START BY USING WORDS CORRECTLY. These are not ‘homeless camps:’
Given the slim possibility that words might still mean something in public discourse, perhaps homeless camps should be called what they really are. They are drug camps, or the tented bivouacs of down-and-out drug addicts.
“Homeless camp” is too misleading and just results in the constant and just as misleading enabling that permits the associations to continue, to nobody’s benefit, especially the down-and-out and desperate.
They are drug camps that move, like forested bogs that float around big lakes and land at the whim of the wind. Drug camps float around in big cities governed by a disappointing political class often responsible for words that deceive. Drug camps end up on littered boulevards, or in a copse of trees in [St. Paul, MN’s] Pig’s Eye Park, or, most recently, in the woods between the Mississippi River and Shepard Road at the foot of Randolph Avenue. There is a handsome apartment complex there, Waterford Bay, whose renters now know that they have been joined by addicts, not campers. Campers hold s’mores over the fire and sing ditties. Addicts hold needles.
Wouldn’t calling them what they undeniably are – drug camps – heighten public sensibilities as to the true nature of the problem? We spend millions of dollars on beds, beds under a shelter roof, in a building with a furnace and running water and air conditioning. But those beds are mostly empty. Help will have to be invented out of whole cloth. Something new, innovative and helpful will have to be created. Is [St. Paul’s] Mayor Kaohly Her up to it? The city council?
Then there’s word “homeless” itself. Over 20 years ago, Thomas Sowell explored how “Politically Correct Terms Replace Honest Words:”
Another word that the left has virtually banished from the language is “bum.” Centuries of experience with idlers who refused to work and who hung around on the streets making a nuisance — and sometimes a menace — of themselves were erased from our memories as the left verbally transformed those same people into a sacred icon, “the homeless.”
As with swamps, what was once messy and smelly was now turned into something we had to protect. It was our duty to support people who refused to support themselves.
Fast-forward to today, and it’s as if: The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.