A Damn Good Question

The Mayor of Portland, OR gets to the nut of the problem of having “homeless” folks camp out at City Hall in protest of the city’s anti-camping/loitering laws

Both the mayor and protest leaders seem to be feeling the pressure and the tension of a struggle that has now stretched into its third week with no obvious compromise in the making.

Rios came out of the mayor’s conference room to complain that Potter’s staff had written a response to the meeting in advance and forced protesters to turn off tape recorders given to them by reporters at the Portland Mercury, an alternative weekly, after Potter refused to open the meeting to the public. Still, Rios later carved a path through reporters to shake the mayor’s hand and thank him for the time.

Potter didn’t take kindly to a question about how he could have allowed a large group to camp outside City Hall for two weeks without expecting public safety problems.

He stared at the reporter for a moment before responding. “That is a really dumb question,” he said. “Would you like to rephrase it?”

Potter said the city has opened 102 extra shelter beds since the protest began, and that 18 sat empty Monday night. He also noted that the crowd outside City Hall now includes a number of people who aren’t homeless. Perhaps, the mayor suggested, those people could take a few homeless men and women home with them overnight during the protest so they don’t violate the law.

If all the people who claim to care about “the homeless” would actually take care of the problem themselves instead of demanding that my tax money be used to pay for some asshatted scheme which only attracts more of “the homeless”, the problem would be licked in short order.

Which is to say, the “homeless” advocates would stop feeling sorry for the bums and we wouldn’t have any more “homeless advocates” to complain about the existence of “homeless people”, thereby, the only whining about “homeless people” I would have to endure is how there is a shortage of them since we put them to work along the interstates picking up trash for their room and board.