Remember the song you were taught in grade school about hobos and their magical destination?
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
There’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Folk songs often make, well, folk heroes out of people in society that most of us don’t really want to deal with every day on our doorstep. Robin Hood may be exciting to watch as he goes after King John’s money on the screen, but if you were among the king’s taxation staff you would probably see Robin Hood a bit differently.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain’s friendly and easy-going hobos were probably never the mainstay of what we now call the “unhoused” population. One of the most enduring modern myths about “the homeless” is that they’re just like you and me, it’s just that they fell on hard times. Maybe it was a medical bankruptcy. Maybe they lost their job and found themselves on the street, right?
Wrong. The overwhelming majority of the homeless are not mere victims of bad luck. They are people with years of drug addiction and/or untreated mental illness. As sad as their plight may be, they are not the only ones bearing hardship. Often their families have given up trying to help them as such people frequently choose drugs and a street life over putting in the work to get clean and on the straight and narrow.
Billionaire inventor and X owner Elon Musk is not afraid to get to the heart of the matter:
Sound harsh? Cast your mind back 25 years and you’ll notice some words that have been taken out of our modern conversation: vagrant, drifter. We replaced those “judgmental” words with the anodyne “homeless,” which has now been displaced by the even more euphemistic “unhoused.” Notice that the word puts the burden on you and me: it’s society that failed to “house” these people.
You won’t find any reference to this reality if you try researching online. The Google search engine has a pronounced leftist bias that makes the “homeless” sacred, even cuddly, while making you feel guilty about wondering if they had any hand in their own situation:
These are not “myths.” Anyone who lives in a city–and increasingly in small towns–can attest to the aggressive, drunk, drugged, and often violent state of career panhandlers.
X user Jeremy Kaufmann (Elon Musk was reacting to his tweet) highlighted this article from the San Franciso Chronicle.
Even the city organ of the most liberal municipality in the U.S. can’t hide from the truth. The Chronicle’s investigation cops to the fact that the “unhoused” are often violent, filthy, and waste the help they’re given while burning every bridge behind them.
That story was from two years ago, and the mood in the country has changed significantly since then. Americans are tired of being guilted into paying ever more to “help” people who only abuse their trust. The responses to Kauffman’s post show it:
