Blaming the homeless for being homeless

Also, A new effort coming soon on identifying the anonymous heroes who built America

The Texas Legislature passed some remarkably rotten bills last year — rewarding vigilante action to stop abortions, nakedly partisan voting restrictions, and muzzling schools from teaching accurate racial history — just to name a few.

What might have been lost as the public swoons over those bits of political perversion is what the legislature did to further penalize homeless people for, well, having the audacity to be homeless.

The Republican-controlled House and Senate passed a bill which requires cities to prohibit any sort of temporary homeless camps anytime or anywhere.

It once was a tenet of the Republican party to decentralize government and allow local control over most matters. That came to a screeching halt after elected state Republican leaders found out, to their horror, that many local governments thought those leaders were full of beans and didn’t understand conditions in their particular area.

The state leaders still don’t understand but that hasn’t kept them from imposing their will on cities and school boards and, probably eventually, library boards.

Admittedly, some action on homeless camps might have been needed in some of the larger cities but that should have been left up to those cities, not the legislature. Local problems should be solved by local people and if it becomes untenable to residents there, they can elect new leaders.

That path isn’t good enough for the Republican leadership. They want to control every phase.

Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t like the sight of homeless camps in Austin under the freeways and along other streets. Seeing poor people probably made him uncomfortable. He may not have realized that such poverty existed.

Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick was also offended.

Austin might not have been handling the situation in the best way. Other cities, such as Dallas and Houston, were also having problems. Owners of small businesses complained that the homeless were blocking the entrances to their stores and that customers didn’t want to navigate through what they considered unsafe conditions.

Those are valid concerns that should have been addressed by the cities and some of them already had before the law was passed.

To pass a blanket law that covers every community in the state was downright goofy, though, and it has led to more problems, not fewer, in places like East Texas.

In Tyler, for instance, a number of homeless people gathered in an area under a bridge in the northwest part of the city. They bothered no one, so far as I know and were certainly not responsible for any crime wave.

The fact that they were together made it easier for both police and volunteers to watch out for them. An organization — the Tyler Street Team — even formed to help these people. Tents were donated, food was sometimes provided by churches, and someone was keeping watch on their general welfare.

By no fault of the Tyler Police Department, the new law forced these people to scatter. Where? Good question.

It seems as if organizers of the Tyler Street Team know some of the locations but, of course, they aren’t giving that information away or else these poor people will be forced to move yet again.

The law is a true burden on people who want to volunteer to help move as many people as possible from the streets into actual homes. In East Texas, the law is making that more difficult.

The same conditions are probably true in Longview, where most of the homeless were focused on the west side of the city.

Those who don’t understand the situation are concerned about crime, but the truth is the homeless are much more likely to be the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators.

Still, the law achieved its main goal, which was to get the poor out of sight and out of mind of those who get uncomfortable seeing them.

Plenty of people had just rather assume that the homeless do not exist because if they aren’t really there no one has to deal with their reality. If you can’t see a problem it really isn’t there, right?

The homeless law is exactly the wrong way to deal with a problem, with the legislature passing a one-size-fits-all solution to a local problem. As long as Republicans rule the roost in the legislature, though, this is a trend that is likely to increase, not decrease.

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AND NOW for something completely different. Later this week, subscribers to this column will get a second dose about a new Substack effort I will be starting soon.

I’m calling the new site, “Identifying Slaves: The Anonymous Heroes Who Built America.” Obviously, most of the slaves’ identities are lost in time but through some pretty intense research, I have already uncovered several thousand names and I believe there will be at least an equal number yet to be uncovered.

You’ll get the details with the second column, but each entry will not only contain the names — unfortunately, in many cases just the first name — but also some commentary about those terrible times.

The new effort will begin free but after a few months, I will be switching to a paid model of $5 per month. I wish I didn’t need to do this but there is a cost to me to get at the research materials, plus, this effort takes a lot of time.

Behind the Pine Curtain will remain free.

I believe it is worth it to somehow honor those who were treated so badly during their lives and never given much credit for all they did to make this nation great.

Hope to see you there.

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