Several years ago, when I lived in San Francisco, I made a somewhat large donation, several thousand dollars, to the city's large soup kitchen at Glide Memorial.
Before writing a check, I wanted to see where my money was going, so I volunteered to serve food there a few times. I stood behind a serving counter with some other folks and each of us put whatever we were serving on the people's trays as they got to us.
This really nice middle aged black woman was the cook, and we served things like fried chicken with mashed potatoes and veggies, desserts, etc.
I decided that the homeless there would be getting good bang for my buck and wrote a check.
I got to talk to some of the "customers" and found that they weren't all drug addicts and crazy people, and more than a few actually got work out of temporary labor joints while others picked up recycling to keep a few bucks in their pockets.
Since then, I've chatted with others -- here in Southern California, there's no shortage of undomiciled individuals.
Many of them are lost causes, young people who simply don't give a shit, smoke pot all day long, use meth, panhandle, steal, trash things -- they use the ground for garbage cans, the alleys as toilets... Others would be quite redeemable given the right motivation and environment.
The other day I went over to the Venice boardwalk, and it made scenes from third world shitholes look like paradise vacation destinations. Ragged tents and tarps, garbage all over, the air pungent will the smell of urine...
Yet I've talked to some homeless guys who keep themselves clean and neat, and who have no drug or alcohol problems, they simply ran into economic problems if one kind or another and ended up on the street. Because of the state of homeless resources, they are forced to be in proximity with the other types.
These are guys who want steady jobs, want to be able to get a place of their own, etc, but the "system" only actually looks after the lazy and the screwed up, the young druggies on SSI and those insane who are able to deal with case workers and so forth are able to get subsidized housing.
The normal, want to work types have no such options: private organizations get a lot of their funding from county, state and federal sources, and the more problems a "client" has, the more money he or she is worth. If a "client" is a transgender with AIDS who is addicted to heroin, he's worth a bundle, whereas the guy with no marketable "problems" is worth very little and gets little more than short shrift.
When one of these normal guys gets any kind of subsidized housing so he can look for a job, as soon as he's hired, before he even gets a paycheck, he gets evicted because he has a job. With no place to live, he"s very quickly back to Square 1, unemployed and back on the street.
The welfare/food stamp system isn't much help to these poor folks, either -- one guy told me they made him take a class in how to write a resume and seek employment, even though he was in his forties and had held several jobs, but that was the extent of it. No housing or anything and all he owned clothes wise fit in a small, wheeled valise he pulls around.
Thousands of those among the undomiciled are veterans, people who have served their (our) country, gone into harm's way on our behalf, and then been discarded by their (our) government and society in general like used condoms.
Now, all the bureaucracies involved in all this are run by Democrats, and probably cost the taxpayer somewhere in the billions every year, for the most part keeping these enormous homeless populations in a perpetual revolving door without any intention of solving the problem.
See, the homeless are nothing more to these private organizations and the massive government bureaucracies that fund them, including the welfare and other social services departments, than a humongous cash cow, a goose that lays lots and lots of golden eggs, and tens of thousands of people would be out of work if they ever actually helped these people overcome addictions and other obstacles to their becoming independent, self supporting citizens -- a lot of people who have made themselves rich off these wretches and continue getting richer would, as I said, lose that goose, golden eggs and all.
So essentially what's happening is that we are being bilked by a lot of people who bribe contribute to various Democrats' campaigns to maintain the status quo at our expense as taxpayers.
I won't even get into what it costs for medical care annually for all the homeless drug and alcohol abusers travelling in unending cavalcades of ambulances to emergency rooms on the Medicaid (MediCal in California) dime, except that it's a lot more than a dime.
Having said all that, let's look at what these same Democrats who fund the above with full knowledge that they are doing so without any intention of actually solving the problem want us to "invest" in illegal immigrants.
They want to give border jumpers, families and individuals, a better, more comfortable "stay" in detention centers and do more for them than they do for our own homeless Americans, including our own undomiciled veterans? They want to give welfare, food stamps and other social services to people who aren't even supposed to be here, while Americans are living like animals on the streets?
This is what the Democratic Party is all about, perfectly at home with our major cities looking and smelling like the slums in some third world shithole so they and their homeless "help" organizations and social services directors can line their pockets at the taxpayer's expense, and then they want open borders so we can pay even more for the upkeep and medical expenses of people who break our laws everyday just by being here.
Today's Democrats have zero respect for the taxpayer, the taxpayer's hard-earned money or for the sovereignty of this country.
3 November 2020 can't get here soon enough.
Several years ago, when I lived in San Francisco, ... (
show quote)