The National Coalition for the Homeless compiles reported violent attacks on homeless people every year, and this year's compilation is as dismal as always. For the fourth successive year Florida is #1 in the number of attacks. Florida is also where, last week, a man caught with downloaded child porn blamed his cat. A year ago, even in the same town as the man with the horrible cat, a homeless man was charged with exposing himself sexually, who actually just urinated on a coffee shop table, having mistaken it for a toilet, presumably because it was white.
With that windup, I will now now fling my thesis.
I say ignorance generates vastly more evil in the world than does malevolence. And if you eliminated all the hate crimes in the world, you could barely breathe a sigh of relief, burdened as you'd be by all the crimes of ignorance that would still go on unabated.
Take the man I just mentioned who peed on the table. It is unlikely that he was charged with lewd exposure out of hatred for either his homelessness or his drunkenness. He was charged with lewd exposure because the arresting officer was and probably still is a moron, who can't tell the difference between lewd exposure with sexual intent and exposure with intent to relieve a bladder, and who therefore desperately needs time off to either figure out the difference on his own, or accept instruction in the matter.
You might say, well, that doesn't support your thesis, Wes, because you're comparing a silly charge with violent hate crimes, and violent assaults are worse. But that view that violent hate crimes are worse, is in fact, itself, ignorant. Because, it fails to recognize the long term consequences of such ignorant treatment.
We live in a police state, full of righteous vigilantes driven to making it worse. And here, a drunk who urinates on a table gets treated the same way that a man who claims his cat downloads child pornography. They are both labeled sex criminals and that label follows them through life. One deserves it, the other doesn't. The one who doesn't deserve it would eventually rather have been punched once, than cataloged for life as a sex criminal. He might even wish he were dead. The stigma is worse than the nail.
Even the physical assaults that occur are rooted in ignorance. Most attacks on homeless people, almost 3/4ths of them, are committed by people under the age of 25, who don't know that they're highly likely to be homeless, too, in a decade or so. They don't know this, not because they are stupid, but because they are ignorant, i.e. they have not bothered to remove the earphones from their ears, and not bothered to shut out each others cheerleading monologues, long enough to reflect about such possibilities, or to imagine that the homeless people they see around them are in any way human beings like themselves. In most cases they were taught ignorance by their ignorant parents, but that's no excuse.
The Port of Seattle is now committing crimes of ignorance on an order of magnitude even I didn't expect. Rather than solely pursuing legal options to evict Nickelsville from Terminal 107 as a whole, they are serving individual Nickelodeons with eviction papers.
These Nickelodeons are people who are already unable to find any adequate place to live that is safe from our truly malicious mayor, and any eviction on their record can only prolong their homelessness, by making it that much harder to rent their way out of it.
I'm sure there was no malicious intent. It's no hate crime, strictly speaking. But what difference does that make to people who are recipients of such low blows? The intent may not be mean, but the effect is. The Port needs desperately to take the time to figure out just what the consequences of such actions on those individuals could be, or accept instruction in the matter.
With that windup, I will now now fling my thesis.
I say ignorance generates vastly more evil in the world than does malevolence. And if you eliminated all the hate crimes in the world, you could barely breathe a sigh of relief, burdened as you'd be by all the crimes of ignorance that would still go on unabated.
Take the man I just mentioned who peed on the table. It is unlikely that he was charged with lewd exposure out of hatred for either his homelessness or his drunkenness. He was charged with lewd exposure because the arresting officer was and probably still is a moron, who can't tell the difference between lewd exposure with sexual intent and exposure with intent to relieve a bladder, and who therefore desperately needs time off to either figure out the difference on his own, or accept instruction in the matter.
You might say, well, that doesn't support your thesis, Wes, because you're comparing a silly charge with violent hate crimes, and violent assaults are worse. But that view that violent hate crimes are worse, is in fact, itself, ignorant. Because, it fails to recognize the long term consequences of such ignorant treatment.
We live in a police state, full of righteous vigilantes driven to making it worse. And here, a drunk who urinates on a table gets treated the same way that a man who claims his cat downloads child pornography. They are both labeled sex criminals and that label follows them through life. One deserves it, the other doesn't. The one who doesn't deserve it would eventually rather have been punched once, than cataloged for life as a sex criminal. He might even wish he were dead. The stigma is worse than the nail.
Even the physical assaults that occur are rooted in ignorance. Most attacks on homeless people, almost 3/4ths of them, are committed by people under the age of 25, who don't know that they're highly likely to be homeless, too, in a decade or so. They don't know this, not because they are stupid, but because they are ignorant, i.e. they have not bothered to remove the earphones from their ears, and not bothered to shut out each others cheerleading monologues, long enough to reflect about such possibilities, or to imagine that the homeless people they see around them are in any way human beings like themselves. In most cases they were taught ignorance by their ignorant parents, but that's no excuse.
The Port of Seattle is now committing crimes of ignorance on an order of magnitude even I didn't expect. Rather than solely pursuing legal options to evict Nickelsville from Terminal 107 as a whole, they are serving individual Nickelodeons with eviction papers.
These Nickelodeons are people who are already unable to find any adequate place to live that is safe from our truly malicious mayor, and any eviction on their record can only prolong their homelessness, by making it that much harder to rent their way out of it.
I'm sure there was no malicious intent. It's no hate crime, strictly speaking. But what difference does that make to people who are recipients of such low blows? The intent may not be mean, but the effect is. The Port needs desperately to take the time to figure out just what the consequences of such actions on those individuals could be, or accept instruction in the matter.
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