 thisnamecantbetaken says: The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance. By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet. When employers check your credit history before giving you a chance at work then you know it is a crime to be poor or even have financial problems. Baffled... Before these legislators pass on their bigoted and narrow-minded judgmental view of how to ‘handle’ the downtrodden they need to imagine themselves or their loved ones being in the same situation. What they fail to understand is that they themselves are a heartbeat or two away from being poor themselves. These people on the street never imagined themselves being where they are. One example of how this can happen is a catastrophic medical situation coupled with health insurance companies refusing to pay for care is costing many people their homes. Another is the downturn in the economy that forced people hanging on by a thread to suddenly lose their jobs and therefore their homes. Municipal... Classic "Blaming the Victim". Some things don't change.  Christopher Mayhew, author of London Labour and The London Poor wrote about victimisation of the poor in the late 1800s/early 1900s. So did Dickens and Jack London in his book People of the Abyss. Nothing much has changed. Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. -- Herman Melville |
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