Today I read a sad and touching story on homelessness in San Francisco magazine. The writer, Kevin Berger, described how he set out to produce a story on homelessness, but wound up making a friend. The homeless man that Berger befriended is still on the streets, and it was sad to read how alcoholism and other issues kept him from getting his life back together. Perhaps equally disturbing were the accounts of government-run programs that are supposed to help people on the streets. A direct quote from the homeless man is this: “it’s safer here than in the shelters, it really is. On the streets, I know who to trust and who not to.” And on “Care Not Cash” he said this: “It was an administrative f***-up.”
Yet more evidence that civil society desperately needs to be strengthened.
I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. Its a good progressive college town. The number homeless people who live in the downtown area is heartbreaking. What is so heartbreaking is that most of them are obviously seriously mentally ill and unable to help themselves. In the name of “freedom” and individual rights, we took away the power of the states to commit these people for their own good and now we get watch them wallow on our streets. Its terrible.