothered to do a search here on SDMB, you’d have discovered these threads:

The Homeless Choose to be Homeless, Right?

How To Solve Homelessness

Who’s Been Homeless?

and many others. You could also extend your search beyond the SDMB and get a real sense of the experience of being homeless. If this type of evidence is too anecdotal for you, you could go forth in search of statistics and analytical studies.

Or you could just make yourself a nice little Chlordane coctail and consume it in the privacy of your cozy little domestic nest, thereby assisting the effort to eradicate ignorance considerably.

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I’m confused - were you a Singin’ Hobo, or a Stabbin’ Hobo? :smiley:

But seriously - your story is both interesting and enlightening. It also seems to show that you had a good inner strength, and some serious perserverence, to go through what you did and turn out well. Not many people could be broken down to that level of rock-bottom, and pull themselves back up again.

I think your post is a great example of how easy it can be to have a long run of bad luck which send you to that rock bottom.

I hope things are infinitely better for you now…I’m assuming, since you’re posting regularly on a web board, that they are…

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Yes, I’m indoors and well-paid, and I get to program in FileMaker all day :slight_smile:

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AHunter3

I realize this is the pit, but I’m not trying to incite you with this post, just curious about your opinion (I jumped here from the Great Debates thread in the OP). Many homeless people, at least in my state, are there because they suffer from mental illness and have been released from health facilities because of budget issues, patients right to choose, etc…those people I have sympathy and compassion for. The alcoholics and drug addicts, the con artist beggars, those people I have no sympathy for. People like you I feel unsure about. Since most of my personal experience with the homeless has been with the begging con artist alcohol & drug addict type, I tend to be leary when approached by a stranger wanting something from me. But you never indicated that you were soliciting for handouts or anything, so I must assume you were making honest endeavors to better your situation, and ultimately did. Congratulations by the way.

So if I see a sane but disheveled person on the streets who isn’t asking for anything from me, I generally don’t form any jusgement of them. If I knew they were homeless ‘through no fault of their own’ I would ask myself questions like; could that happen to me? how DID they get to this point in life? What can I do to avoid that situation?

Again, not to incite you, but to try to understand your experience and others who have shared it, I’m wondering, have you ever looked back on your experience and asked, “was my situation the result of choices I’ve made, some of which may not have been that wise?”

For instance in your situation, was quitting your dwindling part time job (but job nonetheless) without solid prospects of another the best thing to do? Then going to the big city without first looking for a place to live or at least looking through the classifieds of the big city paper to estimate living expenses and reconsider the feasability of your plan, should that have been debated longer? There was an awful lot of risk involved. It seems it ultimately paid off for you so the time you spent without a home may have been worth it to you. But keeping the part time job and looking for another in your free time would have been safer. Staying in the apartment you had at the time until the landlord had you legally evicted, a process that can take several months to actually get you out, would have bought (borrowed?) you more time with a roof over your head. You chose not to accrue debt, not necessarily a bad decision, but getting behind on the rent temporarily is better to most than living on the streets. So have you ever assessed what happened to you and asked if it could have been avoided. You may reply that it was necessary in order for you to end up where you are today, and that you don’t regret your choices… I can respect that viewpoint.

But for those who don’t pull themselves up and instead turn to con-begging or constantly anesthetizing themselves, should we believe that they didn’t ‘choose’ their situation to some large degree? What about the ones who took a long road of bad choices to get to that point? Those who didn’t study in school in order to get a good job, who wind up one paycheck away from being homeless, and then no paychecks away? They could join the military and be reasonably assured of a lifelong career there if they chose it. The military provides your housing, your food, your health care, your education if you want it, and they pay you decent wages on top of all that. Not the ideal choice of careers but respectable for sure. I spent four years in the Army and am now a year away from my electrical engineering degree thanks to the GI Bill and Army College Fund. They pay you somewhere around $40,000 these days for college.

So excluding the mentall ill or otherwise disabled individuals, how many of them out there do you believe we might consider to have ‘chosen’ to be there as a result of making bad choices with their life?

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I can’t discuss the mentally ill even for the purpose of excluding them from the rest of our conversation without creating one hell of a hijack of this thread. Please do a search on “AHunter3” and “mentally ill” and read some threads I’ve participated in before we go there.

Meanwhile, I think you’ve got the proverbial cart in front of the horse. If your prospects for removing yourself from the ranks of the homeless and unemployed is not great, and months or even years go by without your situation changing, you might find yourself studying up on how to make money as a beggar; and if you’ve been robbed of your begging money a few times, your judgment regarding how best to dispose of some dollars you obtained in this fashion may tend to veer towards things you desire in the immediate here and now, and given this situation what you may want in the here and now may very often be a good drunk or equivalent. Frankly, spending your days searching for food and around nightfall for a place to live, and seldom speaking with other people, kind of messes with your mind. Me, I am not cut out for begging, but I did ask a few people if I could “con them out of a quarter” and there were days when my objective in doing so was to score a 40 ounce of bad beer. You got a problem with that?

And I knew I could “pull mysellf up” because although only high-school educated at the time, I had a good GPA and knew I would do well in college, which was one of the reasons I emigrated–I’d finally decided what I wanted to study and the school with the program I wanted was in the big city. Not every homeless person has the options I had, or the skill set I have, including the “Pygmalion factor”, the ways in which I unconsciously know and exhibit the nuances of speech and behavior that would let me succeed in a professional world. (Ironically enough, these can work against you when you are attempting to get and keep a job as unskilled labor. You may need a different set of nuanced behaviors to fit in there). You are doing quite a bit of victim-blaming here.

I knew a psychiatrist who made the “bad choice” of deciding to move to less expensive residential housing in Manhattan. When the brand new building she’d contracted to live in turned out to be behind schedule and not ready on time, and she’d already given notice on the other, she handled it badly and made several other “bad choices”, beginning with choosing to spend her $70,000 / year professional income stream on a hotel room and a lawyer who did not succeed in extracting her down payment but did a good job of billing her at high rates. Her private practice suffered, she lost her office space as well, kept blowing money on the fight, and eventually lost the hotel room as well and ended up with Child Protective nosing around trying to take away her kid, which scared her from seeking help at social work agencies and services, and she ended up homeless and kind of scrambled and nutty. Bad choices? Check. People do screw up sometimes. Unless you’re immune to screwing up, don’t kid yourself, it could happen to you.

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Well, what about those who for conscientious reasons would not want to serve in a military? I served in the US Navy before I received honorable discharge as a conscientious objector, so I’m always wary of people saying the military can improve everything for you with no downsides.

But anyway, it seemed to me when I was entering the Navy that it would be difficult for a homeless or vagrant person to join, as the paperwork presupposes that you’ve had a relatively stable life and address(es) for the past few years.

UnuMondo

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I suppose, if they are no older than 35 (maybe less) and in good health when they run out of luck. That option is not available to people who are older, have poor health, poor eyesight, or a number of other obstacles.

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If they would choose to live in the streets and be a burden to society rather than volunteer to serve their country, that’s their choice. I was offering the military as one example. There are plenty of other ways to better your life.

The military will take any reasonably healthy person who fits within their age brackets and who has enough intelligence and wits to pass an extremely easy ASVAB. That’s physical as well as mental health. No, they probably will not take some bum who’s wasted his mind and body on drugs and alcohol for years on end.

I should have been more specific about who this opportunity is available to. Obviously if you’ve screwed up late in life then the military isn’t much help.

** AHunter3** I think YOU have the cart before the horse. I would dare to say no homeless adult was born that way, therefore the decisions they made in life came before their homelessness. While you are commiserating over how to fix the mess that someone has gotten themselves into, and making it sound pointless to even try, I am talking about preventing the situation from happening in the first place.

Instead of replying to my question about your circumstances, you gave me another anecdote. Not a very strong one either. At least not strong for your position , but it supports mine rather well. What did this woman do, have the movers show up with all of her stuff to a building that wasn’t finished yet? You mean she didn’t know the building wasn’t completed before she moved out of her old place? That’s just fucking stupid. She must have given her notice several months or years in advance for her not to have realized that the building was not near completion. Yes, I would definitely say those were her bad choices, not something that just happened to her randomly through no fault of her own, like a lightning strike ( which by the way, you can also do plenty of things to avoid, not the best example I guess). She made the bad choice of hiring a lousy lawyer. She should have made the effort to find a good one, or at the very least one that is paid a percentage of what he gets for you, not one that will suck your wallet dry with no results. Did she just keep giving him money without demanding progress reports? Stupid. After making these bad decisions, why didn’t she just cut her losses and find another apartment building? Don’t tell me there were none available, plenty of people commute from several miles out of the city if they have to. How did her private practice suffer from these events? The trauma of living in a hotel was too much for her? You say she lost her office space? So she owned her own practice? Then what prevented her from sleeping there temporarily? As a psychiatrist I would think she would have had some connections, someone who could help her find a place to live, or as a last resort take her in to their own home for a short while.

Your anecdote sounds fishy to me. Tell me, did you know this person when she was a successful psychiatrist, or did you meet her after the fall? If after, I would contribute the whole story to some bullshit she feeds people to excuse her situation. Complete package of lies. However, if you knew her before she was homeless, when she was a successful professional making a very nice living ( but apparently squandering her money instead of setting some aside for emergencies and unforeseen situations like the one that befell her) then I would have to say that she made some unbelievably bad decisions. Which is it, did you meet this woman on the streets or was she an aquaintance of yours before then?

I notice that you didn’t address my question to you about whether you felt you had made some bad choices that resulted in your homelessness. Am I to assume that you believe that none of your choices were bad ones, or that you just didn’t want to admit that they were? It seems to me that too many people in America today refuse to accept responsibility for their own lives. Nothing is ever their fault, it’s either someone else’s or it’s all about a big dark cloud that follows them wherever they go. I like the way you rationalized the drugs and alcohol. Behavior that will knowingly make your situation worse from any perspective but the immideate gratification viewpoint, somehow gets turned into positive therapy that helps you get by. That’s bullshit.

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good point tomndebb, I addressed that in my last post, you must have squeezed that in while I was still ranting.

As I said, I certainly didn’t intend for the military to be the only example of an option that people have to prevent themselves from becoming homeless. I don’t believe that because someone can’t join the military that that means nothing is their fault. It doesn’t diminish their responsibility for their lives just because some avenues are closed to them.

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Loki, I made several bad choices. I did not research my destination as much as I should have. I trusted someone I should not have trusted. Probably more than one, in fact–I’ve always had my doubts about the temp agency personnel I worked with, the events that transpired when they sent me out on jobs was just plain weird. What’s your point? Do you see no difference between someone making some mistakes and error judgements and someone choosing their resultant circumstances? Would you say that most people injured in automobile collisions chose to be injured or disabled because some of the decisions and choices they made when the rubber was screeching were bad ones?

Jesus fucking christ, I wasn’t blaming anyone else for my homelessness or homelessness in general, I was saying that it pisses me off to hear people say we are (/were) homeless by choice. Is it their responsibility (as it was mine at the time) to try to do something about their situation if they want out of it? Of course. Even the ones who for various reasons are in no position to discharge that responsibility. Do you have some responsibility to help? Maybe–but whether you do or you don’t, you’d be out of line saying “If you’re homeless it’s your own fault”. Or “If you’re homeless, it’s because you choose to be homeless.”

As for the shrink, yes I knew her before all this went down. I told her at the time to rent living space in the outer boroughs if necessary. She went into deer-in-headlights mode and made an incredible string of stupid decisions, and also became abrasive and whiny, and got on my nerves, but she didn’t choose what happened to her. She finally got a job (several YEARS later) working in a social work setting doing community outreach, btw.

Tell me you’re not one of those assholes who argues that everyone chooses what happens to them, that there are no accidents, that everyone is in complete control of their destiny, etc etc etc. THAT’S bullshit.

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Loki:

Since this is already in the pit, I’ll tell you straight up that you’ve a moronic view of what the ASVAB is. To pass the thing at the minimum level is easy. To pass the thing at the level to qualify for advanced training isn’t.

Your ignorance is not limited to the ASVAB either. The United States Armed Forces are in the business of filling their ranks with folks qualified to do the jobs required of them. Yes, this includes a training track; however, the applicant must be qualified for the training track for the chosen field. It’s not an “Oh heck, I can’t get any other job so I’ll go join the Army” deal. Drug use, mental illness, and criminal background will all disqualify a prospective applicant. In short: Those of us who’ve served in the US military have done so because we are capable.

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Bad choices combined with bad luck get a person into a shitty situation.

I’ve made bad choices, and so has everyone else. If only those people who have made only good choices are worthy of respect or compassion, then we’re all damned to hell. Every single one of us.

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I would daresay this is not an assumption you can make, given the increasingly dire situation in the U.S. of homeless children – and I don’t mean teen runaways, I mean kids with mothers (or, more rarely, fathers) with whom they live, but who are homeless.

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And let me echo TANSU – I’ve got a good education and a good job and a basically good life. But I also have a great family and parents who could and did bail me out the multiple times I made dumb-ass financial decisions, and who let me come home and who took care of me when, as a young adult, I became fairly seriously ill and could not keep my job. If they hadn’t been there for me, I don’t know what I’d have done. Been homeless, probably.