SACRAMENTO, CA - “I’m not a bum,” the middle-aged man said to my wife the other day, “but could you spare fifty cents?”

In other words, he is a bum. The politically-correct term used to be homeless, now replaced with “transient community,” a group whose profile is on the rise with a Republican in the White House. A revisiting of the issues is, therefore, in order.

There are, of course, people who find themselves down and out due to circumstances, accident, or illness. This group, however, is looking to recover a responsible life. The politically-correct homeless, on the other hand, are generally looking to avoid work, which can be verified by requesting them to perform a small task in return for a handout. It was inevitable that this group would become a constituency of the left.

The left believes that a society based on free enterprise and personal responsibility is inherently unjust because some people do better than others. The homeless give the left a megaphone to make this point, a victim group through whose plight Capitalist America can be denounced. During the Reagan years, Mitch Snyder and other activists raised the volume to levels of stridency seldom, if ever, equaled. The press also loved the issue, and the accounts would lead one to believe that during the 80s the nation was some vast soup kitchen. But the reasons people wind up on the street are many and varied.

Whatever one thinks of the deinstitutionalization of mental facilities, it can’t be denied that this move allowed certifiable nut cases to roam far and wide, something that can be verified within three blocks of my house in mid-town Sacramento. These people are not talking into head-set cell phones.

Whatever one thinks of the war on drugs or the issue of legalization, it can’t be denied that drug use and excessive drinking destroy personal responsibility. This is now called “substance abuse,” but in reality many of these people are simply drunks, cranksters, or junkies. They steal things to support their habit--bicycles, hoses, even potted plants. This can be verified by police reports in my possession.

Not far from my house is Loaves and Fishes, a vast service center where the homeless can get meals, clothes, showers, and even do their laundry. They flock there, verifying the law of supply and demand. If you build it, they will come, another reason the transient community is growing here, though a local publication blames it on, yes, “unbridled capitalism.”

Members of the transient community are still held to be victims with the right to have their basic needs provided by other people. The government must, therefore, step in and build more facilities. When those in the working community are less than worshipful about footing the bill, they are held to be greedy and callous. They are also supposedly making the problem worse by living in the central city, taking up valuable space that could be used by the transient community or the unemployed carnival workers who can now pass for “hipsters.” This is called “gentrification,” which has replaced “white flight.”

We will be hearing more of this rhetoric, but there is no reason for the working community to give it any credence.

 

- By K. Lloyd Billingsley