“We can’t coexist anymore”

The Obvious Solution

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Going to school in L.A.

Call them homeless persons if you wish; I call them vagrants, a word falling steadily in frequency of use between 1880 and 1980, most likely because of its perceived negative connotation in a “kinder, gentler” world that has come to value individual freedom and dignity more than public order, which is why we have ceased altogether to call such people tramps and vagabonds.

Tracing the word’s origin back through Anglo-French to Latin, vagrancy has always denoted “wandering, without fixed abode,” encompassing the idea of “mental wandering” and “eccentric conduct.” In the late 18th century the word was a legal catch-all term for miscellaneous petty offenses against public order.

There’s that phrase again — public order, that contemporary society appears to value less and less, and which has certainly deteriorated in proportion to the rising numbers of vagrants in our urban centers.

But let it be noted that, as the 2020 “Summer of Love” rioting made clear to all with eyes to see, our perverse tolerance of public disorder transcends mere literal, physical vagrancy: mentally and spiritually, we are all collectively wandering out of bounds from previous societal norms and standards.

Where we are headed, and why, is less clear. But it seems that on several levels “We can’t coexist anymore.”

I am quoting a Miami Beach city commissioner who is backing more aggressive measures to restore public order by forcing vagrants off the streets, away from beach entrances and schools, out of public parks and all the other places where they drink and do drugs, defecate, have sex (with themselves or others) in front of children, keep people away from retail stores, and in general lower the quality of life for people who foot the bill for a decent, orderly, civil way of life.

These measures would basically subject people sleeping outdoors on public property to arrest if they don’t accept placement in a shelter.

The objections and obstacles, there and probably everywhere else, are as follow:

• Some vagrants don’t want to sleep in a shelter, for varying reasons. Usually the shelter is short-term (24 hours), forcing them to reapply or relocate on a daily basis, and sometimes they can’t bring all their stuff inside.

• Shelter space must be available; otherwise, the choice is between arrest and exile from the place vagrants call home (which is anywhere they can get away with living the way they’re living). But the number of vagrants is often increasing faster than a community’s ability to build additional shelter spaces.

• To build more permanent housing is becoming extravagantly (literally, “wandering out of bounds,” like the whole vagrancy problem) expensive, requiring soaring new taxation of one kind or another. And then there’s the fairness issue, with “regular” Miami Beach residents having to pay an average $2,600 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

More expedient measures — such as giving vagrants a bus or plane ticket out of town — are justly condemned as “passing the buck.” Besides, these people aren’t “hobos” — who are more like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher than the tranqed-out zombies staggering around the same plot of ground or pavement for months at a time.

Clearly we’re getting nowhere with this blight, this affliction, this social pathology and paralysis. And, of course, the past century has made us wary of the horrors of any kind of “Final Solution” or holocaust wherever one population decides that it can’t coexist any longer with another. So we keep throwing platitudes and money at the problem, and it keeps getting worse.

Perhaps before we say “No how!” to good old German know-how, we might consider that, while what the Nazis did in response to the so-called “Jewish problem” was hellish and horrid, the organizational skills they employed in doing it were pretty impressive.

Not unlike those of The New Deal, that took thousands of unemployed men off the streets and put them to work in the CCC and WPA. Not unlike what the same government did after Pearl Harbor, taking thousands of Japanese-Americans out of their lives and into remote internment camps like Manzanar.

And not unlike those that are operating right under your nose in the present moment. How do you think the nation is absorbing huge populations of migrants, if not through an ingenious Underground Railroad, funded by “dark” federal dollars flowing through NGOs such as Catholic Charities and, more generally, the Catholic Church — or that part of it that is in bed with the Democrat Party.

I trust my point is clear. Call them “relocation camps” or “reeducation camps” or “work camps,” or “rehabilitation centers,” they are where most of our hard-core vagrants need to be — until they are detoxed and sober, given psychiatric and spiritual counseling, reacquainted with work, and returned to us or to other appropriate facilities.

It can be done. Round ‘em up, clean ‘em up, train them up, and return them to actual lives. So why shouldn’t we do it? “Compassion”? Ha! What in God’s Name is compassionate about the status quo?

When Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and started talking about immigration, his election was assured. Similarly, as soon as you hear a candidate, from either party, articulating a clear vision of how to reclaim lost souls and restore public order, you’ll be looking at our next president.

© 2023 Chad Klinger
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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