In today’s editorial about the New York City A and C-train subway fire caused by a homeless person over the weekend, the New York Times writes, “It is not safe for them and, as Sunday’s fire makes clear, it is not safe for the millions who ride through those tunnels every single day. The city’s police and homeless outreach programs need to be mobilized right away.”
The real issue, Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine says “isn’t homelessness, it’s insanity… One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is as much at fault as any politician, for it made the institution frightening and the people who run it bad guys.”
Jarvis adds that the homeless who don’t obey the law and refuse good-faith help “need to be hauled off to Rikers Island,” a statement I find crazy. What happens when they get out?
Homeless people don’t need jail time. Most homeless need medical treatment – mental and physical. And only when their health is stabilized, can they benefit from job and housing assistance and currently non-existent re-habilitation programs.
I believe that physical illness adds another dimension to the homeless problem. Many homeless are addicts and alcoholics, both illnesses, or suffering from AIDS or other physical problems. I reject the theory that homelessness is just another lifestyle choice. Nothing will ever make me believe that any human being chooses to live on the street during a blizzard, hungry, cold and stinking of his or her own excrement. Nothing.
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit notes that de-instittionalization of the mentally ill was the real culprit. And undercaffeinated agrees.
Amen, B.L.
I lived in DC in the early 80s, just as the effects of deinstitutionalization were becoming evident. Coming from affluent suburbia in South Carolina, I had never seen homelessness.
Since then, I have traveled a fair bit, and seen poverty all over. What I have never seen, though, outside the US, is the active dislike of the homeless that I routinely encounter in New York, DC, Chicago.
What motivates that dislike? Fear? Disgust for people didn’t make it?
Some of it is fear. I think anyone who thinks about it knows that, there but for fortune…. That’s scary indeed.
And after all, not every homeless person is harmless. Mentally ill people commit crimes frequently. They need hospitals, not jails. But more often, they get sent back on the street in a matter of days or weeks.
I was taught that anyone who has to ask needs help. Last night, three homeless people begged for change in one 15-minute subway ride. It’s just not possible, anymore, to give to everyone who asks. So we begin to get inured to the plight of the homeless.
On my street, there is a couple in their 30s who brag that they have lived on the street for 10 years. They are drug addicts, occasionally very nasty and aggressive. I often want to give her money. But I know that, if I do, they will bug me every day. So I walk by, don’t make eye contact, and try to tell myself that’s ok.