At least, if you're not black or brown.
Police Department under fire for arresting people for "wrong way walking".
In poor parts of town, often sidewalks do not exist. Many cities deliberately refuse to build sidewalks in poor neighborhoods that have been annexed into the city, claiming that the residents are the ones who would benefit and thus the residents should pay 100% of the cost. Often there are no storm drains, just an open ditch on either side of the road. So in these parts of town, people walk along the side of the street. That's the only place you can walk, unless you're going to walk on someone's lawn.
While there are laws on the books regarding which way to face while walking by the side of the street, they are almost never enforced. For one thing, it is only the neighborhoods of the very rich and the neighborhoods of the very poor that lack sidewalks, so either it looks like you're targeting the rich (bad cop! no donut!) or like you're targeting the poor. And if you only target a single poor neighborhood that is majority black and Hispanic, and not poor neighborhoods that also contain poor whites, well. Freedom! If your skin ain't brown, anyhow, right?
Meanwhile, cities are increasingly outlawing feeding the homeless. As Bryan notes in a comment on another site, "I seem to remember a story from my youth about a Rabbi who fed a lot of hungry people who had come to hear him speak. I've noticed that a lot of homeless feeding programs are called "Loaves and Fishes" in memory of that event. Too bad there are no Christians in this country."
But of course that's not the point. What the city fathers want to have happen in these cities is for the homeless to die, already. Indeed, they'd line up the homeless and march them into gas chambers if Adolph Hitler hadn't given such a bad name to gas chambers (bummer, that). Because of course the homeless are untermenschen, other, cockroaches, not really human, unlike the fine upstanding Christian ubermenschen who run Orlando. And since they're not really human, exterminating them would be no more murder than exterminating cockroaches, right? Right?! Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
It's like my local town council saying we don't have any homeless people in town, and when you bring up the dozen or so people living under our bridge, the answer is - the bridge is a state structure, so they aren't really in the town.
ReplyDeleteBecause construction is at a stand still, there are a lot of people who came here to work on beach condos who are now unemployed with no local connections to help them.
There is no building going on anywhere, or they would move on to the next job site.
Local governments want them to go away, but there's no place to go.
Sad , very very Sad . Many of the
ReplyDelete"Homeless" are vets . USA , Combat Vetrans . Part of the rest are people with mental problems , who might have been in an institution for help , had they not all been closed up by penny pinching bureaucrats . Now , they'll just lock them up ? Like the jails have any more room with all the pot heads they have locked up already .
w3ski
No, the goal is to starve them to death and then say they died of "natural causes". Like I said, if they could march them into gas chambers they would. But given that Hitler gave gas chambers such a bad name...
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Cynical Penguin
Thanks for the dose of truth...now if only we could give those continually denying it a dose of something else!
ReplyDeleteSo now there's a new offence in Bradenton: "WWB" (walking while black [or brown]). I went to nuring school in Bradenton in 2001-2002, and while it has areas that are full of poor, brown-skinned lowlifes, there are also lots of neighbourhoods with redneck cracker lowlifes. I bet they aren't getting any "walking papers" served on them.
ReplyDeleteAs for the homeless, when I was a nurse at St. Mary's Medical Center in S.F., we'd get a lot of them in as patients. The hospital is right up against Golden Gate Park, where so many live. It was usually leg problems like infected diabetic ulcers that would lay them so low that they had to look for medical help. Sad to see fellow citizens whose flesh was literally rotting as they lived. They weren't the nicest of people -- many mentally ill or drug-addicted and difficult to deal with -- but humans deserve better than that. The poorhouse at Laguna Honda was too full to deal with the need, so even relatively humane S.F. is letting these folks crawl under the bushes and die.
Here in Australia's second-largest city, there are hardly any visible street people. Some exist to be sure, because the nature of paranoid schizophrenia is to resist anything coming from government authorities. But the official policy is at least to try. When I work midnight shifts, I pass through the main downtown train station, and there are often food wagons passing out sangers (Aussie for "sandwiches") to the people "living rough."
No letters to the editor decrying how this attracts a bad element into the central business district. People here aren't perfect, but they tend to have better heart than Americans. They sense that those homeless people could be them with a few knockbacks. That and the fact that Aussies realise they're descended from criminal ancestors who were made homless when they got kicked out of the U.K. in the 18th Century. (What's a post to Badtux without a little snark?)
I read a book on social class once, homeless people were to lowest. Labeled bottom, out of sight. Out of sight because people pretend homeless don't exist.
ReplyDeleteI've been homeless before, I've made friends with other homeless people while homeless, and I've made friends who were not homeless, but later became so.
None of us, not a single one was ever a combat vet, or had any mental problems, or any other stereotype.
And none of us, not a single one ever stood on freeway entrances with cardboard signs either.
I was, I am, they were, they are, just... people. One even had a college degree. So... relegate homeless to the bottom, pretend they are "out of sight," and in a way many of us are.
I was at a party a few years ago, a friend pointed out a man eating cake. That's so and so, so and so's homeless friend. So and so number two had also been homeless for a couple years. Looked like any other man, no reek of alcohol, no shopping cart, no camouflage clothing.
Because he was a man.