I’ve been saying this for twenty years, even when I was on the Left:
The reason the “homeless” are “homeless” is because they’re a) stark raving mad or b) they were kicked out of their homes for being lazy drunken abusive pervs (wow, that actually describes all three of the men my mother married; maybe her death is the cause of homelessness now!) or are just career criminals (why do you think you’re always hearing about Joe Blow “of no fixed address” on the local news?)
Liberals who yammer on about the “root causes” of the problem completely miss the point that, whatever the cause of the problem in the past tense, the present-tense reality is that you’ve got crazies, dopeheads and felons wandering the streets, protected by the cloak of victimhood that liberals have draped around them. And when you call to their attention this reality — hobo sex offenders who threaten the safety of innocent citizens — you’re accused of “blaming the victim,” as if the dopehead criminal bum were more of a victim than his actual victims.
Homelessness is not a “poverty” problem. Poverty alone does not cause homelessness. If you want to understand why this is so, you should read Adam Shephard’s excellent new book, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream. Seeking to refute Barbara Ehrenreich’s thesis in Nickel and Dimed — that the poor were structurally prevented from escaping poverty by the inherent unfairness of capitalism — Shephard set out with $25 in his pocket, relocated to a town he’d never been to, moved into a homeless shelter, and took work as a day laborer. Within a matter of months, by hard work and thrift, he had saved up enough money to rent his own apartment, buy a used truck, and had thousands of dollars in the bank.
