This morning there was an article in our local paper.
It seems some leaders in our town are getting upset with homeless people camping out in unused landscape inside city limits.
“It looks terrible!” They say. “We have to make another law to keep them from just moving their ratty RV’s (that they live in) around to another spot every two days.”
(The law here says RV’s can’t be parked in any one place for more than three days.)
“We’re going to have to increase the stringency of the law to prevent these people from setting up tents in other peoples’ backyards!” “We certainly don’t need the riffraff in plain view when we are trying to make our city more attractive to businesses!”
In response to the comment of one board member who said that making such laws would give people who already have few options even fewer: “That’s why we have so many people here who are homeless. We make it too easy for them!”
And then there’s this line in the article about who these people are.
Apparently, these “problem people” formerly occupied a run-down trailer park until a developer came along and decided he wanted to use the space to build some kind of business or other.
(I hadn’t noticed that the developer has even started building anything there yet, two months later. But then, it’s been a couple weeks since I went by there.)
They were given two months to leave. The developer had said he’d pay a little something to help them out, as I recall–his only obligation, in his eyes. It didn’t matter that it may not have been enough to help some of them them move. (I know from experience how expensive moving can be, especially if it’s to some place out of the area.)
A reporter interviewed some of the residents of the trailer park right after they heard the news. (This article was in the paper too.) The ones they talked to were really worried, not knowing what they were going to do.
One resident was disabled. Another had no way to move any of her things to another place.
I know for a fact (my brother and I researched the cost of living in a trailer park recently when trying to decide where to live after the house we were living in was sold) that even trailer parks can be expensive around here, and there aren’t too many places that have spots available. And they interview you too, at least in one trailer park in the area.
I’ve had experience with interviews here.
Maybe it’s just that once you’re over 50, you are not considered to be worth hiring for anything anymore. But I know a young man who hasn’t been able to get work for years because of a blot on his record from something he did when he was a teenager. After a while (I know this from experience), you just give up and don’t even apply for jobs or anything else anymore.
There may be reasons they have not been able to move!
(The city doesn’t allow RV’s to park just everywhere, either, not even in the ritzier sections of town.)
Along the way they’ve also had blurbs in the paper about these trailer park residents who were displaced. Just enough articles to cause me to remember…
I seem to remember reading that one of the residents had not moved out when the time was up, and his or her things were put in the dump or something. (Eviction proceedings, no doubt.)
Sort of treated like rats in the park, I would say. You’re not really people, if you’re poor enough. The place you leave can just decide something else is more important and force you out, just like that.
One winter in Boston, I worked in a homeless shelter that was set up in a church. A lot of people who stayed there at night had ratty and torn clothes, so I brought my sewing machine one day and offered to fix anyone’s clothes that needed to be fixed.
The few possessions of a homeless person are as precious to him as our houses and cars and expensive possessions are valuable to the rest of us, I discovered. Maybe more.
One guy needed his jacket fixed, but he was unwilling even to take it off so I could fix it. He was afraid of letting it go.
I guess he’d had experience with people taking his things if he let someone else have them for one reason or another? And his jacket with a big hole in it, in the middle of a very cold winter, was more important to him than a fixed jacket, if it had to go through someone else’s hands to get fixed. He might not get it back, you know!
Another preferred his old ratty socks to brand new ones when they were offered to him. (I don’t understand that one. These homeless people do a lot of walking, and a good pair of socks can make all the difference in how comfortable your feet are in your shoes when you walk!)
It doesn’t matter to some people that these are human beings–”we have programs”.
Programs that make them dependent? What kind of programs?
If it’s a program to help someone learn to do something himself or herself, that might be a good thing, providing there is also lifestyle transition help as well. (They’d have to learn to fit into at least a middle-income person’s lifestyle in order to be acceptable, in our country. That’s a far cry from the kind of lifestyle they’ve learned to have.)
However, I see a lot of the programs sponsored by more liberal-minded people as simply being a way to get us out of their sight.
A way to keep them from feeling guilty because they are unwilling to help the unfortunate, themselves.
As a society, we live in Disneyland. Lots of shooting stars, clean streets, lots of fantasies…we are not going to allow any poor people, trashy yards, homeless people, or handicapped people, or dead people. (At least out in the open, where everyone can see them…even though all of us will die, at least eventually!)
…Keep the “less valuable” people out of the sight of the rest of us, even if the only thing the well-off might show more value in is ”large amounts of cash”.
If this hulaballoo was about people who had a lot of money or who were going to build a mall for the city so they could get tax income from it, they would have rights. You know they would!
Why does the fact that someone has nice clothes and jobs mean that they are any better at being quality human beings than people who don’t? (I’ve noticed an awful lot of higher-up people making news lately simply because they’ve misused the “system” in a way that cost the people of America big-time!)
The typical solution to getting rid of the “druggies” here is to “clean up or fix up the houses they live in and they’ll move out.” (Maybe because the rent goes up too and they can no longer afford to live there?)
Are our heads in the sand? Unless the druggies commit suicide, they are going to have to be alive somewhere. Just forcing them out does not solve the problem–it only shifts the problem to some other place, where it might become even worse in the long run.
And it could very well come back to us again in another form that we’ll hate more–like having them camp out on the median strips near our downtown areas, or mugging people in the streets so they can find enough money to eat or shoot up with.
I think that unless we can come up with a “win-win” solution for everyone, we’re not going to have a permanent one.
And if, in the process of cleaning things up, we force people to be dependent on the “system”, we’re going to have to put up with a few people camping out in places that make our town look slummy when there’s some kind of an upset.
Once you get used to be taken care of, it’s hard to think or do what you need to do for yourself anymore!
If Mom and Dad don’t teach the kids how to handle life’s situations before they leave home, those kids might just stay at home with them for the next 30 years.
Doing things for other people that they should be doing for themselves does them no favors. It’s training they need to be able to manage life on their own. If you just dump them out on the street without the training in managing life, “street life” may be all they can hope for…or all we can hope for.
Maybe that’s what we want? What happens when Mom and Dad pass on?
These are people–not rats.
People–not cats you can conveniently dump when the next apartment you move to doesn’t allow pets.
And even if they were cats. Cats who grow dependent on the care of a human being don’t necessarily learn to fend for themselves if they are dumped outside. They have learned to look to human beings for something to eat, and they are then prime candidates for being abused. Cats tend to try to find a human to feed them or take care of them once they have been “domesticated”.
My sister had one of those abused and abandoned creatures show up on her doorstep. Poor thing.
(The cat, I mean).
Even someone without a home is worth something. They might even be worth more than the buildings we plan to put up instead of them!
I wish I had more money. I’d do what I could to help out, if only to buy some land just outside city limits for some of them to park their ratty RV’s or set up their tents on.
Doing things for people is probably not the permanent answer, though.
Yes, there may be more of us than we even know who will need a bit of assistance someday. There should be temporary help available for those of us who need help with the bumps in life now and then.
But there has to be a desire for something to happen and a participation/cooperation of sorts on the part of the receiver as well.
There’s a time to give handouts, but at some point, there’s also a time to require someone to stand on his or her own two feet. (Maybe through a system that actually has work they can do and then requires them to do work–if physically and mentally able to do so–to receive the help.)
When I worked at the Salvation Army, part of my job was deciding who deserved emergency help, based on the stories of the people who came for assistance.
Sometimes their stories were so good, I couldn’t tell the difference between someone who was truly needy and someone who was just stringing me along.
Captain Ross was really helpful in this respect. He said that for people who are continually poor, there is often a network in place through which they can usually find something to meet their need, even if I didn’t give it to them. Just watch, he said. If you don’t give help to them, now and then you’ll get a glimpse of them finding a way to get that bus ticket, or whatever–through someone in their own little network.
You give help to someone like that with a good story, and the next 30 people who come in will have almost exactly the same story.
You then will have figured it out that they have figured out what works to get you to help them.
They’ve learned to be survivors.
Most people do what they have to do–they figure out strategies that work, then pass the word on. And that’s what the ones who came for assistance from the Salvation Army did.
That’s not to say I shouldn’t help people, or that all of them can manage to find their own way. They may truly have needed the help–and a good many of the rest of us may very well need emergency help someday ourselves. That person who came for help may be from out of town, and know no one to whom he or she can turn.
The networks of the poor don’t usually extend to places outside of their own local areas. A lot of them don’t even own a computer, where networking can make things happen for a lot of the rest of us.
But maybe there needs to be a better way than just cutting someone off if they show evidence of “abusing the system”. After all, that’s the way they’ve learned to fend for themselves. All of us have to figure out how to do that, at what ever station in life we may reside.
There needs to be a channel opened to them that is a more healthy way of learning to get those needs met. And then it needs to really work for them, or they won’t do it for long.
Who Should Get Help?
If I was in doubt as to who should get help, the Captain said, I was supposed to give them a test.
I should give them a broom and ask them to sweep the porch, or give them some other small job that needed to be done there.
If they said “no thanks, I’ll look elsewhere”, you’d know they were “undeserving” (unless they were physically unable to do the work or something such). I’d know that we were just part of their system for survival without their having to work for it.
If they gladly did the work, I was to have no qualms about giving the assistance to them. That seemed to be the defining line, to me, ever after.
If someone is willing to work, and I have the resources to help them when they say they need help, I’ll do whatever I can to help them get to a place where they can be self-sufficient.
We do people no favors when we allow them to live on welfare without corresponding responsibility. Yes, it may take a transition period to really help them get to where they need to go. But our government can no longer afford to support the masses when the masses are really capable of fending for themselves with the right system in place–a system that they can understand and live with too.
