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Won’t you please kill the homeless woman who lives on a bench on the median strip of the street near my apartment building?
She doesn’t bother me. As far as I know, she doesn’t bother anyone else either. The woman who lives in the middle of the street is nice. I like her. Last week, as I was waiting for the traffic signal to change, she beckoned softly from under her pile of soiled blankets, asking for change, and I gave her a $10 bill. I’m not usually that nice. She’s that sympathetic.
I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by, this probably 50-something-year-old woman has deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.”
It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder, and it is not a question of when or how she’ll die — the answers are a) this winter and b) hypothermia — but whether the usual circle of votive candles and $5 bouquets of flowers will be placed by her bench or on the southwest corner of the intersection near the other one.
They say that dying of cold isn’t that bad. That you feel warm, cozy, disoriented.
I don’t believe them. Whatever the physical sensations, dying from cold 100 feet from a couple hundred housing units so overheated that many New Yorkers keep their windows open all year long has got to be one hell of a lonesome suck of depressing. The nice woman who lives in the median deserves better than drawing her final breath while staring at the glow of a laptop screen through a frosted window pane the opposite side of which, under different circumstances, she would live inside.
So, Mr. President, won’t you please kill this lady? You’d be doing her a favor.
I know this isn’t your fault, sir. In a different world, you could allocate the tens of thousands of dollars needed to provide my outside neighbor with emergency shelter, transitional housing, permanent rehousing, substance abuse and/or mental health treatment. In reality, that money is tied up. The government’s budget is stretched thin. You have a massive deficit to think about.
Plus, you have big expenses. For example, you’re asking Congress for $106 billion “in funding for Israel, Ukraine, countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and operations on the southern U.S. border.” These are, obviously, all very important needs. Before she succumbed to schizophrenia, the woman who is going to die in my New York neighborhood wouldn’t dream of suggesting that her desire to live indoors ought to come ahead of countering China in the Indo-Pacific.
I understand. If she hadn’t gone crazy, she’d understand, too. Defense is one pot. A big pot. Anti-poverty is another pot. A very small pot. Like the tiniest pot in the smallest dollhouse ever. Everyone knows — you can’t “just” move money from one pot to another pot. That’s not something we even want to think about.
All that military spending got me thinking, though. Although Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan clearly need fighter jets and tanks and drones and ships and cyber weapons and missiles and bombs and light arms and bullets in order to kill as many Russian and Palestinian and Chinese people as possible, will they really miss … one?
Euthanizing a homeless New Yorker wouldn’t require anything as fancy as one of the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems we’re sending to Ukraine. This lady isn’t worth $1.5 million. Not to mention, one ATACM would take out a whole block or two — including my place!
I’m thinking something more modest, along the lines of the Switchblade 300 “suicide” drone, another gizmo we’re providing to Ukraine. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. President, the AeroVironment Switchblade is an expandable loitering munition so small it can fit in a backpack. You launch it from a tube. Then it flies to and crashes into its target, where its explosive warhead detonates. Like the homeless, it’s expendable. And it’s only $6,000!
Come on, Mr. President: We both know the Ukrainians and the Israelis and Taiwanese don’t need all the weapons we’re sending them. The Ukrainians don’t; they’re selling the extras we send them on the black market and the dark web. I only need one. One!
I know — “operations on the southern U.S. border” address an existential threat to America. What if an illegal terrorist migrant were to sneak past the border wall and make his way to New York and then were to kill the homeless woman on my street who would otherwise die of exposure this winter? Of course, that would be OK.
Still. It’s not like you can’t let $6,000 “accidentally” fall out of your budget for “operations on the southern U.S. border.” Send that drone. Please blow up the old lady.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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A cute piece – perhaps a bit too cute. But definitely cute.
One is reminded that the current – and soon to be exploding – homeless crisis is deliberate government policy. When the US government opens the borders to the surplus population of the third world, that drives wages down, and rents up. Of course it does. How could it not?
Don’t give me this “you’re scapegoating immigrants” feldecarb. If you march 1000 people onto a bridge that can only support 100, it won’t go well. Sure, hypothetically stronger bridges can always be built – but hypothetical bridges don’t support real people. Hypothetically, we can always build more apartments (and sewer systems and water systems and electrical systems etc.etc.etc.) – but dumping tens of millions of people into the country in short order does NOT magically make these things magically spring up out of the dirt. New infrastructure takes time, and resources, and planning, and appropriate political and economic circumstances. It might take a long time to build enough housing units (and everything else) to accommodate all these third-world refugees and their descendants – and it might not happen at all, there are no guarantees.
Suppose that real wages were double what they are now (what they would have been without post-1965 immigration and wages had tracked productivity), and rents were half? Would there still be homeless people? Sure. Would there be a whole lot fewer homeless than now? Sure.
And suppose that real wages are cut in half from today, and rents double from today. Will there be a lot more homeless people? Absolutely.
But ‘liberals’ (including, occasionally, Ted Rall), will scream and howl that we MUST force the population up, we MUST increase rents, we MUST drive wages down, because to do otherwise would be racist – or perhaps, because to do otherwise would hurt the profits of the super-rich.
This is what the Soylent Green tanks are for. We really should implement these!
Thank you! Just this one woman or just that one bloodied, little Palestinian girl with her palms outstretched as she hysterically walked among dead children in rigor mortis with their limbs grotesquely pointing in the air damns the monsters in the White House and the US Congress. They are as responsible as any Israeli and yet fools still mistake the Empire of Satan in DC for their government.
“So, Mr. President, won’t you please kill this lady?”
Mr. Rall, won’t you please take that lady into your home, and give her gratis room and board? It’s a little less extreme, and doesn’t involve government at all, which would be a welcome change of pace.
Imagine living in a country that’s $33 Trillion in the red and watching the government give hundreds of billions to Ukraine and fucking Israel.
i think we should give the switchblade to the crazy lady so she can kill ted rall. then she will be arrested and placed in a facility that has heat. unless of course she released immediately by a soros prosecutor, in which case she will freeze to death.
Yes, when I came home I found that my house had been over-run by Communist Bloshevik Political Officers of the GRU, KGB, SMERSH, etc. and were housing the homeless in my house!
They implored me to agree that this was a ‘much better’ situation, and to avoid being shot on the spot, I agreed with false enthusiasm.
Fast-forward to 2023; nowadays they’re called ‘squatters’ and IF they have taken out a utility bill with YOUR address on it in THEIR name, they are entitled to stay, and charge YOU the HOMEOWNER, with CRIMINAL TRESPASSING! Calling the cops will only get you arrested, beaten, sprayed, or shot at point-blank range, and then the cops would call this ‘self defense for threatening an Officer’…
This is what Force Majeur is all about when the Banks belly-up and fail en-masse; they WILL take possession of your home as collateral to pay for their default to the IMF, and either run you out of your home, or force you to stay and pay a rental fee that no one can possible afford under Blackrock and the Rothschild Banking Cartel.
If you have a mortgage, get rid of it ASAP.
IF your mortgage is paid off, the GET THE SECURITY RELEASED ASAP ON THE PROPERTY! If you don’t do the latter, the Banksters will use the ‘loan security’as collateral and will still…TAKE YOUR HOME!
Shows just how crazy America really is.
War is hell, they say.
If Hamas cared about their civilians, they would have considered this prior to their stupid and foolish attack on Oct.7th.
Why not marry her, Rall? Give her a bath, clean her her, call an Uber to the Mayor’s office.
…No, no, no, just get Xi to come visit your town,Gavin will have it cleaned up in a jiffy.
Luke 16:19-31
Mr Rall might be on to something. While death is a bit extreme, there is no reason we should not make being unemployed or being homeless a felony to be punished by confinement in a labor camp. Maybe give someone 20 years at hard labor for sleeping on the streets. Clean them up, medicate them, and put them on a labor gang. There is much they can do. In big cities, they can clean streets, public spaces, and transit systems. They can do the landscaping in public parks. They can handle the custodial tasks in public buildings and schools. In the country, we can rent them to farmers to harvest crops. They can work 12 hours shifts, be given minimal food and shelter, and only palliative medical care.
Forgot to mention the corporate investors making a killing from all those military expenditures to kill people abroad. Couldn’t they be taxed to pay for a few mercy killings at home? /s
The thing is, liberals like Rall have done a lot to make this situation happen.
They agitated to get rid of SRO hotels, which is where a lot of people like that used to live. Yes, it wasn’t great housing, but it beat the hell out of living on the streets.
They screamed to close down the mental institutions where a lot of people who are now homeless would have once been kept, because they thought One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a goddamn documentary. (To be sure, there were cases of real misdiagnosis in the old days, but closing down the institutions was throwing out the baby with the bath water.)
When the authorities try to sweep them up off the streets, liberals run crying to the courts, saying that the homeless’ precious, precious freedoms are being abridged. And even in the case of severely mentally ill people, the courts agree and force them to be released, right back onto the streets.
The liberals sponsor all sorts of freebies that make living on the streets possible—free food, free sleeping bags, free this-that-and-the-other…and then they howl that the mean old selfish conservatives are making the homeless crisis happen.
And their body parts are useful.
An old SF book had an island where criminals and political prisoners were sent. They all wore explosive collars around their necks, preventing escape. On the island, they were well taken care of as their body parts were slowly harvested, maybe a hand here, a kidney or eye there.
Seems like a good solution for a strong need in society today.
War is hell because humanity-agnostic Jew supremacists like yourself exist who disbelieve in the entire notion of the innocence of children.
Rabbi, that is clearly an African/Asian way of solving this problem. Not something a White Man would suggest.
I read a study saying that the cost of removing all the homeless from the streets and taking care of them decently is $20 billion per year.
The israelis have been harvesting organs from Palestinians and others for decades now. Kidneys, hearts, lungs and other organs go for good prices. There is no prohibition on selling human organs to the highest bidder by israelis anywhere in the world.
The conservatives closed down the halfway houses and the services that were supposed to support the people released by liberal closing of asylums (actually, conservatives supported the closing of asylums, because it saved money for more bombs, so it was an equal opportunity boondoggle).
Conservatives are just liberals only even stupider.
And meaner. Because stupid people are mean.
God, I hope some of you lose your jobs permanently and can’t afford the rent. I pray. Pretty pretty please, Lord. I mean the assholes who mock the indigent. “There but for the grace of god go I” is news to them.
Could you explain this? What is the security on the property? I’ve never heard of it. Is this something in countries other than America?
I grew up with plenty of kids who didn’t have a drop of innocence.
My wife and I are working hard to raise a fairly large family, and our household income, for now, is well above the median. Yet we have repeatedly postponed medical and dental treatment because we can’t afford it without substantial additional debt.
With just a third of the $300 billion-plus sent to the child-murderers in “israel” and the crooks in ukraine in the past three years alone, the US government could have provided a million Americans — US citizens — with needed medical and dental care.
This is not our government and eventually it won’t be our country either.
Very nice. Glad you brought up the vile “gospel” of luke, too. Just a few verses later, check out “luke” 19:27. That’s where “loving saviour” jesus vowed that when he returned, he would have all people brought before him who did not wish him to reign over them, and have them murdered in front of him. Not murderers or rapists or the like, mind you, but anyone who didn’t want to be ruled by him. There’s your cruel psychopath scumbag “saviour.” Sounds similar to the violent biblical ranting used as “justifications” by the child-murdering, women-murdering, starvation-blockading “israelis” right now.
No, you can’t pin that mentality just on the jews. Their little-brother cultists, the christians, are also supposed to believe in the offensively unjust and irrational notion of innocent babies and toddlers being sinful because of “original sin.” Disgusting indeed.
People who’ve pissed away the last trace of their own dignity need not be treated otherwise. The endless procession of worthless, piss soaked drug addict bums, supine, limbs splayed fully across the entire side-walk, smacked into oblivion, tongues lolled onto the 90°+ piss-soaked Los Angeles pavement, whom I must literally step over daily to go from my car to my piss-soaked apartment building, are, indeed, characterologically indigent, on that much we are in agreement. By God’s grace they are shitting themselves with their pants around their ankles, stinking worse than any wild animal I’ve ever encountered. They are worse than mere beasts of the field, these “people” are monstrously impure and they would hock a hepatis vector loogie into your eye sooner than they would roll their stinking corpse out of the middle of the public footpath to earn the right not to be ridiculed. These niggers are scarcely human to me.
Ted Rall is just asking for the costs of his policy preferences to be spread among the highest level of the tax base. “For the price of ten potato chips per day, we can feed and house the Miz Median Dwellers!” Who could possibly object? Eventually, you’re paying several Department budgets in interest on the debt. If Ted had to personally write checks for Miz Median Dweller’s approximately $30K upkeep per year it would be a much harder slog.
Hallelujah and amen!!
You typed these two lines in direct succession.
One gets the impression that the irony is lost on you.
Trouble is, we spend 20 billion to get this crop of homeless off the streets and our fearless leaders import another, even larger crop next year.
Billions of Asians and Africans are on the way. Billions. And the likes of the NYT tell us we (and Europe) must admit them all or else we will be racist nazis.
And I hope you go fuck yourself. And that’s not irony, you unbelievable inadvertently clownish fucking idiot.
What was it you said about being mean?