A pigeon is a quiet, peaceful bird, not disturbingly loud like crows or annoyingly aggressive like seagulls. But, too many pigeons congregating in one area can become a filthy nuisance, even a health hazard. They aren’t toilet trained and they don’t particularly respect anyone’s space. Their sheer numbers can eventually overwhelm a limited geographic area. Sidewalks, parking lots and parks can become infested with flocks of these foul fowls grudgingly making way for passers-by or erupting into flights of defecating clouds indiscriminately bombing benches, cars, buildings, walkways and people. Not exactly an attractive ambience.
Pigeons become a problem when there are too many of them. Their numbers are determined by a consistent availability of food and a lack of perceived danger. These conditions met, they will roost almost anywhere, often in great numbers. Obviously, therefore, to deter pigeons, food must be insufficient and danger apparent. In other words, living conditions must be made hostile for them. To that effect, some communities have passed ordinances against feeding pigeons, and have engaged falconers, strung electric wire or used other such deterrents to scare off these cooing crappers.
The problem of increasing numbers of vagrants and the escalation of their bad behavior is similar to an infestation of pigeons. And, as with pigeons, the solution is similar. Don’t feed them and don’t make them welcome. Certainly, discouraging human vagrants is far more difficult — complicated with legalities and moral sensibilities — than is discouraging the feathered variety of vagrants.
Nevertheless, because vagrancy has become so pervasively intrusive in many communities it must be addressed if these communities are to maintain an acceptable ambience, a vibrant commercial sector and public hygiene.
It is intolerable that residents and visitors are confronted daily by growing hordes of pushy panhandlers and mentally addled tatterdemalions stinking of alcohol and urine. Our downtowns are beginning to resemble scenes from one of those zombie movies as disheveled derelicts menacingly lumber and stagger toward us, arms outstretched, demanding money. It’s all becoming tediously predictable. Every bum has his territory and his story — usually some variation of “I need a couple bucks for bus fare to the next town,” or “I haven’t eaten in three days,” or “I am a war vet.” Once in awhile you’ll get one who is blatantly honest, “I need money for booze.”
They are everywhere where people congregate and have become as persistently annoying as mosquitoes in Michigan. On a recent trip to San Francisco, there were several occasions when we needed a rolled-up magazine to fend them off at BART stations, Market Street, Union Square and the Embarcadero. Even the lobby of our hotel had a bum stretched out on the couch watching the big flat-screen TV. The embarrassed, flustered hotel staff could not get this defiant derelict to depart before calling the police.
Departing the Bay Area, we stopped for gas in the small agricultural town of Gilroy. No sooner had we pulled up to the pump and opened the car doors, than a tattered zombie materialized from nowhere, lurching forward, arm outstretched, in our faces, asking for money.
Come on, Gilroy?
Whether by circumstance or by choice, in boom times or recession, there have been and will always be transient mendicants. Although there are no reliable comprehensive surveys or studies as to who and how many there are in America, the Housing and Urban Development Department estimates that at any one time there are about 650,000 people who are homeless, with 60 percent of these spending the nights in various transitional housing.
While that is a very small fraction of the overall population, it seems like most of them are haunting cities in California. And that may be the problem. Charity and compassion can run thin when the burden of being your brother’s keeper falls disproportionately on you. Beautiful communities like Santa Barbara and San Francisco are being overrun by “the homeless.”
We used to call them hobos or bums, but with the advent of hyper political-correctness, we refer to them generically as “the homeless,” a euphemism considered less pejorative than bum.
Call them what you like, but, frankly, many of us are getting bummed out. We have reached the frontier of charity and tolerance. For the same reason that I do not feed pigeons, I never give money to bums. If a bum can get out of the bushes at 8 a.m. to accost me for money, he can get up and go to a real job like most of us do.
— Santa Barbara political observer Randy Alcorn can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Click here to read previous columns.
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