JWR Jeff JacobyBen WattenbergRoger Simon
Mona CharenDr. Laura
Linda Chavez

Paul Greenberg Larry ElderJonathan S. Tobin
Thomas SowellMUGGERWalter Williams
Don FederCal Thomas
Political Cartoons
Left, Right & Center

Jewish World Review / Dec. 14 1998 / 25 Kislev, 5759

Don Feder

Don Feder Why we lost interest
in the homeless

LIKE SALVATION ARMY KETTLES, touching appeals for the homeless are a sign of the season.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness Inc. is running full-page ads illustrated with a photo of a cherubic child. "This child will never be told to clean his room, take out the garbage," etc., the ad plaintively discloses.

"It's not a perfect childhood. It's a homeless one." The alliance claims there are "some one million American kids growing up homeless."

Someone must maintain the mythology.

The media lost interest in the subject when a Democrat took up residence in the White House in 1993. The number of times the word "homeless" appeared in a Washington Post headline fell from 149 in 1990 to 41 in 1997.

Today, such stories usually concern municipalities getting tough with the steam-grate set. Thus a New York Times article of Nov. 3 was headlined, "Fed up, Berkeley begins crackdown on homelessness." It noted that the all-Democratic city council ("dominated by a progressive faction") authorized police to disperse homeless encampments.

Self-styled advocates (most of the homeless are too loony or zonked out to choose their champions) rail at Berkeley's heartlessness.

Instead of criminalizing these victims of societal indifference, the city should be making more beds available in shelters, providing job training and generally papering over the problem with large-denomination bills, they lament.

Trouble is, the public -- including politicians of the left and right -- have tired of such pleading.

Ah, for those halcyon days of homeless advocacy in the early 1980s. Then all activists had to do was sleep in a shipping crate or dine out at a dumpster, and -- abracadabra -- instant media attention and credibility.

Tribunes of the tattered (like the late Mitch Snyder, who deserted his wife and children to become a homeless advocate) could fabricate statistics out of thin air -- like 1 million homeless kids in America -- and never be challenged.

Synder once told a college audience that 45 homeless people die every second in this country. Rush Limbaugh, who did the math, figured that would mean 23 million homeless expiring each year.

A 1990 Census Bureau estimate put the number of homeless at around 270,000 -- meaning each of them would have to die 85 times a year to make Snyder's mortality estimate correct.

Then there was the snapshot of homelessness presented in documentaries and made-for-TV movies. Here, the homeless invariably were portrayed as nice middle-class folks who first lost their income, then their domicile and lastly their dignity, as they were thrown on the streets.

Teachers told students that most families were just a few paychecks away from homelessness. At Christmas, Jesse Jackson urged us to recall that Mary and Joseph were a homeless family.

Like the Alliance's ad, these Norman Rockwell portraits were more fiction than fact. Families with children actually comprise fewer than 20 percent of the homeless -- that's less than 20 percent of roughly 300,000.

Today, almost everyone acknowledges that roughly two-thirds of the homeless are mentally ill (to one degree or another), have a substance-abuse problem or combine these pathologies.

This recognition debunks the other major myth of homelessness: activists' insistence that the problem was caused by cuts in public housing.

Free-market conservatives countered that it was all government's fault. Get rid of rent control and the homeless will all be living in condos with satellite dishes, they earnestly maintained.

A more realistic appraisal was provided by libertarian author P.J. O'Rourke, who -- in response to demands that the government build housing for the homeless -- declared that if it did, half would rip out the plumbing and sell it for booze or drugs, and the other half were so crazy that they'd jump out the windows.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the homeless are still with us.

Unfortunates don't have to be cuddly blonde children to elicit our sympathy.

It's all right to feel sorry for adults who are mentally ill or addicted.

But how to help them? We could quadruple the number of shelter beds, but most of the homeless prefer the pavement. We could train them for jobs, assuming there are any suitable for substance-dependent loonies.

The only thing that might make a difference is mandatory mental evaluation combined with involuntary commitment (briefly, for those who can be helped by medication or therapy). But then, the ACLU would throw a hissy-fit and the Alliance would be deprived of many objects of its concern.

Up

12/10/98: No place at table for conservatives
12/07/98: The day America lost its innocence
12/02/98: Pilgrims Pilloried in streets of Plymouth
11/25/98: Caribbean dogpatch not a good candidate for statehood
11/25/98: Will Vermont force gay marriage on the nation?
11/18/98: The ACLU wants your kids to get a love life
11/16/98: Why liberals hate tobacco and guns more than drugs and crime
11/16/98: "Pleasantville" a countercultural morality play
11/13/98: Ads are a tough sell for abortion
11/09/98: Why gutless Republicans lost
11/06/98: Historians against the Constitution
11/02/98: Loving response to a hateful conference
10/28/98: Professor Death will fit right in at Princeton
10/26/98: Plymouth caves to Pilgrim foes
10/21/98: On '98 election, keep a critical eye on polls
10/19/98: Clinton could yet be 'prosperity president'
10/16/98: Working families -- Dems love 'em (stuffed)
10/09/98: Majoring in 'weirdness'
10/07/98: Friends of Billy Clinton
9/29/98: Letter from ex-soldier highlights defense peril
9/28/98: Answering arguments against impeachment
9/18/98: The nation that doesn't exist
9/14/98: Bubba isn't the only one who should be ashamed
9/11/98: Resolution of Clinton crisis will define national character
9/09/98: We're still just wild about Harry
9/07/98: Mexican banditry didn't end with Pancho Villa
9/02/98: Clinton forgives us!
8/31/98: Ashcroft's plain talking touches responsive chord
8/26/98: Public opinion be damned
8/24/98: Why liberals condone Clinton's lies
8/20/98: Time to move on -- to impeachment
8/12/98: With Bubba in the sexual privacy zone
8/10/98: The truth won't set Clinton free
8/06/98: Truth about Hiroshima is incontrovertible
8/04/98: Clinton not the first hollow president
7/30/98: "Small Soldiers" -- a fractured Vietnam allegory
7/27/98: Crime wave hits hometown
7/22/98: Love in an Internet fishbowl
7/20/98: Ads bring ex-gay movement out of closet
7/15/98: Brian and Amy -- the children of Roe
7/13/98: Why are we scared of obnoxious 'activists?'
7/6/98: Fonda still resists reality
7/1/98: New York blesses domestic partnerships
6/29/98: Teddy and Calvin stood for virtue
6/24/98: Will Clinton betray Taiwan?
6/22/98: Big tobacco? What about big casinos?
6/15/98: Religion -- God for what ails you
6/10/98: Planning Clinton's China itinery
6/8/98: Republicans' Custer offers advice
6/4/98: Oh, Dems Christian-bashers!
6/2/98: Goldwater did conservatives more harm than good
5/27/98: A Clinton-hater confesses
5/15/98: Giuliani's assault on marriage
5/13/98: Hillary knows what's best for everyone
5/11/98: To honor her would not be honorable
5/6/98: Conservative chasm: pragmatism vs. worship of marketplace
5/4/98: Anglo-saxon me
4/29/98: Needle exchange programs are assisted-suicide
4/27/98: Chretien's mission of mercy to Fidel
4/22/98: School-choice is a religious freedom issue
4/20/98: Corporate execs deliver body parts to Beijing
4/14/98: National sales tax --- looks better all the time
4/13/98: The U.N. sinister? Hey, where did that idea come from?
4/8/98: Unions fight workers rights in 226 campaign
3/30/98: Africa's leaders should apologize
3/25/98: GOP shouldn't look to media for advice
3/22/98: You should care about Clinton's 'private life'
3/19/98: Color-coded reading, product of obsessive minds
3/16/98: Amendment will end exile of G-d from our public lives
3/9/98: Havana will break your heart
3/2/98: Vouchers Terrify Teachers' Union
2/25/98: Presidential politics starts at a resort hotel
2/23/98: Hillary's support comes at a price
2/18/98: How many times must we say "no" to gay rights?
2/16/98: Enoch Powell spoke the truth on immigration
2/11/98: Bubba behaving badly
2/9/98: A conservative dissent on the flag-burning amendment
2/5/98: We get the leaders we deserve
2/2/98: Send a signal that could penetrate boardroom doors
1/27/98: State of the president: hollow rhetoric
1/25/98: For Monica's playmate, we have no one to blame but ourselves
1/22/98: At Yale, bet on yarmulke over gown
1/19/98: Commission tackles America's fastest-growing addiction, gambling
1/15/98: Capital punishment and the hard case: no exceptions for Karla Faye Tucker
1/12/98: Partial-birth abortion and the GOP's future: the "big tent" meets truth in advertising
1/8/98: IOLTA: the Left's latest scam to crawl into our pockets
1/5/98: Connect the dots to create a terrorist state
1/1/98: The Unacceptables of 1997: Long may they rave
12/28/97: Hypocrisy is a liberal survival mechanism
12/23/97: Chanukah is no laughing matter
12/22/97: No merry Christmas for persecuted Christians around the world
12/18/97: Bosnia, Haiti, and how not to conduct a foreign policy


©1998, Boston Herald; distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc.