True Homelessness

It’s Out There, But It’s Not Here…


I was cruising around the WWW tonight trying to catch up on the news and the goings on in the world after our guests left town today.

Since I’m particularly cranky these days, and since we just got through entertaining three teenaged girls overnight, this story caught my eye and I realized that I haven’t opined on the issue of homeless children in a while.

Among other things, they say:

SAO PAULO, Brazil--More than 1,000 children have been living underneath highway overpasses, inside tunnels and on city squares in South America's biggest city, according to a study reported by Brazilian media Saturday.

The study, conducted by Sao Paulo city officials, showed that about 1,030 children are homeless in Sao Paulo, a city of more than 10 million people, the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper said.

It said another 3,000 who are not homeless work on the streets, selling candy or begging to help their families.

I feel like spewing some venom on this subject, so please return your tray table and seatback to the upright and locked position while I tell you how I feel.

FIRST of all, in this country, there is absolutely no reason that there should be any “homeless” children.

None at all.

Zero.

Zilch.

If there is a child out there inside the borders of the 50 states of the good old USA that can be considered “legally” “homeless,” there is also one or more corresponding adults that should be in jail as a result and there is an existing taxpayer funded government program that would and should be responsible for housing, clothing, and feeding said child in a fashion worthy of a king by most international (read that United Nations) standards.

In fact, our imperial Federal Government of the United By God States of America and by example, our individual state governments, impose higher standards on how we treat our pet goldfish, birds, dogs, and felines than most foreign countries impose on young humans under the age of 18.

That said, all you have to do is go to these same foreign countries to see true homelessness and the horror it inflicts on children.

If you've been around this blog before you would know that I served some time back in the late 1970’s on a ship stationed in Subic Bay Phillippines.

Being an innocent young man from rural Alabama that had never done and seen a lot of things at that time, I was horrified to find young children roaming alone on the streets of Olongapo City outside the gates of our Navy Base.

The first thing I witnessed after leaving the confines of the base were the girls standing in “bonka boats” in the Olongapo river just outside the guard’s gate. A "bonka boat" was a small dougout canoe with a single outrigger like you see in old movies about the south Pacific.

Yes, these kinds of boats weren't just a figment of Hollywood's imagination.

The young girls, no more than ten or twelve years old, would stand precariously on crates or other supports (in order to make themselves look older and taller) in some kind of cobbled together formal looking dress gown and utter some variation of the phrase:

“hey Joe, throw me a Peso…I show you my tits…”

Accompanying these young girls would be a young boy whose job it was to either catch the peso if it was thrown directly into the boat, else jump into the feces and garbage stained water to capture the money.

I hate to say that our men in uniform enjoyed making the kids jump into that horrible, nasty water to retrieve a coin that at the time was worth somewhere between ten and twenty cents.

Then once you were across the river and into town, you were assaulted with literally hundreds of unescorted children everywhere, selling everything from chewing gum to their own bodies.

I remember walking down the street one evening and feeling someone rubbing the hair on my arm (I’m sorta a hairy dude, except on the top of my head these days.) It was a a little boy that couldn’t have been older than six or eight years old who was selling packs of Wrigleys Chewing gum.

I bought a pack.

What I realized was that the Filipino people treated their children like profit centers…like employees or lawnmowers. Once you were able to walk and talk and wipe your own butt, you also had to go out and earn your share of your own living, and by default your family’s living…

IF you actually had a family.

Many of these children were the products of the transactions between the American military and Filipino prostitutes and just like the children of American solders in Vietnam, they were at best second class citizens. Many of these kids aparently had no family that claimed them, and God knows what abuses they endured as a result.

Where did they sleep?

What did they eat?

The Marcos government, possessor of an infinite supply of women's shoes, certainly didn't step in to ensure their safety.

Did you know that the Phillippines (not England) has the second largest English speaking population in the ENTIRE world?

No?

Well then...I just taught you something in my ramblings...

Here in Georgia, DFACS (the Department of Family and Childrens Services) is one of the biggest abusers of children because of their ineptitude in managing children's affairs, and if I were a child today I think that I would almost choose homelessness over being under the supervision of the so called

GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS...

Can't live with them...

And some can't live without them...