The Return of Insane Asylums and Internment Camps

On my walk from Studio City to Burbank along Riverside Dr., I passed a gentleman in only shorts. He was making trips between the curb where he had his things and a commercial building with a water spigot. He seemed to be both washing himself and filling containers with water which he then brought back to his little set up along the sidewalk. He muttered to himself while he seemed to manically make trips to find reasons to run the water.

As I watched him, I thought, “Oh, this is going to make people angry.” I had just watched a news report about an apartment building owner who locked up her water spigots to stop the squatters across the street from stealing her water.

Burbank is good at incentivizing the homeless to go somewhere else. I once heard a library patron comment on the homeless in the surrounding park that ‘we don’t do THAT here.”

For the past ten years or so, the call from homeless activists has been for ‘housing first’ and ‘harm reduction’. Taxpayers have paid millions for programs that have not shown them much (if any) change on the streets. The public is angry. I just listened to Michael Shellenberger (on a podcast) link the rampant Los Angeles fires to wasting state money on homeless programs.

In my calls for direct and positive action, I often counter that if you build a program, you have to pay people to run that program - and you therefore run the risk of burning through funds before you help the people that the program is built to help. There also may be corruption in the program which would exacerbate that situation. Chris Rock famously said (about cancer) that the money is in the treatment and not the cure. The same thing can happen for homelessness.

In the United States, we don’t like poor people. We view poverty as a character flaw. So in no way, do housed individuals want to get their hands dirty by directly helping homeless people. When I made my documentary “yHomeless?”, my ex specifically told me that I could not bring any homeless people home. She is my ‘ex’ partly because she felt I cared more about homeless people than I did for her. Many people have supported my ex’s views over the years.

Along with not wanting to directly help homeless people, the public also does not want to even see them. Comedian Mike Bridenstine has a bit about his wife who told a man who was asleep on the sidewalk in front of their house that he had to “GO”. When Mike asked her when she became a Republican, she gave the man a bottle of water and THEN repeated that he had to go.

If we can’t solve our homeless conundrum through funding programs and we won’t directly act to get people off of the street, the only way I see that politicians will be able to placate the public outcry would be to bring back insane asylums and internment camps. Out of sight equals out of mind.

In the past California election, nurses asked for the support to incarcerate disruptive and mentally affected patients that come to the emergency room. A commercial shared tales of nurses being abused by mentally ill and addicted patients. I would say that the popular approach to the homeless since getting rid of state mental hospitals has been ‘neglect = freedom’ (because mental hospitals have been historically criticized for restraint and abuse). But, I don’t think anyone can fault nurses for not wanting to get beat up at work, so orderlies in the ER taking patients to padded cells might have to be an evolution/regression of healthcare.

Another stain on American society has been the Japanese internment camps of WW2. Because the action was steeped in nationalism and racism and because the assets of Japanese Americans were seized, we have not been keen to again involuntarily sequester a segment of the public (unless we can prove that they are criminals). However, since the poor are not a protected class and since the homeless cannot or will not make the minimum income that The US requires of its citizens in order for them to simply exist, the housed masses have been rumbling about a place ‘to put’ the homeless.

This leaves me (as an advocate for humanity) in a rough place. What humanity do I support? In my dream country, every community would step up and be direct and positive support for their homeless. They would extend to strangers the same forgiveness they give to a family member and not give people an excuse to be homeless. People would also realize that shelter can’t be an investment opportunity because people can’t afford it. People would agree that everybody needs stability in their lives and that negative reinforcement only breeds resentment.

I don’t want nurses to get beat up. I don’t want people to steal water. At the same time, I know that insane asylums and internment camps will be underfunded. The needy will get neglected. And not many people will care because it’s not happening to them or right in front of them. In The US, we are trained to think the worst of people. We assume that they will take advantage of their situation. Our whole system is based on what you can get for yourself. People want someone else to either help or punish the homeless and they want it to cost less money. In that rubric, I don’t know what the answer could be. All I know is that insane asylums and internment camps = BAD.