Teach a Homeless Man To Get A Job
Michael Kwan is looking for cases where we’ve done something charitable for those in need. Well, I have a charitable act that I do very often that helps many many sides of our society.
You see, I’m not the average North American – privileged from birth, full of empathy and sympathy, trying to be self-righteous by doing small insignificant deeds of good that only makes the doer feel good while it does not fix the problem. I’m a very realistic person who sees things for the truth rather than idealism. I don’t believe in basics or minimums that are guaranteed by default, and I believe in Darwinism. Even the right to survive is, technically and truthfully, not a guarantee. We have won it as a society, and we also need to sustain it as individuals.
When you decide to cross the street at night wearing a black jacket, you are gambling with your right to life. When you decide to go to war with Iraq, you are forcefully taking away the right to life from innocent Iraqi civilians. In an ideal world, everybody has the right to live. But who said these rights are guaranteed? I don’t understand how these standards somehow became a philosophy. These standards we set are merely artificial human attempts at achieving a higher goal, but really, there’s no law in physics that grants us any kind of rights whatsoever.
When you ditch out on a job and decide to shoot up on heroine, eventually you will lose your right to an income. When you lose right to an income, you lose your rights to food, shelter. You’ll also lose the right to heroine, since money will be scarce. Eventually you will lose rights to live. You will die on the streets. Unless. We encounter the idiots who decide to give petty change to these people, feed them in soup kitchens, so as to grant them the right to food and heroine that rightfully should be taken away from them. It only makes the problem worse.
Some people might be saying at this point, “In some cases, it’s not their fault. They have mental illnesses.” or something of the sort. Once again, going back to the very basics of physics – nothing is guaranteed. Unfortunately some are born without adequate ability to survive. If they have rich parents who are willing to lend them the right to carry on, great. If they found some other talent through which they can obtain the right to live, great (paralympians, for example). If not, who the hell says that we as society should guarantee them basic rights just because they’re human beings? It’s all man-made, and merely an opinion. It’s not a golden standard, unfortunately.
When a homeless person asks me for change, my response is “No. Get a job.” If you are incapable of getting a job, REGARDLESS of whose fault it is, then you lose rights to money, and in consequence, you lose your rights to food, shelter, and ultimately, survival.
You see, if you give these guys change, they’ll carry on for another day. Buy cheap food, and cheap drugs. That doesn’t solve the problem. The only thing it might do is make you feel like a nice smug person who is generous and all. But it doesn’t really help anything in the long run.
I’m a more charitable person than those donating soups and change to the drug-addicted homeless people in downtown and the eastside (I live in Vancouver by the way). Because I encourage them to learn how to fish, so they can find their own rights, rather than borrow rights from others on a daily basis. We as society, thanks to our ancestors, have created this magnificent world of opportunity and wealth. If you can’t grasp even a tiny bit of it, too bad. Darwinism says you will just perish away and nobody will remember you. It’s cold, it’s sad, but it’s the truth.
Just to make things clear – I donate for other charitable causes that involve childrens charities, as well as international charities for Africa and what not. Their economy and way of life has been raided by the influence of Western civilization, the global economy and the currency exchange system that enslaves some of the poorest nations. This is a fact I cannot change because I’m not that powerful. To offset the fact that the wealths I enjoy are trickled down wealths from the global economy that leeches from the poor 3rd world countries and piles it up in the hands of North Americans, I donate for those causes. I just don’t give a single fucking penny to homeless people in Vancouver.



While I may not necessarily agree with your views, this was a fantastic post!
On a side note, your header image has a typo. In the second definition of your name, you spell ‘small’ as ‘smal’.
I do agree with you as well Michael, some of the view might be personal and nothing wrong with that. However, you’ve put up a really interesting post.
Jeff, you’ve always had a passionate hatred with Vancouver’s homeless for as long as I’ve read your blog.
Taking the heroin away won’t get them to respond like giving them heroin. Now that they’re addicted, money isn’t what drives them. It’s the heroin.
Here is the genius in this. If you take the pursuit of heroin away by making it free for addicts, under conditions of course, you probably will have a better success rate at them finding a greater will for something more in life.
If I give you all the money in this world, power, and women, and world peace is also declared under your authority, your will to fight for something more significant will eventually surface.
The indulgences of pleasures in this world are no match for the pursuit of the unattainable.
Lead the homeless heroin addicts with free heroin. It’s cheaper, it’s safer, it’s controlled, and you’ll always know where your bums are.
In the same respect, it’s exactly how governments control the masses with money and or fear.
Or what?
Jeff, like your site. Thanks for the tips on SEO.
I want to point at that your #2 note up in your head… small business owner graphic is spelled smal business owner.
I vote that you create a new acronym out of SMAL to solve the problem
I am going to challenge your position and present you with some food for thought.
I just finished writing an op-ed article to the New Westminister leader on the social issue of homelessness. Research shows that the homeless come from broken homes, other countries, domestic violence, victimized situations, people who struggle with a drug addiction problem. Some people are seperated from their families and seek to reunite them. Some are at risk for suicide and have no social network like most of us do. Looking back at this, these people live a vicious cycle of drug or alcohol addiction and are stigmitized by society because no one will hire “someone who has scruffy clothes, has no home to go home to, and lives in the cemetary”. Therefore, it’s not so easy for them to get a job as we like to think.
We have all heard about Insyte in the media. I’m a supporter of Insyte because it is based on the harm reduction model. Opponents to this clean needle injection site think it is too expensive but if we look at it from a cost-benefit perspective, we will see that running and operating Insyte will save taxpayers billions of dollars in reduced hospital admissions over the next decade. I work in healthcare so I see this everyday. For every drug overdosed patient we admit, we could have admitted someone in need for surgery. That would help reduce the wait lists we have for surgical procedures.
Insyte also reduces the spread of HIV, hep B and hep C through clean needle exchange. This is what we call communicable diseases and it is a mandate of Health Canada that we reduce its prevalence and incidence – whether it is among the homeless or not.
Anyone have other thoughts?
Sophia