February 21st, 2006
It must be getting harder and harder for people who stand and beg in the streets these days. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly sympathetic to them, though I think that we could do a lot to constructively improve their situations enough that they wouldn't need to stand on street corners and pan-handle (or follow you down the block talking to your back). But I feel that, although there are some pretty large holes in the so-called social safety net, some folks will always find the streets the lesser of evils and continue to live there.
I remember a guy I befriended named Pete. He was just plain nuts, and not safe to be around. God knows, he could sure have benefitted from being in a hospital (well, in my self-righteous opinion, anyhow ...); I mean, the guy could barely cope in the big real world. But there were worse cases than his, and he somehow stayed sane enough to live on the streets (mostly) of North Vancouver, and there were enough people like me who befriended him sufficiently to feed him and even clothe him, that he somewhat survived.
And he preferred it to living in the mental hospital. He told terror tales of what it was like to be constantly medicated, living in intense boredom, or grovelling at the mercy of scarce and underpaid staff who were that kind of cold impersonal staff who just weren't smart enough to be effective, or perhaps not free enough to be caring. Whatever the case, Pete assured me that lying under a leaky box in an alley in the cold rain waiting for morning (no sleep, just lying and waiting) was preferable to being chemically paralysed and put onto a mat face down for several hours, where he could hear people coming and going but not see them. Bad enough when you have your full faculties, but try staying happy and well-behaved through this for the staff when you are already paranoid and somewhat unhinged from reality! Yes, I think I would take the dirty puddles and sleepless cold rain in the alley over that, too.
But I am not proposing that we just throw more money at the problem. That won't work. We know this, because we have tried this. The problem, as always, lies with the baseline culture we live in, where crazy people should be shuffled off to dark corners. Where we even have a concept of crazy people. That won't change ever, because we don't feel safe around schizophrenics or folks who are bi-polar. We don't feel comfortable around those who are depressed and/or suicidal. We feel the urge to push them out of our way, and it is dishonesty to try and pretend otherwise. Crazy people are hard to be around: They are frightening, frustrating, and depressing.
And so the hospitals lack funding to keep more patients than they already do; thus, people like my former friend Pete wander the streets. And even if there were more funding, I doubt he would go live there anyhow. Here in Vancouver they've made it illegal to squeegee windshields (you know, that's probably not a bad idea; they were never exactly effective at it, and the traffic was dangerous for them and disrupted for everyone else), but standing on a street corner isn't exactly an improvement, is it?
So, at the top I said that things must be getting harder for the beggars (not supposed to use that term, am I? But is "pan-handlers" any better?) because our society is growing more and more cashless. What do you give them? They don't exactly take Visa or MasterCard, do they? And the cash we still carry around is more targeted. Younger people don't just withdraw $200 for the weekend any more. Now they get the cash they need for something specific that bank-cards or credit can't be used for, and use plastic for everything else. The beggars are SOL, aren't they? We just don't carry the cash we used to.
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