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And you know this, how? Do you speak to them? Do you know their stories? Do you even know their names? You are aware that many, MANY people went from nice white-collar jobs to dire straits in the recession, right? And that addiction is a health and mental health issue, right? And that plenty of good people make the MISTAKE of trying to escape their problems, like, say foreclosure after a job loss, by turning to alcohol or drugs, right? And that a lot of those people are veterans, to boot?
Oh, wait. You just want to send some carbon monoxide their way. Hey, poison a fellow human being because you don't like their unfortunate circumstances. What a guy.
You know the other day I heard a very tragic story about one of these people. It seems that one day he was attacked by an angry mob that held him down, forced a crack pipe into his mouth, and lit it. A very sad story indeed.......
If a bum ever comes up to your car trying to clean your windshield turn on the wipers.......
I am not calling them a bum (a bum is a hiney in my personal dictionary, I aim not to use derogatory terms as much as I can). But yes, when someone comes up and touches my car or gets too close, I let them know in no uncertain terms I am not comfortable with it.
It can be annoying, because I feel like the people who hound you are not really homeless.
If my husband & I see someone sleeping in a bus station, we know he has no where to go, we will bring him food. I do not just hand money-my husband saw someone hand a 'homeless' man money & watched him walk right into the liquor store. I'm not going to feed into their addiction. Now, if we are walking down the street and a guy is sitting there singing or playing a guitar, we will usually throw money in the 'hat.' At least they're doing something for it.
I was in San Francisco once for work, and during the weekend my coworkers and I walked around the city for the day on Saturday. Toward the end of the night, I remember coming down this escalator toward the train station, and all of a sudden this guy comes up to us with his arms wide open, yelling 'open up your wallets folks!' I got scared because I thought he was robbing us, then I realized he was begging. I did not contribute...he looked like a regular guy just looking for a payday & looked perfectly well enough to work to me.
Yup! Kids hounding me at an exit or entrance is very annoying. We have even had girlscouts giving us the finger at the grocery store!
ROFL. Maybe some of those stereotypes about our state are true.
A lot of the homeless are mentally ill or addicts. How do you propose that problem be solved?
You hear a lot from mental health advocates who think we should 'do something.' The problem is that there isn't a good solution, unless you want to shred the Constitution and essentially put the homeless under house arrest for no other reason than having an addiction or a mental illness.
There have been provisions such as the Baker Act to pave the way for involuntary sheltering or even commitment of the mentally ill. But how do you identify someone as mentally ill without running afoul of illegal arrest provisions in the Bill of Rights? And where do you draw the line between someone who is just eccentric enough that he prefers living on the streets and someone who is a danger to himself and the surrounding community? Are we going to turn police officers into mental health professionals?
In truth, someone who is out on the street is often that way by choice, regardless of how unwise that choice might be. While some fear for their safety in shelters, a larger number do not like the structure, the controls, and the rules. So creating a government shelter does not really count as a solution either, unless you allow the place to run without any rules at all.
I cannot remember the exact details, chiefly because it was twenty years ago, but there was a shelter in New York City that got lots of grant money to test a theory: If homeless people had their own place to stay, they would no longer be homeless. So they built a shelter that consisted of apartments rather than the barrack-style housing you find in most places.
If I remember correctly, it was a colossal bust. Very few of the homeless actually wanted to take advantage of even such a free environment, and reverted back to living on the streets.
One thing I notice on these types of threads is the polarized reactions you see: from, "Bums stink" to "You should be ashamed for not helping our homeless brethren."
To be honest, even though I like to try to help people when I can, I wonder if this broad idea of being compassionate and engaging with every "homeless" stranger you meet is realistic. From an evolutionary standpoint, does it make any sense?
I mean, I try my best to be decent to my friends and family, and yet I still sometimes fall short of my ideal; I only have so much love and patience (and money) to go around. Do I really need to be browbeat because I sometimes suffer from "compassion fatigue" when the tenth person tells me that they need $5 for their train ticket?
Exactly. I work in NYC, and I've gone to work walking past people sleeping on the sidewalk in the dead of winter, marveling that they manage to survive on the concrete on their beds of filthy blankets. But they do, and they obviously feel safer on the sidewalk in a doorway than in a shelter, which is understandable. I can't do anything to help them or all the other people I will meet later in the day who have the cardboard sign proclaiming that they are down on their luck and need money for a bus ticket home when I know damn well they are junkies or the people on every block shaking a cup for money. Sometimes I do give change, and there IS a guy on Park Avenue South with a missing leg, sitting in a wheelchair. If I see him, I give him something. Last week an old guy got on the train and gave a pretty good, sad speech about how he hates that he has to beg and would rather be working at an auto-body shop but lost his job, and he was right when he said, "Most of you won't even look me in the eye or give me the courtesy of a smile." I gave him a buck.
But "compassion fatigue" is a good term. There are so many beggars. At least in NYC I know that if they want food, they can get it. They have City Harvest, which picks up unused food from restaurants, and there are food banks and soup kitchens all over. The biggest problem seems to be getting word out that the services are available.
I do give food and monetary donations to the food pantries/homeless shelters in my home area.
I was once walking along a sidewalk in Chicago (this was a busy pedestrian walkway in an area full of higher end shops, etc) while we were doing some Christmas shopping. A woman was sitting along the sidewalk, asking for money. I briefly made eye contact with her (mistake, I know), and she shouted at me:
"You're the devil! White people are the devil!"
This woman was white, by the way. Obvious mental health issues.
There used to be a woman in the World Trade Center by the door to the East River Savings Bank ATMs who would ask everyone who came out for $20. One of my friends got asked and said, "No" and the woman started screaming at her, "You bitsch! You got it all and I got nothing!"
Another time a group that handed out sandwiches to the downtown homeless gave her a sandwich and she threw it back at them and yelled, "I don't want food! I want MONEY!"
She got so annoying that PAPD finally threw her out of the complex and wouldn't let her come back in.
Yep. I'm mean to people who hang out in the middle of a busy street. I also happen to know, from my own personal experience feeding *actual* homeless people, that they don't hang out in the middle of streets.
You haven't been to Los Angeles lately. Just south of down town in Huntington Park you'll see them begging in the middle of the streets at red lights.
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