I’m always amazed how entitled homeless people feel, as though they’re owed all sorts of things by “society.” Society owes them nice homes, they argue, in nice neighborhoods, with security, heat, wifi, full kitchens, medical services and who knows what else.
Well, here’s the truth: society owes homeless people nothing. What causes this misalignment between homeless expectations and reality is that we—society—never fully tell them no. Instead, our politicians hint that we’ll eventually cave in and give in to their demands, and so they keep making demands.
The homeless know how the political game is played. All they have to do is refuse to leave their dirty encampments, and the politicians will crumble like fortune cookies. They get so frustrated, they’re willing to strike deals, the way they negotiate with unions. The homeless people say “We’ll leave the encampment if you give us” [fill in the blank]. The politicians say “We can’t give you that, but we’ll give you this.” And so it goes, until the homeless people get something cushy, and even then there’s no guarantee they’ll really leave the encampment and not come back. (Prima facie example: Lakeside Park, still a bleeding wound on Oakland, even after the Camron-Stanford House almost was burned down, apparently, by homeless people.)
This attitude by homeless people toward the greater society is contemptible. They hold government and us taxpayers hostage. If the government refuses to give them all the goodies they demand, they stop cooperating, refusing to leave the camps and therefore further contributing to the demise of our once-great city. They know the homelessness/media/progressive complex will support them by stirring up sympathy among the vast, bleeding heart public. A great example of this was in Saturday’s Chronicle, which wrote about San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s efforts to reduce homelessness. The article quoted Shaunn, “a homeless advocate” (what does that mean, anyway?). He was referring to Mahan’s offer of tiny homes to people living in a filthy encampment along Coyote Creek, an offer Shaunn found insufficiently fancy. “He [Mahan] is investing in a short-term solution. You can’t blame people for not cooperating with a system that invests so little long-term in them.”
This “reasoning,” if I can call it that, is exactly what the problem is with these “homeless advocates.” The Constitution guarantees homeless people, as it does all of us, certain rights—to vote, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, birthright citizenship, etc. But our founding fathers saw no reason to go beyond that and promise all Americans they could have free stuff, including housing. They expected all citizens to do their part in participating in the greater society, which meant leading productive lives and obeying the laws, which would give them the means to actually afford the things they want.
Now, here come the homeless advocates, responding that they have no intention of leading productive lives unless we, the taxpayers, give them “longterm investments.” This is obviously a form of blackmail. We have to make clear to our electeds that we’re not going to make these “investments” because if we did, we would effectively be paying people to be dropouts, losers, parasites, addicts and lawbreakers. Once upon a time, society treated such non-comformers harshly, because we adjudged them to be cranks who were a threat to the society we humans have spent millennia building. That’s exactly what they remain—cranks--but the “compassionate” progressives have managed to trigger guilt in us by alleging that we’re just mean, selfish creeps unless we share our wealth with the least-productive among us.
I, for one, reject that premise. If these homeless people refuse to “cooperate with a system” they despise, then let them suffer the consequences. They will remain outside the system they reject-- destitute and homeless, cold and hungry, receiving no help whatsoever, except from the usual charitable institutions like the Salvation Army. If they push us too far, we will arrest and prosecute them for their non-cooperation, which is another name for criminal behavior. It they build their slums on public land, we will roust them. We have to eradicate the notion among homeless advocates that they can guilt-trip us into a communist-style redistribution of wealth from hard-working taxpayers to people like them. We want to end homelessness in Oakland, not encourage it, or reward its practitioners for their indolence.
Steve Heimoff