As the rain falls, a homeless person sleeps on a park bench along the crumbling concrete path between Morse Avenue and Lunt in CAPS beat 2431. Word has it, by tomorrow afternoon, Joe Moore will have sanitized Loyola Park by running all the homeless people out of the park while he holds his annual political picnic. Monday things will be back to normal.
28 comments:
Joey Moore doesnt give a shit. It's extremely obvious that he's just a highbrow dirtbag who's only invested in keeping himself happy. God forbid someone should bother him with these issues. It's not like it's his job or anything.
V&J: What do you want? How about another homeless shelter in RP? It seems like that's what you and Craig and Michael H appear to be asking for. Joe Moore not doing enough? Well where do you want the shelter built?
Did anyone say anything about building a shelter? Hayzee, get the haze out of your eyes and learn to read.
Why, the picnic should be open to ALL. Even the homeless are a part of our diverse hood aren't they? The picnic is 'free for everyone' isn't it?
Maybe someone will go through the park and give these people a ride to a shelter in another ward and a few bucks?
> Well where do you want the shelter built?
North of Howard - NOT
ANOTHER HOMELESS SHELTER-
BUILD IT NEXT TO JOE MOORE'S HOME OR OFFICE SO HE CAN GET A REAL TASE OF ROGERS PARK
The history of the homeless or any disenfranchised group goes back over 50 years. Remember Rogers Park was where the cities wealthy families came to get away from city heat and dust. As people started fleeing the city after attacks of redlining empty palacial homes in Rogers Park had to have some occupants. Believe me.These homes were converted into nursing homes. Imagine what they were like. I know because I lived next door to one. You could hear people wailing, crying, moaning and no comfort provided. Well as nursing homes were built by knocking down big homes the residents then went to the 'newer' more efficient homes. Again a vacancy of palacial homes. oops the next round of needy to Rogers Park is the 'group home' for wards of the state. Personally I have nothing against them and I have worked with some very fine residents of these homes as well as their care providers. But guys and gals ------ let us be realistic. How many nursing homes can one community handle. How many group homes can one school attendance area handle.
Rogers Park has been and still is a dumping ground for the disenfranchised of the earth.
Politics is directly behind it. Before Lincoln Park and before the state came to believe that the mentally ill would be better cared for in group homes than in institutions communities only had a few of these ' unfortunate'.
But in the 60's when it became the humane thing to do well --- Lincoln Park used to have quite a large number of homes. Then when Lincoln Park became the place to be hehe....... the nursing homes and group homes came here. It is a way for unscupulous person to become millionaires off the backs of the poor.
I have to agree with Toni and the picnic is free and it is for all .
I would be ashamed of any persaon who disrespects these ufortunate people.
I feel that all of us are only one step away from homelessness.
Remember what we have in common with them - they like us are part of humanity.
Maybe we will stop spending government money on suicidal wars, endless bureaucracy, and corporate welfare, and allocate what we used to, to building and staffing mental institutions.
Most of the chronically homeless are hopelessly mentally ill, which is why I forgave an old homeless man with a demented gleam in his eye for singling me out for a kick in the stomach a few years back, as I was walking down Broadway through Uptown. The guy called me "Gladys"-clearly I recalled a bad experience to him.
We used to keep these people in asylums, but the Reagan administration couldn't wait to cut the spending necessary to keep these institutions running. Most major public asylums shut down by 1990. There are very few remaining. Mind you, all they did was "warehouse" these people with incurable mental illness, but at least it was a warehouse with a warm, clean bed, mostly gentle staff, and decent basic food and care.
These extremely deranged people are the victims of tragic accidents- something that went haywire in the genes or in the womb that no one could explain, whatever. They are a miniscule fraction of the population, and could be cared for in a basic way for a fraction of the money we spend on ill-conceived welfare programs for people who are perfectly capable of working, and for an even smaller fraction of what we spend on Corporate Welfare and on bureaucracies created to address non-existant problems.
Why not a homeless shelter? You don't like to see the homeless. I guess they make you uncomfortable. You're angry that they are around and pretty much feel that Joe Moore has a responsibility towards them.
If this is not the case, are you just using these poor homeless people? What do you want Joe Moore to do about the homeless?
"Maybe we will stop spending government money on suicidal wars..."
And you criticize my dad for protesting the war? Come on...if it's not one thing it's another with you guys.
Hayzee brings up a good point: all you guys do is complain. Craig, you haven't offered any solutions to this problem, which by the way exists in several nice communities around Chicagoland including Evanston.
Hey Nathan, I pay 10's of thousands of dollars a year in taxes, fees, business licenses etc.
I'll bitch about your lying, cheating, lazy, do-nothing father all I want.
Get off the computer and go out and exercise or something you spoiled little brat. You're looking a little chunky around the belly lately.
And like I told your loser father 4 years ago. If you two want to stop the war, go over to Iraq and be a couple of human shields. See how that works.
To blame the war in Iraq for our state, and local mis-spending is foolish.
The state and city have to make cuts in budgets, yet they can approve pay raises for themselves!
They can hand out millions of dollors in tax payers money to give to connected companys to do studies on issues that already have know answears or are pushed to the bottom of some pile.
There is no accountability to where billions of dollars are being spent. As I once mentioned the state of Illinois is 3rd in monies recieved from casino taxs (Only behind Nevada & New Jersey) Illinois recieves over 1.6 Billion in revenue annually, where do you ask is this money being spent? The city of Chicago sold the Skyway to a private company for several Billion dollars, again where is this money being spent!
These are just two areas and dollars amounts that our elected officals need to give answears to the voters.
WAKE UP NATHAN, IM AGAINST WARS BUT IN A DUFERENT WAY-
IF OUR COUNTRY WENT PROTECTING OUR LIBERITES IN THE MIDDLE EAST IT WOULD BE HERE-
many of the mentally ill are being lovingly cared for in our nation's prisons
North coast you should not have turned the cheek. assault is a crime and should he have gone through the jailing system he may have been able to get treatment....now he remains on the streets and is likely assaulting other people
when did i say anything about building a homeless shelter? i mearly said that joe moore doesn't care. but we all already knew that. hey nathan, since you obviously read this blog, why don't you try getting your lazy daddy to actually do something good for RP? like clean up morse, for instance. the shit and piss smell under the el tracks, and all up and down the street is NOT pleasant.
reagan admin?!
you might want to go back a bit farther to the later 60s/early 70s
and the the aclu
disfunctionality or not, unless they're an immediate threat to themselves or the public, they can't be held/medicated against their will. and no, living in the streets in an 'unhealthy' environment isn't considered an immediate threat to anyone
"many of the mentally ill are being lovingly cared for in our nation's prisons"
lovingly cared for?!
the prison system is NO place for the mentally ill, where they are frequently put in isolation with 'therapy'/drugs and 'dialog', being administered through a slot in the door
Nathan, I don't criticize your dad for protesting the war.
I am critical of him for using his office to do it. He should do this on his own time.
On OUR time, he should be attending to the affairs of this war, which unfortunately include the low-grade turf wars between criminal gangs.
V & J, if you had seen how helpless and demented and OLD this guy was, you might have "turned the other cheek", too. It did not injure me because he was very weak. He went down Broadway screaming at himself.
I believe he died, though I'm not sure.
I'm not one to forgive criminals, but I have been around severely mentally ill people, and it is heartbreaking. We watched a classmate and friend of my sister's spiral into schizophrenia in her late teens, and it took her parents, who are not rich people, thirty years to get her confined. She couldn't stay with a family member because of her lapses and behavior problems. The only way you could keep her around would be to lock her in the attic or something-otherwise she'd burn the house down leaving the stove on or playing pyromanaic, or invite hordes of strangers over to rob the place. She could also become violent in a moment, if she were frightened or confused. So she lived on the streets, as effors to place her in an apt. resulted in her abandoning the place and ending up sleeping on the street because she forgot where she lived. There were many suicide attempts, including a leap in front of a freight train that cost her a leg. By the time her elderly, worn mother succeeded in getting her committed, she appeared to be an elderly woman herself and so deranged she couldn't form a sentance.
I see many people like this in Uptown. The lucky ones are placed at the Somerset House and other shelters, but the most deranged are on the streets.
I see other homeless people who just fell by the wayside. They are sane, but frail, and just can't compete. Most have never married or had children, though there are women with families out there. This is what happens to low wage workers who experience a disaster such as a house fire, or car accident, or prolonged illness.
sparky, my sarcasm didn't come across.....although prisons aren't the ideal housing choice, fact is: there is a huge population of mentally ill in the system....many of these people would no doubt be homeless if released
pratt,
i wondered if it was a sarcastic statement, but after reading the rest of your post regarding treatment, it seemed as though you were serious
and unless they're really out of it and get taken directly to a hospital, they get thrown in with the regular criminals/subjected to the survival of the fittest
Alright, we know for certain there are homeless people due to:
1) Drug addiction
2) Alcoholism
3) Mental Illness
What the solution? More care. Certainly.
While Joe Moore could certainly be a leader on issues of homelessness, how many of you out there are willing to say the following:
"I want Joe Moore to build more shelters, have more outreach personnel on the street and create an atmosphere in Rogers Park that helps the homeless."
V&J what's your solution to homelessness in RP? What are you offering?
North Coast, yes opening the flood gates and releasing all these mental cases has put a strain on our society. However, there were lots of people in the asylums that were not mentally ill. People put family members in institutions when they were developmently disabled, a petty criminal or stupid enough to get pregnant. If you couldn't control your kid, you locked them up in a mental institution.
However, what I find most sad about this blog stream is that no one really seams to care about the real human being under that comforter. God bless you all that you never find yourself in that place.
Pratt - The sarcasm came through loud and clear here.
One of my high school friends is one of those mentally ill people roaming around. In high school, he showed brilliant promise as a classical musician, then he fell into the bottomless pit of schizophrenia. His family and many friends tried to help him. He could function when he stayed on his meds, but kept going off them because he said they made him feel dead inside.
We would help him get jobs when he was doing better, then he'd go off his meds and show up late or not at all, and act erratically. I see him occasionally around the neighborhood or on the red line, but it's been a while. Last time I saw him, he was managing to hang onto some sort of housing. I hope that he can keep a place and not end up on the streets.
i dont have a solution, nor do i think there is any easy way to "fix" this issue. however, it seems like there should be some move by our political leader to do something about this issue. instead of fighting to end the war, which is not going to end until the idiot who is our esteemed leader is either out of office or dies (wouldn't that be nice), to fight for some sort of normalcy for these people. i'm not sure how that would work, becuase i don't know much about the whole homelessness situation. however, having them shooed out of the park so he can have his shindig seems pretty cold to me.
Hayzee said...
"What the solution? More care. Certainly. While Joe Moore could certainly be a leader on issues of homelessness,"
Joe Moore hasn't, and wouldn't take on the homeless issue because they don't vote.
Joe is just going to stick with the retirement communities because he can show his face every once in a while and influence them to vote for him.
True, there were people in asylums who shouldn't have been there, before the 60s.
The 50s was a terrible, repressive time, and you could be committed because, say, you were a girl who didn't want to follow the prefeminist program.
But after the 60s, these institutions were so cash strapped, that they served as shelters and warehouses for people with crippling mental illness, and that's about the most anyone can do for them at our current level of knowlegde: give them shelter and kindness and meds.
The state instititution in St. Louis was such a place, and it became a hangout for these people and a place to socialize after release. Anyone who wasn't critical was released. The place was not ideal- there was no real therapy, just a really comfortable place to sleep and eat, but it was all anyone could really do and it beat the streets.
Now, that place is a vacant hulk, as are hundreds of similar institutions in cities across the country.
We can't cure most really severe mental illness, and I'm not optimistic about the possibilities for finding real "cures" for these disabling illnesses. But we can provide as much as we did in the 70s.
Maybe there will be a cure for the mental illness on this blog. You are still complaining about Regan. If you feel so bad, put the homeless person up in your home. Hypocrite. Those were mental prisons and most people were out of sight and out of mind. Now they are in your face and everyone is "Don't put it next to my house" You make me sick. Assholes. Nothing is ever going to change. This neighbor is fucked because of the people that live here.
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