Here in the States, the homeless are dirty and stinky and creepy. What's wrong with them? They're clearly not crazy: they're extremely visible and there are folks all around who would be more than happy to take them to their little happy homes with fluffy walls. They're not violent: the police would be all over them in a heartbeat because they do a horrible job of portraying themselves in a sympathetic light and so they can't play the "you're not gonna lock up widdle old me" card because they lack any sort of cuteness. At all. The best I can come up with is that they're lazy.
Look at Mexico. In Nuevo Laredo, a town ten minutes south of the border, there is a big plot of land called "Las Colonias." It means "the neighborhoods", but the plot is a garbage dump. I don't mean it's run-down and falling apart. I mean that the city used to put all their trash there until a bunch of people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else because basically all the money in Mexico belongs to an elite ruling class that you can't get to be a part of ethically blazed a trail through the refuse. The Mexican government, in an act of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," gave the blank spots between the heaps of garbage street names. So this shanty town has thousands of people in little lean-tos with plywood walls and tarp roofs, and you know what? The homeless people in the US, should they decide to move there, would be dirtier and stinkier and creepier than every single one of them.
Here, they have access to all sorts of shelters and asylums. On the nights when they can get inside (granted, not every single night, but honestly their batting average can't possibly be that bad), they have access to a shave and a toothbrush and a shower. There's no excuse for being such strange weirdos, since they don't seem to be crazy since otherwise they would be taken to a crazy home long ago. If you're 80 and doing this, I have a hard time believing you lived 80 years acting like a helpless alien without someone saying "y'know, we should investigate and see if there's anything wrong with your psyche." That's obviously happened, and the conclusion was obviously "welp, this guy's just lazy and drunk."
What's even worse are the people who appear strong and normal and have tattoos and piercings. They're all college-aged; maybe they're students doing some avant-garde thing to whore for attention. If you have enough money to keep a nose ring on you and not sell it for the money (this half square centimeter under my nose is gonna be SO toasty), I don't see why I should give you anything. To make matters worse, they're all confrontational buttholes. So we have people who aren't even pretending to need money yet demanding it anyway.
That would not fly in Nuevo Laredo. Over there, the homeless (at the risk of offending my readers who live in the colonias in Nuevo Laredo and can read English and get internet access, if I can pick up your house then you are homeless) are all normal and nice. They manage to stay clean without running water and they're all perfectly well-adjusted. Maybe it's the sense of community there, or maybe it's that here it takes effort to be homeless while there it just takes not making much money. Maybe it's the fact that here people are too well taken care of for their own good. They know that if they want more money they can just beg harder and look sadder. But please don't think that all beggars everywhere are at all similar to the first world's degenerate crazies. Pretty much everywhere else, where substance abuse is uncommon and there aren't scads of rich people who want to get thoughtless karma by throwing money at bums who stand around with signs, they're decent and normal and just victims of bad circumstance.
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