Posted on 08/22/2016 4:37:47 PM PDT by Theoria
If you’ve spent any time in downtown D.C., you’ve likely seen 80-year-old Wanda Witter.
Shock white hair, a determined, unsmiling set to her mouth, jeans. She may have asked you for some change and probably didn’t smile if you gave her some. This month you may have also been taken aback by the black eye and stitches across her face.
For years, Witter bedded down for the night at 13th and G streets in Northwest Washington, on the cement in her blue sleeping bag, pulled up tight to keep the rats and cockroaches out. Her tower of three suitcases was stacked on her hand cart and bike-locked to the patio chairs next to her.
She may have even told you that inside those bags is all the paperwork to prove the government owes her more than $100,000. And she was right.
“They kept thinking I was crazy, telling me to get rid of the suitcases,” said Witter, a former machinist from Corning, N.Y., who is divorced and the mother of four adult children.
“I knew, when I committed to homelessness, I had to be very careful about what I did. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ I told myself. Because they’ll think I’m a mental case,” she said.
She was right about that, too.
More than a dozen years passed before Witter finally met someone who didn’t think she was a nut job, who finally believed her — a social worker named Julie Turner.
Turner, who works for the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, got a call a nine months ago from the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless asking if she could work with Witter.
In fact, Turner had tried to help Witter once before when they met at a soup kitchen. Witter rejected her.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It sounds like the lady cut off contact with her family.
I remember years ago, there was a woman who moved from Toronto to Vancouver, who chose to live on the streets. She had been wealthy and well educated, but chose to leave everything, disappear, and live on the streets of Vancouver.
Eventually, one of her daughters in Toronto, was finally able to track her down. She visited her mother and she and her husband arranged to get an apartment for the mother in Toronto. The mother would have none of it. The daughter arranged all the paperwork for her to get her CPP and OAS (senior citizens pensions), so she had some income.
Eventually, she compromised and agreed to move into a City of Vancouver rent-subsidised low income bachelor apartment. With the rent subsidy, she could afford it on her CPP and OAS.
In this case, it was mental illness, but not severe enough to have her institutionalised. Disappearances like this, are not uncommon among the elderly.
at least he has a place to store his stuff
...if not himself?
often there’s help available for such folks, but they (or someone) has to make those contacts (churches, welfare, etc.)
Yeah, and a cool place in the hot Texas summer.
The world has some awfully interesting people...
Pride can go to some long extents to exclude help, and all one can do is to pray that the Lord would help the person in future, more lessons learned.
At least it was one of the cleverer impromptu digs.
Never thought of that
No — Communists aped the church, except without God.
Strange story.
.
GOOD (to that extent, anyway...)!
(We looked into Texas... has many attractive features...but we checked every county weather report and there does not appear to be a single cool place in the entire Republic of Texas all summer!?)
And I ain’t just woofin’ about it. I saw an example of this in the form of a letter that was received by a past (now gone to heaven) pastor of a Baptist church I visited. It was from FDR who was asking pastors to stump for Social Security. Well hey it’s mercy to the poor, what’s not to like? Except that it was tied to a very venal Caesar, of course. This ain’t Christian charity, which has a side effect of selling the credibility of the gospel. In the end, secular apings of the church will fail. This is what makes what is ironically called “liberalism” so tragic and vain; there is no faith hope behind it, no good will, only the pride of vaunting big shots buying influence for their own egos.
And yet, I still wonder, perhaps that the good Lord has permitted this secular simulacrum of His generosity to exist in order to cause churches to ask themselves (and even more, Him) what would Jesus do given similar circumstances. People in need do benefit, but at a cost of cynicality and venality, and not all the donors are voluntary.
Why do operations such as Mother Teresa’s gain such fame? Because they are so selfless and yet God-ful. And few speak ill of the Salvation Army, which raises funds partly through its famous secondhand stores.
Some people cannot be helped, some people don’t wanna be helped, and some people just need killin’.
Of course the liberal mindset thinks the state can recuperate all of the above examples....
Of course the self adulating conservative mindset thinks we must class the slightest difficulty into one of those categories and walk off, feeling superior.
I knew a guy who was director of a large rescue mission in Detroit. He once told me that the number of homeless by choice was very high. Many weren’t crazy or addicts, just guys who didn’t like the idea of having any responsibility.
Having worked in health care (large,famous,big city hospital) for decades i can say with absolute authority that the large,and probably overwhelming,majority of this nation’s homeless qualify as one,or more,of the following: 1)schizophrenic 2) alcoholic 3) drug addict.
Yes. We see many like that too No sympathy is indicated for that type. Its their choice, their wish. ( there are still some others who are more appropriately of some concern, though).
[ Of course the self adulating conservative mindset thinks we must class the slightest difficulty into one of those categories and walk off, feeling superior. ]
Well when it comes to people who cannot currently live in society, most conservative feel we should personally we should give someone at least 5 or 6 chances and at the most a few dozen chances before we “write them off”, some people don;t get better until they have been “written off” by everyone else and they fall to “rock bottom” while at rock bottom they either recover or they end up killing themselves, it is tragic, but that is life.
As for the “some people just need killin’ “ argument, this deals with the people who have killed other people serial killer style, mass murdered using power, or have molested children or committed rape, or talk during movies (last part optional). These are people whose crimes are so heinous that even if they could be “re-rehabilitated” they could never be trusted again by society at large to ever hurt someone again that a trip to olde’ sparky would do the gene pool a whole lot of good.
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