Homelessness

No one ever has accused me of being Mr. Compassion, but what we are allowing American homeless to endure is immoral. These people, who include people who have made poor choices, people in financial straits through no fault of their own, people with serious mental illness, and just drifters, which America has had since the first settlers arrived, are still people. To live and die in the rain? No. we are better than that.

The Homeless Industrial Complex has invented thousands of ways to keep these people on the streets, and to pretend that building them a “house” that may cost five figures or more, somehow, will get them to move into that house – and not trash it, has for quite some time made serious cash keeping these people barely surviving, or starving and dying on our sidewalks, parks, roads.

Homelessness may be the most difficult problem America must deal with, but it is not intractable. As Americans, do we have the freedom to come and go as we wish? Yes. Would any of us change that? Well, Democrats might, but adults? No. If a drifter wants to sleep on a bench as he or she moves around the country, should they be free to do so? And if they want to move into a tent on their travels for a few days or weeks…?

But – As Americans, do we have the right for our people, particularly women and children, to be safe? For our businessmen and women not to have to hose filth off their entry every morning? Or call the coroner for people who died overnight in front of their business? For our children to see that we are not okay with a fellow American laying dying or dead on the street from disease or an OD or a fight with another transient? That we care enough about our fellow Americans not to let them wallow in filth, heat, rain, mud, garbage and disease – mental or physical?

What to do..

When you put politicians in charge of anything, they are going to make it worse; if they fixed problems, what would their campaigns be about? No – they create problems to run on and then corrupt themselves to millions of dollars of net worth on sub-$200K salaries.

So let’s take the politicians out of it and just fix the problem: Re-open the internment camps and house the homeless.

In 1942, President Roosevelt(D) decided via EO 9066, that it was illegal to be Japanese in America and threw them all into prison camps.

Between 1942 and 1945 a total of 10 camps were opened, holding approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans for varying periods of time in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas.

I’ve no interest in editorial discussion of the necessity of these camps. My dad was in the Navy in the Pacific in the war and never noted a strong preference one way or another – and it’s not remotely close to my point here.

The point is that we have quickly built housing and neighborhoods with basic amenities for large groups of people in our society before.

For the most part, the camps were run humanely by authorities, and internees did their best to establish a sense of community and to continue life as normally as possible. They worked to set up churches, schools, shrines, farms, newspapers, and more, which enabled them to make money. Many Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) imprisoned in the camps worked as nurses, teachers, carpenters, farmers, and cooks.

We seem to have about ten times as many homeless as we did internees, but the logic remains. Re-open, rebuild and/or build new camps, with their own schools, libraries, farms, kitchens, medical care, electricity and water supplies, and move the homeless into them. These do not need to be palaces and can, in fact, be wooden group homes rather than multi-story brick and mortar. They need to shelter, not pamper.

This would be far less-costly than building new asylums in our cities, far safer and healthier for the people moved into them than is living in the streets, and could be done on government land away from the trials and tribulations of drug pushers destroying what’s left of their lives, away from criminals preying on them, while providing clean food and water and good medical care.

It's past time to get serious about the homeless. While their liberties as Americans exist, the freedom of movement and safety of all Americans must also be recognized.

Re-start the idea of internment camps, assign homeless to them, create criteria through which people can be deemed capable of restarting their lives on the outside. But give them something more than a leaky tent in a puddle on a sidewalk with their toilet in between tents of other homeless.

Taking care of those who cannot take care of themselves has always been an American virtue. It’s time we re-started it.