Are homeless people in the USA without any chance to do better?
Like, there'd be anything they could do to get out of that situation?
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SW-User
There was an article in this morning’s Chicago Tribune that touches on this. The guy profiled in the article was from some small, remote place in Tennessee. In high school, he was truant often enough that the state penalized him by not allowing him to obtain a drivers license until he was 21. Since he needed to work to eat and live, he drove anyway. He racked up a couple grand in fines and court fees that he couldn’t afford, so he was jailed for not having the money that he couldn’t earn to pay the fines he accrued by driving without a license, which he did as a result of being denied a license due to his initial poor choices as a high school student. This cost him his job and then made it even more difficult to find work, and this has snowballed to the point where he’s 30 and homeless. This can be viewed as a series of poor choices, or it can be viewed as a system that’s stacked against poor people where an initial poor choice seemingly continues to compound in perpetuity.
SW-User
I also think there needs to be a measure of common sense applied where penalties that will clearly deprive someone of their ability to work and provide for themselves need to be avoided unless completely unavoidable. The idea that someone who had truancy issues in high school gets whacked with a restriction that doesn’t allow them to drive legally until 3 years after high school is asinine, and the outcome virtually inevitable. Clearly, school was not this guy’s thing, which means he was going to be entering the workforce sooner rather than later. Not handcuffing him with the driving restriction (which is a punishment unrelated to school attendance) could have avoided the whole fiasco, and he’d probably be grinding away at some job struggling but at least getting by instead of being homeless and on public assistance. For a society that vilifies people on welfare, we sure do a lot of stupid things (like that driving restriction) that kneecaps people and pushes them onto it. @scooogy
SW-User
Agreed. They didn’t discuss his school experience in the article other than to point out the initial truancy issue. There are plenty of people who don’t do well at school who go on to learn a trade and lead happy and successful lives. This guy didn’t seem to have a chance, and I’d have to believe there are plenty of others with similar stories. @chrisCA