I have more to say about this, but it's 4:30, and I have to be at my other job soon

I was flipping through the channels this weekend and came upon a broadcast of a recent city council meeting. A citizen was asking the council members to do something about the increasing number of homeless in our city. I thought I might settle in and watch, as I thought this to be topic of importance. There are a great number of homeless citizens around these parts, especially near the university where I work and the apartment in which I live. But then the question-asker posed the following:

Don’t you think we should cut back on the number of services we offer for the homeless, you know, to cut down on the number of them coming here to get help?

I turned the channel. I couldn’t bear to hear the answer to this stupidity. And I was slightly bitter that this man had the privilege and time to attend a televised city council meeting while I only had time to sit on my ass and watch it in my pajamas.

Finding nothing else on to numb my senses, I kept flipping through the channels and again landed on the city council meeting where another citizen – this one a middle aged white woman who had not been forced by poverty to skip either a meal or an appointment with her stylist – urged that something should be done about the homeless. And, as had the previous citizen, asked if it was wise to keep offering them free meals and places to sleep when it was clear that such actions only enabled them to be homeless.

I am para-phrasing in both instances, but the insensitivity, I mean, sentiment, is there.

If we stop feeding and housing citizens who have neither home nor nourishment, they will cease to exist. In other words, if we leave them out in the cold without food, they will die off and decrease the surplus population and we will no longer have to look at their dirty, malnourished faces and assume that they only want our spare change so they can buy another bottle of Thunderbird.

*I realize that I am not much better, spending my last post ranting about what I'm being served for dinner on Thanksgiving, when hey, at least I'll be having dinner. Do not think the hypocristy is lost on me.