By Frosty Wooldridge

June 30, 2022

Part 2: Are we too big a society? Are our cities to big? Loss of community.  Too many corrupt politicians.

Louisiana Senator Kennedy said, “About 90 percent of Congress should be making license plates.”

When the woman who wrote me for solutions to the homeless problem in Los Angeles, she described her feelings of “homeless fatigue.”  Yes, we must possess compassion for hundreds of thousands of Americans who either became homeless by their own poor choices, or by the economy and loss of jobs, and/or drug and mental problems.  But when we see hundreds of thousands of them camped out on our streets, it causes emotional irritation and outright fear as to their crimes, craziness and emotionally warped minds.

No question! We’ve created a hell of a mess in America as to homeless and mentally unstable people.

I remember my time in the U.S. Army 1968-71.  The Army promoted drunkenness as a “manly”  way to conduct oneself.  We suffer at least 20 million alcoholics in this country.  Alcohol destroys marriages, kills hundreds of thousands on our nation’s highways, and creates mayhem in our courts as to murders, spousal abuse and child abuse.

But then, the Vietnam War produced a whole new generation of drug addicts from hash, heroin, meth, MJ…all the way to cocaine.  We can thank Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Military Industrial Complex for all of that nightmare brought home by our disillusioned soldiers in an absurd war that produced nothing but death for the Vietnamese, and death and drugs for our men in uniform.

How did homeless begin?  Are our cities too big?  Is our society racing too fast for normal minds to cope?

When I bicycled through the endless homeless in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as my own City of Denver, I was/am struck by the utter hopelessness, misery and horror of those people living in tents, filthy conditions, lice, bugs, rodents and human waste on the sidewalks.  All of it being allowed or promoted by the politicians of those cities.  They pretend to care. They run campaigns on how they will solve the problem.  Once in office, they don’t solve the problems.

I can only speak for Denver, but we are SO diverse racially and ethnically, that no one is on the same page.  That’s probably the greatest tragedy of a multicultural and multi-lingual society. The Hispanics fight with the Whites and the Blacks fight against Hispanics and the Whites throw up their hands. They fight each other more than solve problems.  Even when the solutions are SO obvious, they can’t compromise and engage those solutions.

In the next two parts of this series, you bring the solutions. I’m the messenger.

My simple solutions for the homeless in Denver:

  1. Pass “no loitering” laws as to sleeping on sidewalks, in tents or anywhere in the streets. All tents, junk and other items will be picked up by the city and thrown into the trash. No begging laws to keep beggars off street corners.
  2. If you’re arrested for sleeping on the streets or begging, you must be processed into a warehouse or other building, where you are required to spend the night in a room, in a bed, with a shower.  Treat them with dignity, kindness and firm hand.
  3. You cannot bring drugs, alcohol or other items into the warehouse.
  4. You may see a counselor in the morning, or you may be allowed back onto the streets for the day.
  5. Offer job counseling and training to all homeless.
  6. If homeless people are kept off the streets by “no loitering” laws, it changes the dynamic. It makes them change their choices. Very few people want to sit in a jail cell.
  7. Offer food banks to feed them. Job training. Drug addiction and mental counseling and rehab.
  8. Have police secret informants catch drug dealers, arrest them, and jail for significant time.
  9. Place National Guard troops along the entire 1,952 miles of the border with Mexico from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas.  Stop the billions of dollars of drugs slipping over the border at will by the drug cartels.  Shoot to kill drug mules or anyone pushing drugs over our borders. That would stop it very quickly.  Since we suffered 107,000 opioid overdose deaths last year, and probably another 100,000 this year, I think the “shoot to kill” drug runners would be a small price to pay for saving another 107,000 American lives in 2022.
  10. Force Mexico to stop allowing refugees to travel across Mexico to invade America.  We could cripple their economy with our power to tariff them and stop them from allowing this invasion.

The following are from a Colonel in the U.S. Army:

— Concur with your idea of informants, very wise.

–Treat this as apolitical, as your friend says both administrations and political parties have failed.

–Build that warehouse where the elected officials live, building or occupying a warehouse in Pueblo to house the homeless is a long way away from Golden, my take until those elected see the problem in their backyards, nothing changes.

–Have a homeless advocate who has been homeless on the advisory board for the dept of social services.

–Kill the incentive

–No money for food, but food

–No ability to camp on the street in front of my home.

–PUT THE HOMELESS TO WORK!  Inspect their areas, make them pick up their trash and roadside trash.  They either work or they keep walking.

–Use the military medical services to augment the mental health support needed for the homeless.  Now, I know, many will say, it’s not the problem of the military, some will even say what if a major war breaks out.  Well, if we go to war, suspend the program and by the way, whose job is it.  This is almost like the overpopulation problem.  Because you and I live in the mountains and we don’t see overpopulation in Golden or Winter Park does not mean its non-existent and does not directly affect us.

–Stop the programs that supplement those not working and if any homeless are getting any type of government support, suspend it until they register and are either in mental health programs and/or working.

–We need a CCC!  In the 30’s during the depression the President put a CCC in place to employ people.  Imagine if we could take inner city kids absent of any father, in danger of joining a gang and even those that have and combine them with the homeless to get “Shit done that we need”.

Like what you ask, well start with taking care of the environment, building trails and living in the outdoors in tents all summer!  Put them in Estes and Granby to work Rocky Mtn. National Park.  What about fighting fires?  Assisting road crews holding up that heavy sign that  says, “stop and slow”.  There are a million things we could use in this nation that we should not pay for, so let’s put a CCC together.  Many will say in the 30’s the unemployment was 40% and now its 3%, true, but for the homeless, for the black and Hispanic youth, its 100% unemployed.  This is not a program designed to punish a race, it’s a program designed to help our nation, teach youth a skill,  and provide some supervision.  How about this….any homeless youth or adult, any inner-city kid that completes two years of working for a government sponsored CCC gets 4 years of paid college!

Gotta go, lets chat soon, Keith

What are you solutions?

Part 4: More of your ideas.

© 2022 Frosty Wooldridge – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Frosty: frostyw@juno.com