Sunday, March 06, 2005
 
Homelessness Rediscovery Watch

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch waxes romantic about homelessness in its Metro section today: For two men, it was a place to call home.
    Even now, more than a month later, the discarded bits of their lives litter the ground around the little green bench — a few twist-off beer caps, a couple of dozen cigarette butts and some scraps of candy wrappers half-buried in the March mud.

    For the better part of a year it had been their bench, and even on those rainy nights when they would leave to take shelter under the roof of a nearby bus stop, they would always return. There was no address, not in the strict sense of the word, but for Morris White and Kerry Smith, it was the closest thing to a home they would know for much of 2004.

    They arrived for the first time in the late spring, when the city air was warm and clean, and the sweetgum trees were heavy with new leaves.
I don't understand. I thought homelessness was bad, but here the Post-Dispatch sepia-tones the story of two men who preferred to live on the streets to living with their families or in homeless shelters with their pissant regulations.

If these homeless people don't care to change their condition, why should I? Why should tax money be spent on them, other than it's free?

I doubt the Post-Dispatch wanted to raise these questions.


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:54 AM
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