Homeless Don't Belong Near Homes?

I just took an online quiz to find out how Malaysian I am. I am 25% Malaysian, it said. That's good to know, isn't it? We all struggle with our identities. Now if I can only figure out what my other three quarters are.

One of the things I've struggled with is how liberal or conservative I am. I've decided those labels are used wrongly all the time. I've decided I am both conservative and liberal, and everyone who isn't both simultaneously is a fool.

Some self-identified conservatives are saying Obama makes America look weak by admitting to other nations that we have made mistakes in the past. How is it conservative to go around saying you have never made mistakes? That's not a political stance at all, it's a character flaw.

Other "conservatives" are saying both that "getting through this recession will take sacrifices from everyone" and that "taxing the rich more is not the answer." Taken separately these do indeed resemble familiar conservative propositions. But together they just prove a kind of schizophrenia. What sacrifices are the rich going to make if not higher taxes? Should we draft them for a shovel-and-pick carrying economic army, a mandatory public works program for the super rich? Will Bill Gates and Paul Allen and friends lay the asphalt for the new Mercer Boulevard? Oh please, say it's so.

The poor, in fact, are sacrificing already, by being poor and getting poorer. So for the "sacrifices from everyone" to ever kick in, the rich have to sacrifice. Again, what? Well, what do they have? Duh, money.

Here's your conservatism: You pick the country you want to live in and you pay for it. You want an America that looks like a Third World country? Fine, that's free. We can abolish all taxes and you can have pregnant barefoot beggars on every street corner. You want an America that has a middle class to aspire to, and HDTVs for all the masses, to keep the revolutions in check, and restore the consumer class to buy the crap your overseas factories make? That's extra.

I started down this rant because of another "Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)" story in the news. The NIMBYs this time were residents of Ferndale, Minnesota. A church there wants to set up a daytime service for homeless people, and the neighbors said, "Homeless people don't belong in a residential neighborhood."

Would that be a conservative position? It's a call back to a simpler time, certainly, when people could say things like "[insert plural of racial epithet] don't belong in a residential neighborhood" and not have to mumble or hide their heads in shame among their white brethren, but it is a slander against conservatism to equate bigotry with the philosophy just because conservatism means to conserve values and bigotry has been a past and passed-up value.

Real conservatism should mean to conserve good values, only. My ancestors, and yours too, if you go back about two hundred generations, valued their enemies' heads for trophies, hearts for food, women for two minutes, and their children for slaves. But those are not values that any non-criminals now want to conserve, so we can remove those values from the discussion of what conservatism means.

Can we please do that with the NIMBYs' "values" too? If homeless people don't belong in any residential neighborhood, where the freaking hell do they belong? A swamp? A big pit with a lid on it? This is not a conservation of a good value; this is just plain asinine unreflective boneheadedness.

Of course they belong in a residential neighborhood, they're residents of this land, they're human beings, humans make neighborhoods. The value you need to conserve is the value of humanity and neighborliness. You let them into your neighborhood and you help them not be homeless, and when you have succeeded in helping them not be homeless, voila! -- no homeless people in your neighborhood!

Done the right way.