I can understand how someone might have tough times and end up broke and on the street. What I don’t understand is why such people turn into slobs.
I’m talking about the ones who overturn garbage bins and leave the contents all over the street. The ones who defecate in the middle of the sidewalk. The ones who throw books from those tiny libraries into the gutter, in what seems like an act of deliberate contempt for society. (I see this all the time in my neighborhood.) The ones who litter. The ones who smash bus stop windows. The ones whose tents are surrounded by a sea of trash. The ones who leave stolen shopping carts in the middle of an intersection. In short, the ones who behave like they were raised in a pigsty.
I’m presuming that most homeless people grew up with parents who taught them the rules of society. So what changes when they find themselves homeless? Do they suddenly lose their conscience?
One answer that homeless sympathizers give is, drugs. A lot of these homeless people are strung out on various drugs that make them sociopathic. Well, I don’t understand that either. Why do homeless people feel that eating fentanyl or crack is going to help them? Are they that dumb? If they’re so incapable of making rational decisions, we shouldn’t let them roam free in our streets, any more than we would allow rabid dogs. But there’s always going to be the American Civil Liberties Union to argue that homeless people have “rights,” even if they’re behaving maliciously and illegally. I don’t agree. If homeless people have the “right” to overturn garbage bins, then there’s something seriously wrong in society. Case in point: Oakland, where homeless lovers like Carroll Fife will do everything they can to prevent the homeless from being held accountable for their misbehavior.
There’s another possibility about why homeless people behave so disrespectfully, and it is this: It’s a conscious act of contempt. They hold everyone else accountable for their woes. It’s not their fault they’re broke and homeless, they think, it’s due to racism. Or capitalism. Or some kind of unfairness that picks on them personally and punishes them for things that aren’t their fault. This is paranoia, of course, and a colossal evasion of personal responsibility, but it may account for the urge to “get even” with society by befouling it.
Meanwhile, can we agree on one thing? Throwing good money after bad isn’t working and never can. It’s impossible to estimate how much Alameda County and Oakland have “invested” in homelessness programs, but it has to be in the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. And now, our esteemed Board of Supervisors, spurred on by that fearless homelessness advocate Nikki Bas, just approved another nearly $2 billion to add to the grift, waste, fraud and graft that marks every homeless program. And yet, homelessness in this county and city are worse than ever. Oakland is addicted to providing homeless services that do nothing except gratify politicians’ urge to signify their virtues.
I realize that complaining about this won’t get us anywhere. The homeless will continue to degrade our city and officials will continue to let them. But someone has to point out the obvious: we have a lot of really dirty homeless people in Oakland. If they cleaned up after themselves, we, the public, might feel more sympathetically inclined toward them, regarding them as down-and-out but rehabilitable. But as long as so many of them are slobs, homeless people will remain a dubious and undesirable part of our population.
Steve Heimoff