Albuquerque shows they have a heart and a clue!
I often wonder about the intelligence behind efforts by various people to deal with homelessness. They build homeless spikes and things so they can't sleep under bridges and on benches. They put up speakers to play annoying music as auditory torture. Yet aren't there better ways? Aren't there better ways than just constantly taking in donations to just keep them on the edge?
Turns out that it's a lot easier than anyone would have likely thought.
Men making tiny houses in California to just give them a safe space to stay...then the city spends money to steal them from the homeless, and steals their solar panels.
People, mayors, city workers, normal people, giving them jobs, helping them just a little bit.
Giving them food.
Giving them showers.
It really is this easy.
Government is made to bring us together, to help people, to solve problems. But that haven't been what they've been doing. They've been serving particular people, often the rich, to the detriment of everyone else. The dark humour of the matter is that it would be even easier to just do things correctly the first time, rather than callously, unintelligently, just to shove them under the carpet.
The same is true of healthcare. It would be so much cheaper to just provide basic healthcare to everyone rather than let the poor suffer until they have no choice but to go to a hospital. It would be cheaper for everyone. It would be cheaper than insurance. But we can't do anything intelligently, because we have so many that see the problems caused by the callous wastefulness of the unintelligent.
I feel like the same solution could be applied to the homeless and the poor and the immigrant populace and the problem of healthcare and jobs. We need an organization that helps people find places to live and work and ensure they can eat and just take care of the paperwork for standard healthcare...which has to be covered for everyone. Everyone needs standard healthcare. It doesn't matter if it's paid for by taxes or bills, just that it gets covered, for a price people can afford, and it can't really be horribly difficult to get. Right now, often people have to hire lawyers and sue for benefits, and then the state ends up paying the lawyer, when they should have just given the care in the beginning.
People shouldn't have to nearly kill themselves for the basic necessities of life. We have minimum wage, but it doesn't work, because everything just keeps going up in price, and people keep having to work their life away. It wasn't this hard to survive in the past.
People in third world countries often eat better than the working poor in America. We eat pasta and food with horrible preservatives and few vegetables...and they eat these meals that we could barely afford to eat, every day, for pennies on the dollar of what it would cost here.
There's so much waste and greed and it's out of control. And no one's fixing it. It's just getting worse.
We don't necessarily need socialism or whatever you want to call it...we just need people to work together, to ensure the poorest are better off, the homeless can get jobs, the poor get better jobs, the sick and weakest get taken care of, that society as a whole is just better off.
Right now, we just have a massive system where profit and corruption is legalized. Where bribes are just labeled fees and tickets. Where people are treated like less than.
Things need to change. And it's easier to do things better than it is to do them horribly and just ignore the corruption and incompetence.
Flag because of @themarkymark that troll!
Go fuck yourself with your own head. Preferably after decapitation.
Nice, sure will!
Thanks! It's nice to be heard.
I really like this post and agree with overall sentiment, but we differ on certain particulars.
"Government is made to bring us together, to help people, to solve problems."
I usually am pretty optimistic in general, but I really don't think this is the goal of government. If this rosy, sunshine and rainbows explanation of government's purpose was ever true I'd wager it's example is centuries behind us if not millennia.
I don't mean to understate the destructiveness of foolishness, but I'm convinced that much of what you speak out against is deliberately perpetrated by capable and intelligent malefactors.
Governments (at least modern iterations) seem to me another tool to enable concentration of wealth, resources, and luxury for those willing to wrest them from the hands of the masses. Taxation, eminent domain, taking from the most vulnerable and stigmatizing the poor are just a handful of examples of mechanisms that enable our demagogic domineers to fulfill that purpose.
It seems to me that the rest (public works, welfare programs, representation and the like) comes only with prolonged struggle and great reluctance from the governing elite, barring some exceptions. This feigned benevolence serves mostly to legitimize rulers and quell their subjects.
Again, I like the post, don't get me wrong.
Heck the corruption! Help the homeless!
Didn't you just say you were optimistic? :P Governments might have been created to rule over the people. I don't know why the first happened. But why we need them is for them to organize people to do things together that we all need. But yeah, they don't very often lately. Or they do so much shit that people hate they can't even appreciate the things they do that help.
Totally read this as "Hack the corruption! Hack the homeless!", as in a reference to hacking. I think it would be totally possible to solve this problem by "hacking" it. The government isn't helping enough. They aren't solving the problem. Maybe it's time that people get together and create organizations to help people find work and places to stay. There are small organizations that provide some food and beds...but there needs to be something larger, more widespread, that works with a ton of different people and organizations to help different people.
But I don't think that we can solve healthcare. That's so fucked up and out of control, it needs intervention.