The hapless mayor of Denver, Michael Hancock believes there is no homeless problem in Denver.  I guess he has no windows from his offices looking out over Civic Center Park.  Go by there ANY DAY, and you will see this.

I apologize that the foreground is blurry, but driving by at 20 miles per hour or more is about the only way to keep them from coming into the street to berate ask you for money. 

Note the guy in the red poncho/trash bag outfit.  All of that stuff to his left and above him is his.  Two bikes, and at least six bags of shit.  I don’t know how one person rides two bikes at the same time, so one must ponder the need for the second bike, or how this guy came to be in possession of it.  Think how long he could drink or smoke weed if only he sold one of them.

The huge pile in the immediate foreground belongs to another homeless.  He keeps it covered from the rain with the big blue poncho.  This has two immediate effects.  His worthless crap stays dry, and the poncho kills the grass beneath it as it gets no sun or moisture.  But it isn’t HIS lawn, so he gives a shit. 

This picture is at the street level in front of the state capital.  It is an every day event.  That is, until there is a major festival or celebration coming to town, or a charity walk or run is scheduled.  Then you’ll see police, charter buses, and trash trucks come in force.  They load them up on buses with whatever they can carry and haul them to another part of the city.  What is left is gathered up and thrown away.  You get to pay for this, of course through your taxes.

But that is how Hancock gets away with saying there is no homeless epidemic in Denver—he ships them out to other towns and cities.  These are the sights I personally see all across Denver, but read about in other cities across America.

And most of them simply do not care about their drag on society or culture.  They set up camps where ever it can be advantageous to them.  They do not care about it being private property, or even a business storefront.  And the Denver Police have been directed to not harass them, so it takes a concerted effort by property and business owners to have them removed from their place of business.

The whole thing got me thinking on the genesis of the problem.  Homelessness.  I’ve narrowed it down to just a few catalysts.

1. A major life changing event
2. Drugs
3. Mental illness
4. Choice

By major life changing event, I focused on the loss of a job or primary source of income, be it the actual person’s job, or that of their spouse or parent.  It could also include the loss of the actual spouse or parent through death, divorce, or decree (get out of my house!).  As we age, the loss of a job can be seriously difficult to overcome but should not be unrecoverable.  The longer one is out of work, the harder it becomes to find comparable work (or wage), so getting back on the horse is important.

Losing income has an immediate impact on lifestyle, particularly if the persons involved are like 90 percent of Americans and are living a financed lifestyle.  If you are spending 25-40 percent of your income to pay credit cards down or other retailer’s cards, you are setting yourself up for a long road of shit if you lose some of that income.  Sometimes you can reason with the creditors for a period of time, but they are going to want their money.  If they do agree to forego payments in the short term, you can bet that the long term pay off will be much higher.

Add to credit cards, the car payment (be it a loan or even worse, a lease), then the rent or mortgage.  Before you know it, you are living paycheck to paycheck, with barely enough to continue, let alone eat, or be entertained. Living a life of immediate gratification is going to result in being slammed by a financial tidal wave after usually just a single hiccup.

Watch the transition here.  Lose your job and within six months you’ll likely be foreclosed and then you are living in your car, until it breaks down, gets repossessed, stolen, wrecked, or you no longer have enough money to put fuel in it.  Clearly, you’ll have no insurance on it since there is no immediate payoff making those premium payments.  After the car, now you are lugging everything you own in a shopping cart or a bike with a trailer, or a series of rolling suitcases and back packs.  These break, or are stolen when you sleep or check in to a homeless shelter, or through out right robbery, so your worldly possessions slowly dwindle to the fifteen pounds you can carry on your back.

You eat out of trash cans, or beg on street corners to gain enough to get ten chicken nuggets at Burger King.  You ask for extra sauce so you at least can eat that when you don’t “earn” enough through the generosity of others.  You start selling your blood until they won’t take anymore.  And somehow, in all of this, you forgot how to find a job or gave up trying, the only thing that can reverse the course.

Drugs are an even faster way to the street.  The idiot feel-good politicians of Colorado are still blind to this fact.  So tempted were they are the prospect of money for schools and extra tax revenues, they legalized marijuana use (in your own home).  Dispensaries popped up all over the place.  I have three along a single half mile stretch of one road within three miles of my house.  There has even been a killing in one to steal the money generated over two days.

Here’s another easy path to follow.  You live in an apartment (or own a home) and you smoke weed.  Just at your house, but you like it.  A lot.  A once or twice a week buzz turns into three or four nights a week.  It takes more weed to get you the buzz you like so you have to spend more at the dispensary.  You cancel Netflix in favor of the weed.  Then you cancel Amazon Prime. Then cable altogether.

You are oblivious to the stench that comes with your high.  It is absolutely horrendous but you are immune to it since everything you own smells like burnt rope.  But your boss smells it.  If you are in a job that can mandate random drug tests, you get called out, tested and piss hot.  Depending on their policies, you may get lucky and be offered rehabilitation.  You try it, but like the high better and you relapse.  The boss grows weary of your lack or quality of production and lets you go.

Now you are back to the first reason listed above.  No income, you get evicted or foreclosed. Yada, yada, cycle repeats.

Mental illness.  This one is again multi-faceted.  Sometimes people with an illness are cast away by family because of the pattern of violence, cost of treatment, stigma of association, any number of reasons.  But the mentally ill are shunned away from the family or shuttled off to live with other relatives until their behavior is too much again.  On the streets they go with absolutely no lifeline.

Another side of mental illness comes from simply being alone all the time and living on the streets.  People, like most dogs, are social animals.  We need supportive interaction with others.  Many homeless I encounter talk to themselves, argue with themselves, or have conversations with their belongings, or an invisible travel mate.  They are dirty, stink beyond belief, and so, no “normal” person will interact with them.

The strong homeless prey on the weak ones, robbing them, pummeling them.  Its only naturally for the psyche to break eventually.  With no tether remaining to connect them to reality, they are doomed to die on the streets, hungry, cold, wet, piss-stained, and penniless.

Choice.  This is the hardest one for me to understand and thus, condone.  They are called the Voluntarily Vagrant– people who actually choose to have no job, rather to live off the social programs made available by liberal politicians, or by begging for money from passersby.  These leeches decided early on that they are entitled to a living paid for by the efforts, wages, and emotions of all the rest of us.  They do not want a job.  They are content merely getting by, begging for food, money, selling themselves, stealing, you name it.

I have a friend who has a daughter who is a business owner.  It is a small restaurant, doing breakfast and lunch.  One day, she came outside her establishment to find a group of vagabonds begging for money.  She engaged them, offering each of them a job on the spot.  One of them could serve food, one could work the back of the place, one might even learn to cook.  All three of them declined her offer and merely moved 200 yards away to another place to beg.  She offered all three a lifeline to a stabile existence and they CHOSE against it.  They don’t want to work.  They must make an acceptable or comparable income doing nothing but sucking off society.  This is why Trump wants people to have to show an effort to get a job in order to continue receiving government assistance. (Oh, and Clinton actually started that.  B. Hussein ended it.)

So what do we do about them?  The feel-good liberals all want to give them hand-outs as they see them as weak, vulnerable, Democrat voters.  The conservatives see them as drains on society, consuming, and not providing—like locusts.

I always remember that sign I used to see when going into a National Park about not feeding the wild animals because they will become dependent on humans for their existence and stop hunting on their own.  If we can’t feed this set of wild animals that are unable to communicate in a language we can understand, what makes it okay to feed that set of wild animals just because they can.  Will they not learn the same lessons about dependency and stop trying to produce for themselves?  I know a guy who feeds a roving herd of wild deer at his farm about an hour south of me.  Within a week, it went from one or two to the whole herd, buck, cows, and fawns.  They all show up for the daily allotment of corn/grain.

Look at any charity around 11 o’clock in the morning and you see the same thing.  People, not deer, and they are expecting to be fed.  And when they finish, just like the deer at John’s barn, they leave behind what they don’t want, or their own personal refuse.  Nice repayment to your benefactor.  Leave your trash right where you stand regardless of the abundance of trash receptacles in the area.  Just like the providing of food for their survival, cleaning up for their comfort is left for someone else to do.

Like most productive, job-holding people in the labor force, I’m trained at my job.  Some of the training came through my career in the military, while some of it was taught to me on the job.  And now, I trade my time doing that job in exchange for money to pay bills and buy things.  These homeless people, whether they want to admit it or not, in all likelihood, are trained in at least one thing.  Before they became homeless, I’d bet they had at least one parent who made them clean their room.  Thus, they are trained in the art of bending down and picking things up.

I say we make the lot of them sanitation engineers so they can put to use that skill set.  They can police the trash in and around the same city blocks they infest and pollute in exchange for food vouchers and/or lodging tickets.  You are paid by how much you police.  Sadly, we won’t be able to do this purely by weight.  It is the nature of the human beast to try to get over on any system and soon enough, these beasts will begin to add to their collection a measure of dirt or rocks to make it heavier.  No, it’ll have to be sorted and then paid by another measure.  Volume, maybe.

I can hear the bleeding heart leftists now.  But, they’ll die.  As Captain Kirk once said,

Let them die.