How angry are Californians with homelessness and encampments? Angry enough that some people are saying the only solution may be to let the most hardcore addicts “die.”
That was the comment from someone who calls himself “Chucklechan.” It was in response to a story published in California Globe, an online news site with no apparent partisan leaning. The story, “California’s Homeless Hustle is a House of Cards,” looked at projects Homekey and Roomkey and found massive fraud, waste and absence of accountability. In the future, when considering candidates for emergency shelters, Chucklechan recommends a three-step procedure:“Test every vagrant for drugs we arrest, then force them into rehab. The next time, more rehab with some labor. Keep the pressure on until they clean up, go to prison for serious crimes, or die.
It’s easy to dismiss Chucklechan as a disgruntled, rightwing white guy who’s gone over the edge, but to do so would be to disregard huge numbers of people who feel the same way. They watch our civil society being eroded a little more every day—they see the refusal of our elected leaders to do anything about it—they hear the utter nonsense from progressives, fiddling while Rome burns--and they grow angry. Angry enough to entertain the thought that some criminals, after being given chance after chance (and a great deal of the taxpayers’ money) might just have to be allowed to die.
Another commenter, Showandtell, divided the homeless population into three triage categories: The “have nots,” the “can nots,” and the “will nots.” The “have nots” comprise the smallest percentage and are willing to rehabilitate themselves, but they need a little help—preferably from private, religious-based organizations, not state-supported bureaucracies where waste, fraud and abuse are rampant. The “can nots” and “will nots” constitute the vast majority of homeless: “can nots” are mentally ill and/or drug addicts, and “[must] be institutionalized if necessary for as long as necessary.” The “will nots” are the stubborn hoodlums who like being on the margin, and who prey upon the rest of us: they “must be arrested and prodded into drug rehab with a stick and a carrot.”
Clearly, ordinary folks are fed up, and are starting to reach drastic conclusions.
Pro-homeless radicals, like Carroll Fife, will object to these characterizations. They’ll claim that the homeless have simply fallen on hard times and must be given ever more money to lift them up. But vox populi: the people are mad as hell, and can’t take it much longer. They—we—are sick and tired of the crime, the filth, the encampments, the coddling, the psychos wandering the streets, the shoplifting that is closing stores left and right, the grifting politicians who lie to us in order to prolong their political careers and enrich their coffers. When decent citizens begin thinking that the death of homeless people may be the only way to end this problem, you know things are getting out of hand.
Obviously, people feel that harsher measures are required. It’s time to pull in the compassion a little and start being realistic. Call it tough love, if you want. Pouring bucketloads of dollars into so-called “solutions” that don’t work is a huge, cynical waste of money and an insult to us taxpayers. Homelessness and drug addiction are worse than ever; what we’ve been doing isn’t working. The permissive progressive politicians have utterly failed us. The anger is a natural reaction to their incapacity to hold office, and to our resentment of the awful conditions they have inflicted on us.
Steve Heimoff