During Republican administrations the press magically finds space to cover the national homeless issue. Because obviously, out of pure moral indignation, various addicts, people with mental disease, and others who are having a sustenance problem leave their comfy surroundings and intentionally live on the streets to protest the callous policies of yet another GOP regime. Or not.
I know a bit about the or not part because, for four years during the last administration, I ran a non-profit homeless shelter for US military vets in Philadelphia. The thing most miss in their coverage is the proper purpose of a shelter. It is not to wave a wand and transform someone into a contributing member of society. It is only a tool, a bridge, a start. People walk across that bridge or they don’t, totally at their own discretion.
The recent stories seem to come from the West Coast. L.A. and San Francisco prominently, but not exclusively. What these cities, and others across the nation, share in common is a utopian ideal, based on the pernicious Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson. They were predicated upon the fallacy that there is such a thing as a cure for consistent societal problems such as the poor, homelessness, bigotry, ignorance, etc.
As the wisdom of the Bible tells us, the poor will always be with us. As the accumulated wisdom of recorded history further elucidates, so will the rest. It is the eternal human condition. It can be mitigated, but not solved. Philosophers like Thomas Sowell explain this, and the motivations of people who don’t see this, in his brilliant Conflict of Visions.
Mankind is not that malleable. There is no certain recipe for earthbound paradise just by adjusting here and calibrating there. As William F. Buckley, Jr. noted, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton.”
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But some say intone abamarxistcadabra, fill the SJW rubes with unrealistic expectations based on idealism and gullibility, and when the malady still persists blame it on racism, sexism, ageism, etc. Then go on to collect the funding to open up yet another homeless shelter. If your former idealists are now full of bitterness and resentment? Well, the price of doing business.
Like the Air Force used to say: “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”
Also, the economic and cultural leftism that passes for government on the West Coast, policies turning the place into Venezuela with worse beaches, is placing people in poverty and thus in great danger of homelessness. But then, needy desperate people make better dependent leftist voters, eh?
Is this true of all homeless programs? No. Some are based on the hard realty that the issue has relatively little to do with funding, society, or the background of the homeless person. It has much to do with their current behavior. Prologue is not necessarily destiny.
Of course you have to know the backstory. But that tale can be used as a rationalization to continue the cycle of dependency. Used by those who have been working the system for years, even decades.
And no matter how much you care, how much you or they want there to be a recovery and a good ending, there are instances that it’s not in the cards. Just like it is for doctors and combat infantry officers: sometimes you lose people. Sadder than that, sometimes it’s the choice of a person to get and stay lost.
I had a decorated Army veteran stand in front of my desk one day as I asked him about those choices. For obvious reasons, you couldn’t come in drunk at night if you’re living in a homeless shelter where people are making a go of trying to overcome addictions.
He had come in drunk more than once. We had a policy of giving everyone one major mulligan. A second chance. He had exhausted those. So now it was time for a Come to Jesus meeting.
I told him the choice was simple. He could live on the street and drink or stay with us, not drink, and start the hard road back to a real life. He chose drink and he left. Less than sixty days later I read his obituary.
We also must understand that homeless people, at least the ones who truly want to help themselves, do not have an expectation of luxury. Just safety and decent sustenance. When open-ended over the top largesse is thrown their way, they smell a sucker and the message to them is dependency pays.
That’s one of the reasons comparing the good conditions at border shelters that temporarily house kids to Nazi death camps is so typically repulsive and ahistorical of the Left. Have you seen the pictures out of those shelters? Then you might have already done the historical math: Treblinka didn’t have foosball tables. But, I digress.
Their extant lifestyle standards are limited because they’ve seen a lot worse than a well-run shelter.
I once told a Marine, who related to me he’d been sleeping on a park bench in front of the Free Library of Philadelphia on Logan Square for three months, that we could help him get off the street and he could have regular meals and a bed to sleep in tonight if he wanted to come back to the shelter with us. We went to Logan twice a week to serve those who couldn’t make it to us.
He responded to me, “Sir, several months go I was sleeping anywhere I could in Iraq and they were shooting at me. Here, no one shoots at me. I’ll get to you soon.” Never saw him again.
If there is a way to lessen the problem, what might it specifically be?
To begin with, take the resources out of the hands of government and put them into the hands of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” of community service groups like churches, local service clubs like The Rotary, and veteran service organizations like the DAV. They are close to the problem on the ground and have the best and closest means of dealing with it. The guy with the ball should get to call the plays.
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It would help if we could get these people out of the inner city environments that are the spawning grounds for so many of the issues that plague them. Perhaps a revamped 1930s-style Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) could do this and be of national service as well. But that’s a location fix. Good, to a point.
The real challenge is breaking the vicious chains of dependency by giving the homeless a chance to recover their lives themselves. Yes, with help. But fully knowing the best start, the best bridge, the best tools we can put in their hands are completely useless if they don’t have, or haven’t learned, the work ethic and the perseverance to use them.
And those traits have never come from a Great Society program.
