To apologize for something that occurred nearly thirty years ago, which was based upon an entirely different context, is a truly absurd result of political correctness run even further afoul of sanity. One innocently participates in a marvelously silly, albeit well-produced, training video three decades ago, sanctioned by the professional agency in which one works, and intended for the purpose of morale-boosting. As a result, a city’s leftist contingent of apologists for bad behavior cannot wait to jump on a fabricated issue. Create a crisis and then don’t let it go to waste. If anything, this should have been explained away with logic and rationality, not an integrity-compromising apology. Is there no reason left in some cities or honor in some city leaders? Must everyone guzzle the progressive Kool-Aid? Must everyone of substance be made to kneel before the leftist horde’s social justice lust is satisfied?
Thirty years later, here come the social justices and political correctivists with their manufactured outrage and usurpation of the term “homeless” in order to criticize, corrupted by the warped lens of presentism. They accuse people of disparaging the “homeless,” when that term wasn’t even in common use when referring to street folks at the time. I defy anyone to find a police officer thirty years ago who referred to those living and committing crime, say, under a bridge, as “homeless.” Even twenty years ago, this was not a common term for these folks. Aside from “inside-police” terms based upon observed behavior, these folks were referred to as vagrants, derelicts, vagabonds, hobos—wastrels, for the more literary types—and the sure-to-rile, and, God forbid judgmental, but arguably accurate: Bum (Insert ominous music here). Calling these folks, “transients,” was probably as “politically correct” as it got back then.
These luminaries of social outrage cry foul that anyone would dare to poke fun at the “homeless.” Well, if homeless advocates even approached being honest, they’d have to admit that’s not what happened. Humor at the truly homeless’ plight would be an affront. There are of course too many people who are homeless due to horrible life’s circumstances that are not their fault. In fact, it is these truly homeless people who have been insulted by those advocates, and homeless practitioners, who insist on applying the term “homeless” to people who are such by design. “Homelessness” for these people is a consequence of their reckless actions and foolish, self-destructive choices. These people, even if we concede they are well intentioned, have usurped the term “homeless,” and have inserted it into the issue as a euphemism for an irresponsible lifestyle.
The woman who has been beaten and forced to leave her home with her child; they are homeless. The kid abused by a family member and kicked out of the house; that person is homeless. However, the thirty-five year old, able-bodied man or woman who’s been repeatedly cited for drinking and urinating in public, arrested fifteen times for shoplifting, trespassing, and assault, who has no home as a result of how they’ve chosen to live their lives, eschewing any social responsibility, is not legitimately homeless. On the contrary, they are walking insults to the really needy and truly homeless.
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