Of all the human catastrophes that need an attractive victim to promote the cause, none is more challenging than homelessness.
The most obvious obstacle for the casting director is that the homeless are, as you much expect, hard to find. Lacking an address, one must go prowling the mean streets for just the right person. Connecticut communities and others across the country recently went through the process of “counting” the homeless — not only to substantiate their grant applications, but also, in an “American Idol” sort of way, auditioning for the perfect homeless victim to woo the public. Also, of course, there is new federal “homeless” money, so we need to identify the “clients,” before the money dries up.
Colorado just counted its homeless for the first time in 17 years.
The enumerating of the homeless has often drawn a few snickers from the academic community, which questions the validity of both the counters, whose jobs depend in part on a large herd of homeless victims; and the self-reporting of those who stand to be benefit from being “homeless” — assuming they are coherent enough to be either accurate or devious.
The perfect homeless victim needs sympathetic vulnerability. The “deserving poor” must conjure up a more heart-rending anecdote than spending the rent money on bourbon.
In a concession to the love-hate kind of thing we have with the homeless, the police chief in Daytona Beach, Fla., has proposed giving the city’s homeless a bus ticket out-of-town, so that they can presumably find housing with friends or families who live somewhere else. Las Vegas cops are closing down parks at night where the homeless sleep, are conducting Iraqi-style raids on homeless encampments — and the city has made it illegal to feed the homeless in open-air guilt facilities.
Because we have so little success in identifying compelling homeless stars to wow the media, we tend to classify the anonymous homeless with all manner of labels, trying to hit on just the right example. There are the “chronic” homeless, who suffer from “chronic street homelessness;” and, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, we have the delicately labeled “difficult-to-serve people who routinely live on the streets.”
The “continuously homeless” are sort of homeless all the time for at least a year, although they may, in the alternative, be homeless for at least “four homeless episodes” over three years.
You see the problem. Vocabulary is hell. Whether or not the poor “will always be with us,” the homeless seem to be with us and multiplying, no matter what the economy is like, no matter how many social service agencies are hard at work, counting them and presumably, trying to plop them in a “home.”
No Solution
Of course, if the real problem with the homeless is that they are “homeless,” government could farm out the problem to 37 private pre-fab home manufacturers, who could buy a few rural towns in eastern Connecticut and build a community for 47 million homeless people. Problem solved.
But if we just put all the homeless people in a home, then what would the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness do all day? What would happen to the church groups and the government agencies and the “advocates,” if all the homeless people were in homes?
Fear not. Housing the homeless is the least of it. We diagnose the homeless with sufficient pathologies and afflictions to keep the social service industry knee-deep in government grants, forever.
But, back to the original problem. Who shall be the perfect homeless victim in Connecticut: pathetic, yet photogenic?
Dick Blumenthal. That’s right, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.
No, no, you say, it can’t be. But, sadly, Blumenthal lives the secret life of a homeless person. How do you think he is available for in-studio appearances on talk-radio shows at 5 a.m., has three press conferences by noon; and still manages to hit three Democratic Town Committee meetings, two church dinners, and a solemn session with a family whose vinyl siding is peeling of the ranch house, courtesy of a crooked contractor?
Blumenthal can do it, because he is homeless. He simply wanders the state, looking for love. He tells the politicians in Hartford that he lives in “Fairfield County,” wherever that is. It’s a perfect cover.
Dick Blumenthal. Attorney General. Homeless person. Open your hearts.n
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
