George Opudo used to drive for Uber. Picking up and dropping off customers at Union Station in Washington, just steps away from the U.S. Capitol, he’d look at homeless people and think: “That’d never be me.”
But in September 2017, Opudo lost his car, his job, and all of his worldly possessions. With no place to go and no food to eat, Opudo was homeless.
“I was so hungry, I didn’t know what to do,” Opudo told The Daily Signal.
Walking around Union Station, he asked a woman where he could find some food.
“She said, ‘Go down to the mission,’” Opudo recalled.
So he walked a few blocks down to Central Union Mission and asked, “Can I get something to eat, please? A sandwich?”
“Before they answered me … stuff started going on in my head. ‘OK, if I have to eat this sandwich, where am I going to go? I’m gonna be hungry again, [what] am I gonna do?’”
At that point, Opudo saw a flyer advertising Central Union Mission’s ministry program.
“I quickly turned around and asked the girl, ‘Hey, is there a way I can be in?’”
Yes, there are rules about using federal tax dollars to support a Christian organization. Apparently there are no such restrictions when it comes to giving tax dollars to the Nation of Islam.
How to eliminate homelessness: stop subsidizing it; stop making it a profitable business enterprise that makes money off of people being homeless. It isn’t that difficult – but you have to actually care about them enough to take personal action rather than lazily vote for people who say they will fix it.
Effective help for people in those situations ended after activists [ called Poverty Pimps by Walter Williams] lead a hostile takeover & turned the assistance programs into an entitlement bureaucracy system by driving out the volunteer programs run by people who really cared about helping them, but also didn’t tolerate layabout bums. Help for those who needed it, but not for those who just wanted a handout.
iow, the real help was to teach how to fish & the desire to fish. Not catch the fish for them the rest of their lives. The poverty pimp system is really a system of professional bureaucratic thieves that go out, take the fish away from the fishermen who caught it, and give the fish to the person wanting assistance while also convincing them they could never catch their own fish & shouldn’t even try. Just sit back, relax, and we’ll take care of you the rest of your life. A few with strong self respect will demand to go catch their own fish, but far to many become addicted to a low standard of living as long as it is free with no demands on them. Those stupid bastards who get up early and goes to work owns them & stuff.
Marvin Olasky wrote about it years ago:
https://www.crossway.org/books/the-tragedy-of-american-compassion-tpb/ .
a wonderful story.
A few years ago (probably a lot of years ago) DC shut down (at least) one free meal outlet cuz the bums and hobos littered.
Why all the “well-meaning” and “compassionate” “liberals” couldn’t pick up the trash was (and remains) a mystery – but the bums and hobos had to get out of the tonier neighborhood – that was for sure and for certain.
“Liberals” are the most illiberal people on Earth.
izlamo delenda est …
Here locally, we have the Rescue Mission, St. Vincent de Paul, and a few churches that feed the poor. These places are now magnets for the freeloaders, who after each meal, just hang around waiting for the next meal. They sleep in parks and private business doorways. They litter and deficate wherever and whenever they choose, and leave dirty needles everywhere. And the charities are always begging for more funds, because (surprise!) the number of freeloaders keeps increasing every year. Merry Christmas!