What's scarier than terrorists?

We are.


This from the Chicago Tribune...

Some communities asking for change
To curb begging, more cities consider IDs for panhandlers

By Tim JonesTribune national correspondentPublished May 1, 2005
Fed up with panhandlers they claim hurt businesses and stain the image of downtowns, cities are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to regulate beggars--including arresting them and tossing them in jail if they do not carry a license to beg.
Several cities already have licensure laws on the books. But the effort to regulate or eliminate panhandling gained momentum last week as the police chief in Minneapolis, William McManus, pitched the idea to control what police there say is a worsening problem.
Requiring panhandlers to apply for picture licenses in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, sparked outcries among advocates for the homeless, with some advocates obtaining licenses in protest.
But the broader questions raised by cities' efforts to regulate or eliminate panhandling are being addressed in courts, where critics argue that the laws violate 1st Amendment freedoms and are enforced arbitrarily.
...
"In some cities it is clear they want to remove any indication that the economy is bad so that tourists and visitors will come downtown. They want to do away with the unseemly elements of urban living, and that is panhandlers," said Gary Daniels, litigation coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which is challenging the Cincinnati ordinance in federal court.
"What the municipalities are saying is you can engage in any manner of free speech on sidewalks, except panhandling," Daniels said.
...
Gentle persuasion is not the norm.
In the mid-1990s, Cleveland was sued by the ACLU, which alleged that police officers were removing homeless people from downtown and depositing them on the outskirts of the city. Cleveland settled out of court. In Cincinnati, advocates for the homeless point to the case of a 55-year-old man who was arrested and jailed in 2003 for violating the city's panhandling ordinance after he asked a plainclothes police officer for 10 cents.
...
Usually people are begging out of desperation," said Samir Goswami, associate Director of policy at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. "I doubt that my first Stop once I hit the street would be City Hall for a license. I'd like to know what the goal is here."
...
"I live in downtown and I'm irritated [by panhandlers]. I don't want to take my 5-Year-old granddaughter downtown and have people approaching me for money," said Officer Ron Reier, a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department.

How awful that your granddaughter might discover that there are poor people in the world, and not just in some faraway Bad Place like Africa or Milwaukee, but right there in her own home town.

The trauma would be...insuperable. Of course first she would probably have to tear through the layers and layers of bubble-wrap and cute, pink HazMat suits in which Daddy has wrapped her to protect her from sharp-edged thingies. And then doff her five, foam helmets – nested one inside another like a Safe-T-First Russian Egg puzzle to keep her shielded from meteors and falling cartoon anvils and such. But then...

The horror. The horror.

Beggars and mendicants have been with us forever. The Bible is well-stocked with them: even J.C. said that the poor will be with us always. But now that we have entered the Bush Administration “End Times” for Dummies, we must all pretend that all is well all the time. Freedom. Marching. Mission Accomplished. You know the drill.

And using scarce First Responder resources to hassle pan-handlers certainly seems way beyond stupid, until you remember that the core of the Bush Doctrine is that we must all be one relentlessly cheerful American Family in full-on denial that anything is fundamentally wrong in our happy, happy home.

Sure Dad’s a dangerously small-minded, bellicose drunk...but nothing another helping of pancakes won’t fix!

And, yes, Junior’s coming home legless and jobless and driven half-mad by the war Daddy started.

And, sure, it turns out that every single last one of Daddy’s reasons for sending Junior off to war were, well, “lies” is such an unpleasant word, so let’s not call it that. Let’s say “intelligence failures” because that sounds ever so much nicer.

And, yes, all of Daddy’s Jesus friends like Fred Phelps and Randall Terry and James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Don Wildmont and Tom DeLay and, well, there are a lot more of them and I lose track of all the names. OK, maybe they are a little bit, well, “scary” and seem extremely preoccupied with “queers” and “killing”, but Daddy says he needs them to do his work, and we all know how important Daddy’s work is.

Daddy keeps us all safe, safe, safe. And, yes, sometimes Daddy gives money and guns to people who are trying very hard to kill us, but it’s all very complicated and we must never, ever question anything that Daddy does.

Our job is to be cheerful and happy no matter how tired and cranky Daddy is when he gets home from the Oval Office. And give Daddy Big Hugs no matter how soaked his suit is with Blood and Oil. And if Daddy needs to lie to us about things that seem to be hurting us, our job is to bite our lips and be quiet and supportive and extra-special good so that Daddy can do the important work Daddy does without a lot of silly bother.

So when it comes to wearing the Disneyfication Goggles that the Bushies and their myrmidon followers demand the world be filtered through, the poor are a tricky tool.

On the one hand, jobs really are being shipped abroad. Wages really are stagnant at home. Health care is a joke. College is more and more a guaranteed E-ticket ride to Debtsville. Gas prices are trembling on the verge of rocketing out of sight, while a substantial percentage of good, hardworking Americans hop from paycheck-to-paycheck, one sick child or injury or broken axle away from debt peonage. All the while being endless hectored on the subject of Personal Responsibility by a Third Generation Trustifarian President who has had every opportunity he has ever enjoyed delivered to his suite by his manservant, and who has fucked every business that his Daddy’s pals have ever given him into the ground.

On the other hand, we’re not supposed to notice. I’m pretty sure it is, in fact, treasonous to even whisper such things.

No matter how many CEO’s are perp-walked past the cameras, no matter how many Bush Pioneer Grade Lifetime Contributors are exposed as nothing more than amped-up shakedown artists and long-con operators, we are still required to equate financial success with moral superiority. In direct contravention to every word Jesus Christ ever said on the subject, the Shining Path Party of God Republicans are unified in their daily sermonette that if you fail it must be your own fucking fault.

If the bank takes your house, if must be that you have some moral defect.
If you go bankrupt, you are clearly some kind of deviant.
If you need help, Jeez, what a Loser.

And in trying to keep up this façade, the homeless are both useful and problematic.

Useful in that they scare the holy shit out of the struggling middle class. These dirty, bearded, wild-eyed aliens that lurch out of the their nightmares to ask for pocket change are the living, stinking Danger! Radioactive! warning sign that keeps the white working class quiet. You wanna make trouble? One small slip, one knee not bent low enough quick enough, and this could be you, bitch. You’re wife, you kids, your home, your self-respect, your future, your very identity...gone in the blink of an eye.

So as scary, cautionary diorama, the poor serve a purpose...so long as they can be kept at a distance. Valuable class-war ammunition to keep hourly-wagers from becoming electoral-ragers...so long as they can be tamed and integrated into an Idealized Pastel Urban Landscape as essentially harmless extras. Licensed. Just part of the show, folks.

But let them exist as they are and people may remember that once before Republicans ran the national economy like their own, personal game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Once before they used the American treasury as their stake-horse. And when it all collapsed, millions of perfectly good, patriotic, hardworking, non-morally defective citizens were left with nothing.

Were driven onto the highways, the rails, into soup kitchens. They slept in the parks. They packed the children they could no longer care for onto Orphan Trains and in desperation sent them West, hoping that someone, somewhere would take care of them. Some – many – couldn’t take it and committed suicide. Some tried to organize and were murdered by private, corporate armies. This real horror is still lodged deep in our national subconscious. Bone-deep.

And above the chaos stood Herbert Hoover, who’s Republican prescription for the disaster that had engulfed the nation can best be described as “Same as it ever was”:

- Unfettered Markets Will Solve Everything.
- Private Charities will take up the slack.
- Government Has No Business Interfering in the natural course of the economy.

Sound familiar? And a time when the Administration is trying to gut Social Security and run up debt likes of which the world has never seen before, while locking in lavish permanent tax cuts for the 1% of the population that are already vastly wealthier than any other human beings in history...does it sound very, very familiar?

So it makes a certain kind of sense that we’d want to lock these Failed Men up. During these parlous times, when it’s getting harder and harder to keep the Mandatory Rose-Tinted Blinkers duct-taped to our collective forehead, there is perhaps no greater menace to our National Delusional State than the presence unlicensed, unregulated poor folks running recklessly around and begging people for dimes. It threatens to remind people that we’ve already seen this catastrophically bad movie once before.

And we know how it always ends.