Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Serious question about the homeless

Oh my.

LOL

Does this apply to Obama and Bernie t-shirts?

Had a homeless guy arrive dead on arrival to Ed 2 years ago. Found on a side walk barely breathing. Had close to 30g cash in his worn out backpack Was panhandling around the area per police, but was more transient. Makes me wander why he was homeless. He had money!

Answer - he was crazy. They closed all the loony bins a while back and let the crazies out. Once they are off their, meds, they revert to being crazy. When I first worked in NYC in the late 1970s, the homeless were all over the place. I worked in the JC Penny building and we had a large black woman living out of a laundry bin by the loading dock. She was nuttier than a fruit cake, screaming all the time. I would see the crazy drummer seen in one of the movies - maybe Mean Streets - all the time. He drummed on mail boxes, manhole covers, whatever. Crazies were on the subway, making noise and asking for money to stop.

Then Ed Koch got elected and he cleaned it all up.

No derogatory implications intended, but by chance was he of gypsy or Jewish genealogy as best you could tell?

Allla this ^^^^

Look, if it weren't true, I wouldn't be saying it. Let's say you get in car wreck. You get a concussion. You get taken to the hospital, and get all the right treatment, but scar tissue develops. 6 months later, you start having paranoid delusions. Your wife takes you to the shrink, they put you on meds, but little by little your personality starts to corrode. Within a year, you've walked away from your job and family and you're living under a bridge.

It's a fairly common story. I'm not saying you need to be nice to the guy. He's nuts. He's tormented. He can't live inside, because he has paranoid delusions. I do my best to avoid them. The moral of the story is drive safely, wear your harness, and always wear your hard hat on the job.

Looked like a rough old homeless white guy. Hell of a beard lol

Not the first time stuff like that happened in the Er. Have had crazies off the Appalachian trail brought in. Find out they are missing persons from long ways away( one I remember was from west Texas). missing for 2-3 years. Presumed dead apparently. Schizophrenia, mental breaks, or whatever. Some have lots of cash in there bags. The guy from Texas had a lot, but don’t remember exactly how much. Most get committed and when released are a completely different person.

Last year a homeless guy said we lost his Rolex watch that was placed in the hospital safe in a tamper proof bag by 2 security officers. They went to look again. Sure as crap he had a Rolex

Hard to know if Gypsy ancestry. I myself am descended from Roma. My great grandmother was 100% Gypsy. You would not know that by looking at most of that side of my family

There have been carefully done studies on who the "homeless" are. Only a small percentage are people who truly working people who have just fallen on hard times and are without a place to live. These people generally are only homeless for a week or two until they get another job and possibly some government or charity assistance with housing. The vast majority are mentally ill, drug and alcohol abusers and panhandlers. They have tried to take some of these people and put them in free apartments and they invariably end up back on the streets. So there is not really a homeless problem but a problem with mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse. We used to treat mental health with hospitalization but the courts ruled that you can't forcibly keep these people against their will under most circumstances. I guess drug and alcohol addiction is a illness of it's own but I have less sympathy. I had a cousin who was an alcoholic. He was given a modest but paid off house when his mother died. He only had to pay the property taxes to keep it (probably less than $2k a year). The government took it within a few years for taxes. Lots of people tried to help him (he was a trained car mechanic who could easily get a job) but he died "homeless" in an alley one winter night. Some people are self-destructive addicts and there is not much you can do to change it.