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Posted by Ken S And I musn't forget the one at Mason and O'Farrell at 11:00 at night who got in my face and screamed at me to drop some coins in his Starbucks cup because "you can afford it." If he can afford a 4 dollar cup of coffee, he doesn't need my help. Los Angeles was as as bad as its sister to the north. Bums on every other street corner and in every other gas station, and every one of them either had a disability or had "just gotten out of jail". The sign in the downtown McDonald's at 8th and Broadway said it all: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." It was annoying enough in the two weeks I spent there. I can't imagine how you put up with it for almost 13 years, living a stone's throw from the Tenderloin. I make it a practice not to give my hard-earned money away to them. What I do is give them a little career advice, "UPS and FedEx are always hiring." A job!? Definitely not what they want to hear. After all, that would mean showing up on time, 5 days or more a week, working 8 hours a day and having someone telling them what to do. Well, welcome to the world! Here in Chicago, our dear mayor has such a soft spot for these human turds that, several years ago, he actually started LICENSING them to stand on downtown street corners and beg! Funny thing. During the Democratic Convention here in 1996, there wasn't a panhandler to be found anywhere on the streets of downtown Chicago. It was as though they had all be swept away with a giant whisk broom. It was wonderful. Of course, it only lasted until the week after the convention. Last Saturday, I had a run-in with one of these bums, who decided that he was going to plop his butt down on the curb across the street from my house and watch me mow my lawn! (For all I know, he could have been a thief casing my house. I've already had three attempted break-ins.) Naturally, I took a photograph of him and called the police, who, when they came, gave me a stern lecture about this bum's right to be where he was. What angers me the most is that the ones who are the loudest advocates for "the rights of the homeless" live in suburbs and affluent city neighorhoods where panhandling and loitering would never, ever be tolerated. Well, my little middle-class townhouse will never make the pages of Metropolitan Home, but I don't want bums loitering where I live, either. It's a nice, quiet, shady street, and it doesn't stay that way by accident. It stays that way because I have 911 and *999 on speed-dial. If city planners wonder why the middle-class are moving to the suburbs, they'd better take a long, hard look at this problem, which has been growing ever worse since the 1980's. If these people are on drugs, rehab should be mandatory and brutal. If it's joblessness, they need to be rounded up and put on buses to where the jobs are, and if they're not qualified to do anything but dig ditches and shovel chicken poop, maybe their square parents and their square teachers back in school knew something after all. Hopefully, Charlotte's city managers are not as weepy about bums' civil rights as they are in bigger cities outside the South. You haven't mentioned any run-ins with them since you've been back . As for me, the bums and the people sleeping in their cars overnight better stay far away from the street I live on. This ain't Skid Row.
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