Mad Housers

As we move through the dog days of August and are mentally numbed by the media smorgasbord of coverage including the “Swift Vets”, mutilated-via-plastic-surgery child molesters, professional-athlete-date-rapists, dead-or-missing pregnant women, and underwhelming presidential debates on domestic issues, I’ve got some suggestions of my own for the domestic front. They are all based on the premiss that the less the imperial Federal Government has to do with domestic issues, the better off we all will be. Many if not most Americans have lost sight of this concept. (And by the way, will someone show me where in the US Constitution it says anything about government “creating jobs” or stopping the “exporting of jobs overseas?”)

I’m not given to using cliché’s, since they’re so cliché—but here is one of my favorites, paraphrased:

“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

To a textbook liberal, this might seem like an alien concept to spring from the mouth and mind of a mean old, Caucasian, conservative, dyed in the wool, libertarian.

Well, I’ve got news for you: all mean old white guys don’t necessarily enjoy the idea of poor people being poor or total strangers and dang foreigners freezing or starving to death. It’s just that most of us mean old, conservative, libertarian white guys believe that it should not be the government’s job to take our hard earned money and spend it on whomever it is politically expedient to spend it on. Particularly since the government has this strange way of generating ridiculous amounts of overhead into which the majority of the funds end up being diverted, instead of being spent on the intended, so-called “charitable” purpose.

Since we earned it, it makes sense that we might have some pretty good ideas about what to do with the portion of our income that we don’t need for our own basic clothing, food and shelter. Things like paying for our kid’s education, our elderly parents expenses, and our own retirement easily come to mind. And yes, there are times when there are extra funds available and we Americans are pretty good at coming up with ways to help each other without good ole’ Uncle Sam stepping in to lend a (heavy) helping hand.

Of course there are the churches and traditional charities like the Red Cross and The United Way, but I must confess that I cast a wary eye in the direction of any so-called “charitable” group paying six and seven figures for individual executive salaries. The United Way is notorious for making heavy-handed demands on employers during fund drives and for their exclusion of other charitable groups when their funding drives are in progress. There are, however, a number of non-traditional organizations that operate on a “grass-roots” level and that seek to meet the needs of individuals that might ordinarily fall through the cracks in our society.

For instance, I recently visited the website of a group http://www.madhousers.org/ called the “Mad Housers” that I first had some involvement with years ago when I was attending Georgia Tech. An acquaintance of mine named Mike Conner, an architecture student, was a founding member of this organization, which provides free basic shelter for homeless people in the metro Atlanta area.

The group goes out and finds homeless people (what Neal Boortz calls an urban outdoorsman) living under bridges and in home made huts in Kudzoo patches. The Mad Housers provide a small (8’x10’), clean, lockable, prefabricated structure with a safe, simple home-built stove for heating and cooking. The structures are prefabricated in “panels” and hauled to the site and erected with volunteer labor.

The individuals that the Mad Housers serve are not inclined to utilize traditional homeless shelters for a variety of reasons, but they need shelter regardless. There is a neutral, sometimes somewhat strained relationship with local governments but they usually tend to look the other way. The City of Atlanta destroyed dozens of Mad Houser structures in 1996 in an effort to “clean up” the city before the summer Olympics. Government at work…

I helped build a couple of shelters with them 25 years ago and I am pleased to learn that they are still in business. They are truly a legitimate non-profit enterprise and they could use any help you wish to give—financial or otherwise.

Another group that I just learned about and intend to look into is Modest Needs: http://www.modestneeds.org/ . This group was started by a guy that decided to dedicate 10% of his monthly income to meeting the unexpected, emergency needs of individuals and families. It has since grown to a larger organization that has helped thousands of people. I love the concept and will write more when I’ve had time to look into their work.

The charitable group that I have spent the most time and energy with is Habitat for Humanity http://www.habitat.org/. Everyone thinks that Jimmy Carter started the organization, but in fact it was started in south Georgia and he just provided his name, reputation, a lot of sweat equity, and international recognition that only a former US president can provide. Mr. Jimmy and I differ on just about every political and social issue, but Habitat is a great organization. I have helped build half-dozen houses with them and attended their project manager’s school in Cobb County, Georgia. I am getting involved here in Glynn County soon and can personally testify as to the good work that they do.

I'm sure that there are dozens of other similarly deserving groups out there that could use your time and funding, so fold up that crappy fish wrapper you call a newspaper, turn off "Entertainment Tonight, " and get out there and make a difference...then you can justify voting for smaller government this November.