Sleeping Rough
A National Disgrace
People coming to America from Europe can’t really believe all the homeless sleeping on the streets of Washington, DC. In the UK they call that sleeping rough, and there are none. In the UK homeless people are given services and a place to sleep.
In the United States we’ve spent over 400 billion dollars on the “Bush” war and for a fraction of that we could get the homeless people off the streets. Doesn’t anyone else find this unbelievable? We are worse than a third world country because we have the money and we do nothing.
The photograph is of a homeless mitigation project. There was a homeless person who slept on this ventilation grate on winter mornings. Instead of helping him, the powers that are, spent money on a fence around the grate and on welding steel pieces to make it uncomfortable to sleep on. It all didn’t matter, the man figured out a way to sleep there. The area is in one of the Washington, DC tourist areas, down the street from Air and Space and other high profile museums.
I vote to not spend anymore money on the war in Iraq until we’ve taken care of those who are sleeping rough in our “modern American cities.”
August 30th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Great post! I I wonder how much the welders were paid to install the bars, how much the steel cost, if the worker was then taxed on their wages and used that money to purhcase something big and expensive on their credit card….
Or they could have given the person a bed, but what would be the point of that.