DeclinetoState
12-13-2005, 04:14 PM
Aunt Eula wrote from Fort Worth, Texas, to inform me that in 1954, 50,000 reindeer migrated from Lapland to Finland. An interesting seasonal note, but the most interesting thing about it is that we know it. Someone counts migrating reindeer so we know if they're up, down or holding steady. Try getting an accurate count of the homeless in America.
You can find an estimate for New York City -- serendipitously enough, it is 50,000, the same as the migrating reindeer of '54. After that, we start wandering up the scale -- 250,000 across the country, 1 million, multiples of 1 million. No one actually knows. Obviously, at least some students of this problem are off in their count by at least 1 million.
Oh, no! I hear your vast collective groan -- not another Christmas Column on the Homeless! Well, you know how it is with us liberals, we just can't help ourselves -- like Dr. Strangelove, our hands rise involuntarily, despite our best intentions, and write these Christmas Columns on the Homeless, thus managing to be boring and trite simultaneously, laying our liberal guilt all over an unwilling general populace. But grit your teeth and soldier on, if you will, in seasonal goodwill.
Not only do we not know how many Americans are homeless, we don't know much about those who are. The most common form of denial about homeless people is that they deserve to be where they are. They're drunks, winos, bums, addicts. Their condition is self-inflicted and thus not our fault. We have no responsibility. It's not my fault, I'm all right, Jack.
The concept of addiction as a treatable disease has not made that much progress, despite the best efforts of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Council. Many of us still think these are the Undeserving Poor. (Wouldn't you think some sociologist would have done a comparative study by now to prove, as I have always suspected, that there is a higher proportion of Undeserving Rich than Undeserving Poor?)
But we know there is an additional admixture in our homeless population now -- one there, as conservatives never tire of pointing out, because of one of those brave, new, liberal social experiments gone wrong.
Lots of nut cases are on the streets these days as a consequence of the movement in the '60s and '70s to deinstitutionalize people who are not dangerously insane. Since it was incredibly expensive as well as counterproductive to keep those folks incarcerated, it seemed like a good idea at the time to let them go home and get treatment there. And as liberals never tire of pointing out, the reason deinstitutionalization was such a failure is because the chintzy conservatives in the legislatures never appropriated enough money for community-based mental-health care.
More (if you can stand it) at http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?columnsName=miv
In fact, sez Molly, homelessness among families is Reagan's fault.
During the Reagan years, about $3 billion was cut from low-income housing programs, and homelessness, amazingly enough, grew apace. Three billion is peanuts in the context of the military budget.
You can find an estimate for New York City -- serendipitously enough, it is 50,000, the same as the migrating reindeer of '54. After that, we start wandering up the scale -- 250,000 across the country, 1 million, multiples of 1 million. No one actually knows. Obviously, at least some students of this problem are off in their count by at least 1 million.
Oh, no! I hear your vast collective groan -- not another Christmas Column on the Homeless! Well, you know how it is with us liberals, we just can't help ourselves -- like Dr. Strangelove, our hands rise involuntarily, despite our best intentions, and write these Christmas Columns on the Homeless, thus managing to be boring and trite simultaneously, laying our liberal guilt all over an unwilling general populace. But grit your teeth and soldier on, if you will, in seasonal goodwill.
Not only do we not know how many Americans are homeless, we don't know much about those who are. The most common form of denial about homeless people is that they deserve to be where they are. They're drunks, winos, bums, addicts. Their condition is self-inflicted and thus not our fault. We have no responsibility. It's not my fault, I'm all right, Jack.
The concept of addiction as a treatable disease has not made that much progress, despite the best efforts of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Council. Many of us still think these are the Undeserving Poor. (Wouldn't you think some sociologist would have done a comparative study by now to prove, as I have always suspected, that there is a higher proportion of Undeserving Rich than Undeserving Poor?)
But we know there is an additional admixture in our homeless population now -- one there, as conservatives never tire of pointing out, because of one of those brave, new, liberal social experiments gone wrong.
Lots of nut cases are on the streets these days as a consequence of the movement in the '60s and '70s to deinstitutionalize people who are not dangerously insane. Since it was incredibly expensive as well as counterproductive to keep those folks incarcerated, it seemed like a good idea at the time to let them go home and get treatment there. And as liberals never tire of pointing out, the reason deinstitutionalization was such a failure is because the chintzy conservatives in the legislatures never appropriated enough money for community-based mental-health care.
More (if you can stand it) at http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?columnsName=miv
In fact, sez Molly, homelessness among families is Reagan's fault.
During the Reagan years, about $3 billion was cut from low-income housing programs, and homelessness, amazingly enough, grew apace. Three billion is peanuts in the context of the military budget.