“Esto Perpetua”
Every month or so my wife and I venture to Seattle to visit my son Andy and his family. They live in the Madison Park section along Lake Washington. As we make the trek from SEATAC to downtown and then to Madison Park, we see hundreds—maybe thousands of homeless people living if they are lucky in tents, and if not so lucky in boxes or crates. I was asked one time by one of our Uber drivers if we have so many homeless in Idaho—my answer was—”not yet”. Who are these people? Many are drug addicts, people with mental illnesses, and many criminals who have not been able to be rehabilitated and assimilated back into society.
No matter who I am with they will comment about how sad it is and how empathetic and maybe sympathetic they are to their situations and living conditions. But empathy and sympathy are not compassion. Compassion is reaching out to help and at the same time holding people accountable first to themselves, and if they take advantage of the chance to get out of such situations, then to their communities. People who are mentally ill need to receive treatment, many in an inpatient situation. Drug addicts need a shot or two at rehab, but if they aren’t willing to be accountable to themselves, then time and resources need to be directed to people who are willing and have the courage to invest in themselves.
Who let this happen? My answer is that the people who live in Seattle have let this happen. Slowly over many years, they have passed by the homeless living in their streets, maybe sometimes they put a few dollars in a bucket to help pay for more drugs or alcohol. What do they say—”give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he will learn to feed himself”? Empathy feeds him for a day. Compassion feeds them for life, but they must be willing to participate in their own rehabilitation. The choice is ours to give and theirs to take.
We spend too much time worrying about things that we have little control over. We allow the agenda to be set by media, “experts” and politicians who court our favor—the homeless don’t vote, they just have their ballots “harvested”. Covid, global warming, Y2K or 22 or BLM and CRT. These are issues designed to take our eye off the ball from the real problems that politicians promise to fix but never can. The real problems occur in and are solved by families, tribes, and small communities. Government cannot solve the homeless problem. Heck one of the largest homeless communities of drug addicts and criminals live within 1 mile of Nancy Pelosi’s gated/ guarded secure palace in San Francisco. Like Ohio State defending a 5ft 7 170 lb. Utah wide receiver in The Rose Bowl—you can contain him, but you can’t defeat him. Mitigation instead of confrontation. Nothing Nancy does in Washington DC 2400 miles away will help the homeless situation in San Francisco, until the people of San Francisco decide to fix the problems themselves. The solutions to most of the problems citizens face are almost always solved from within—not by government. 55 years after the Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Programs that is one thing that has been proven to be true. Just like Democratic Senator John Patrick Moynihan warned. “A dependent society is an angry society”
All we need to ensure failure is to legalize drugs or open our borders and the conduits to our cities allowing gangs and cartels to poison our children, not to mention enslaving thousands of young boys and girls in underground prostitution. We could choose to encourage social justice reform that decriminalizes violent behavior and sends criminals back onto the streets to terrify the marginalized and poorer neighborhoods. Let’s set the bar low in our schools, turn a blind eye toward marijuana, alcohol, and meth, and give out “participation trophies” in youth sport leagues. Don’t give your kids chores or when they get older don’t make them work a few summers on a ranch or in a lumber yard or in construction—-every Wall Street banker and college professor should be required to spend a summer on a farm or construction site. Teach your children to compete and to win and to lose “and treat those two imposters just the same”. If a person is mentally ill or dependent on drugs or alcohol they deserve to be helped. They deserve our compassion. They need a place to live where they will be treated with dignity and respect. If they are just lazy other solutions are available.
So many of the homeless have lost their connection to loving families and communities and most of all to God. They are lost in “the mob”. Many go days without hearing somebody else call them by name—can we even imagine how lonely that becomes. They would all trade their loneliness for the solitude of hope and the promise of a future.
We are lucky in Idaho and in Boise that we live in a place where there is space. We have room to breathe and time to think and read and pray. A subsistence existence and substance abuse do not allow for those things and that is exactly what is required to get out of the descending vortex that has enveloped their lives.
If we are to protect our communities and families from having this happen in our State, we must upfront resolve to secure educational opportunities for our children. Teach them to think critically and give them a skill that will allow them to provide for themselves and their families in perpetuity. If the people chose to be a sanctuary city or State, then the compassionate thing to do is to build the infrastructure that will support what happens when we make those decisions ahead of time—not after the fact like has happened in Seattle or almost every Blue State and City in our country. If the citizens of Idaho choose to legalize drugs or not punish criminals, maybe upfront they should invest billions of dollars in new drug rehab and mental health facilities, not wait until we have a large homeless community. A few billion dollars up front instead of a few bucks in the bucket to assuage our guilt after the fact would be “compassionate”. Supporting faith-based organizations like The Boise Rescue Mission and Food Bank with long range planning for their growth needs to be done.
Finally, we must incentivize work by electing politicians to govern us who insist on individual accountability for themselves and the citizens of our State, and who refuse to create a “State of dependency” amongst a class of people who couldn’t survive without their largesse—actually the largesse of transfer payments paid by citizens. A state of dependency—a subsistence existence is no different than being indentured or enslaved. Creating those situations is not compassionate, it is in fact immoral. The final stage of this evolution of “the State of non-accountability” is when taxes are so high to the working and investor class that they too will feel enslaved. The next step is for government to own all the means of production and distribution
Incentivizing families to be able to invest more in themselves—lower taxes should be a priority. Creating conditions of connectivity in our communities, schools, neighborhoods, and churches is of paramount importance. How many people living in a high-rise inner-city government project even know their neighbors? How many farmers in Madison County living miles apart know theirs? Big difference. Families and communities need space to grow and think and work and play. They need space to connect.
Thank God there is still Idaho. What happens when it becomes California or when Boise becomes Seattle or Portland?
Esto Perpetua
