The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> LA votes 100 million for homeless solution...

LA votes 100 million for homeless solution...
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, September 25 2015, 15:42:43 (UTC)
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...city government has passed an emergency fund of 100 million to deal with the crisis in homelessness...it's a start. The fiction has been that today's homeless are just the bums and riff-raff of times gone by, which is where neo-cons live, "times gone by". But they aren't...many of them have jobs, they just don;t get paid enough to afford shelter..or they are families with children.

...being homeless they have no addresses so they can't vote and are therefor unrepresented. But the problem is getting too severe to ignore....disease and epidemic are just around the corner and, as always, the problem becomes more difficult and expensive to solve as time goes on.

...any meaningful solution runs right into today's mantra of unregulated capitalism and the freedom which goes with it. Low-income housing, even just a single room with bath and kitchen would cost less than homeless "services"...and the benefits to society would be great...but there's a problem.

..I ran into it the last night of our six-week stay at an island off the Washington coast years ago...I took five boys from my group home on a six week survival romp....on the last night we sat around the campfire discussing where we would go from there...I was convinced the social work model of group homes, of paying subsidies to juveniles only if they proved a danger to the community and then keeping them on handouts, earned by bad behavior, till they turned 18 and then cutting them off, was a recipe for the continuing disaster we're so good at not seeing around the corner.

..my new plan was to get some old salts from the docks and buy an an old sailboat of good size and fix it up with a crew of my delinquents, then sail up and down the coast living off the sea and any islands we might be able to camp on...I figured it would be a much better learning process than being locked up with nothing to do but plot revenge and fight the "Man".

Our parole officer, who came back to the island to spend the last week with us said it would never work, never be approved...when I asked why, he said because he'd quit his job for the chance to join us. While he may have been exaggerating, I realized the truth of his statement....how many low-achieving and terminally bored kids would stay in high school if they knew they could go sailing with us...and how would they react if told this adventure was only for kids who committed crimes? They'd go out and oblige by committing them

Any "treatment" the State hands out HAS to be punishment...because the fear of punishment is what keeps millions of people who are barely hanging on with their fingertips to a "normal" life, from letting go...if the State offers an actual meaningful learning experience, where's the "deterrent effect"? Wouldn't thousands of kids, bored to death with their D- existence want to come along?

If the State builds decent housing for the homeless won't the marginally-housed, working for starvation wages want to move in? And, further, if the State provides work for decent pay so those people can actually afford to be alive, what will industry say?

Turns out industry needs the homeless like it needed cheap labor...fear is a great motivator....until it leads to action. LA knows it has to do something before the growing number of homeless can no longer remain hidden and their effect on the rest of us becomes severe...but, by offering a decent life "free", they undermine the work-ethic, if that's what it is, this Puritan society is built upon.

The best way would have been to avoid this tangle by keeping jobs in the country and demanding a decent living wage for all...too late...and now the taxpayer has to clean up after the corporations...like we always do.



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