Posted on 09/25/2013 6:30:55 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Indianapolis offers the full urban deal: great architecture, hot restaurants, famous museums and a walkable downtown. It also has had one of the worst panhandler problems I’ve seen. At almost every street corner, it seemed, someone was squeezing you for money.
In August, Indianapolis joined numerous other cities that have attempted to curb aggressive begging. And as has happened elsewhere, the American Civil Liberties Union immediately filed a suit.
“The ACLU of Indiana,” its executive director, Jane Henegar, said, “believes in the power of the First Amendment to give everyone a voice, even when those voices confront us with our greatest challenges, such as poverty and homelessness.”
Defenders of panhandling commonly portray these laws as heartless campaigns to remove ragged people — the homeless, vagrants, loiterers and beggars — from the public’s view.
No doubt many businesses struggling to revive their downtown want these people gone. Courts have also identified another right — to use public streets without being confronted with demands for money. Depending on urban comfort levels, people’s response may vary from guilty compliance to mild annoyance to feeling threatened.
We’re talking about the future of urban America. As cities became repositories of the poor, the will to preserve their nice public things, be they libraries or parks, withered. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it, the nation became a land of “private affluence” and “public squalor.”(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Indianapolis actually put secured donation boxes in the downtown area. Rather than give to a guy who might blow it on dope it allowed folks to give to a reputable charity that assists and houses the homeless. All that means nothing to the ACLU, of course.
Thankfully here in NJ our cities are becoming very Hispanic, and they don’t panhandle. Something about their macho culture prohibits a man from begging for money for nothing (I’m not kidding).
At one intersection in Newark over the summer I came upon three characters at a red light: an Asian (from the subcontinent) selling flowers, a Hispanic selling bottled water from a cooler, and a black guy simply asking for money.
THAT is the future of urban America, until there are no more blacks. In Jersey City in particular, Asians and Hispanics will be the future population (and neither has “white guilt”).
Many of us are old enough to remember when schools taught us about the exotic dark corners of the world where beggars existed, places like India, Mexico, and the Arab nations.
We’ve come a long way baby.
Yes, I live in a nicer mobile home park and probably 75%+ of my neighbors are Hispanic. Have never seen a beggar and almost every male has a job or a business and MUCH nicer cars than I have at this point in time.
Vaguely . . .
Do they replace the beggars or merely dilute the beggars?
That is interesting, and actually a hopeful view.
The left never changes do they?
They will marvel at the architecture and the potemkin village of big government projects and complain when they notice the little people are all visible. Not because they are impoverished by big government to fund the big opera house and fancy libraries and other edifices.
Remember all the people
Who live in far off lands
In strange and lovely cities
Or roam the desert sands,
Or farm the mountain pastures
Or till the endless plains
Where children wade through rice fields
And watch the camel trains.
Some work in sultry forests
Where apes swing to and fro,
Some fish in mighty rivers,
Some hunt across the snow.
Remember all God’s children,
Who yet have never Heard
The truth that comes from Jesus,
The glory of His Word.
God bless the men and women
Who serve Him overseas;
God raise up more to help them
To set the nations free,
Till all the distant people
In every foreign place
Shall understand His kingdom,
And come into His grace.
If no one gave them any money they would disapear!!!
Heck, I remember when, during a discussion and you couldn’t remember a commonly taught date or name, that you could turn to the teen or the 20 something who’s high school memory was still fresh and ask him for it, like when was Lincoln born? or when was the battle of Yorktown? When did those two railroad building efforts meet up? What was the name of that famous general who was at???
They’ve been encouraged. Cook County, IL (Obamacountry) closed down the insane asylums and released them onto the street. Many are fakes, utter fakes.
They should be arrested for endangerment. They stand in traffic, etc. They should be housed. There is no reason to beg in America.
I live in Indy.
These aren’t “beggars” in the Calcutta sense.
They are people making a good living at panhandling.
I’ve seen many interviews where these folks will admit that it pays far above min wage.
Then why aren’t we all doing it? LOL
Two blocks from posh Union Square in San Francisco, I used to give a sweet little black woman a dollar every time I passed by. Friends thought I was nuts. She’d only buy drugs with it, they said. But no, she went into the deli on the corner every time and came out with a piece of fruit to eat. How in the world this woman fell through the cracks was a mystery. She was clearly someone’s grandma if not great grammie.
That was twenty years ago. Many more panhandlers now, but some might be someone’s sweet grandma who really needs to eat something. You can probably tell by looking at them, which are truly needy and which are crooks. Hopefully.
I am a volunteer with the homeless and have yet to see a Mexican come in for the free meal.
Of course, they have jobs,
Whenever a panhandler asks for money I just politely say, “Do you take plastic”. One guy said, “Oh, good one.”
I don’t carry cash in downtown areas. None.
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