Greetings from the Pacific Northwest. All this week we have been in Seattle and Vancouver. It has been a wonderful vacation in two cities that are mirror images across our northern border. Highlights have been a train ride from Seattle to Vancouver and a day trip to Victoria, BC, where on the 35 mile ferry ride we saw the most spectacular scenery I have ever seen.Both cities are modern and vibrant. The streets are filled with young people who, despite the high price of just about everything, seem to be living the good life. There are lines outside the clubs. The cafes and sushi restaurants are buzzing.
But the cities reflect one another in another more disturbing aspect. The parks and underpasses are teeming with the homeless. Walking some of the streets, especially in and around the two Chinatowns, is a daunting prospect. Within an hour of arriving in Vancouver, we are warned four times to avoid East Hastings Street. As we leave a Chinatown restaurant at nine in the evening (it is still light out), the owner insists on calling us a taxi. We had a similar situation in the International District in Seattle.
Amy naively wonders why they don't get jobs. Even if there were jobs, these people are patently unemployable. In the U.S. at least, I am tempted to point to something that happened more than 20 years ago.
History has been kind to Ronald Reagan. These days, even Democrats speak nostalgically of the days of the Reagan presidency. But I remember what happened in New York City when Reagan emptied the mental institutions as one social program after another shut down due to lack of federal funding. The streets and parks and underpasses filled with tortured and sometimes dangerous souls who were unable to care for themselves. We seem to have forgotten about that.
Get a job..? There has to be another solution.
Posts
2 comments:
A tragic aspect of the social welfare system in this country is that many receive assistance who would be quite capable of providing for themselves, while many who really do need to be cared for by others are neglected, often in a misguided attempt to respect their "rights". "Get a job" is good advice for most receiving public assistance, but many destitute people have such severe behavioral problems or developmental deficiencies that the best contribution they can make to the economy is to just stay out of the way of productive people. The terminally unemployable should be kept comfortable and secure at public expense—whether they like it or not.
Same situation in Los Angeles. The theory of Ronald Reagan was that anyone can do better than the government. Cut out all government funding for social programs and let the regular folks take care of them. It was never clear who those regular folks were and so nothing was done. It was very sad to see crazy people slowly starve on the street, but I avoided them too.
Post a Comment