You look around this country, this beautiful, sprawling, and completely fucked-up experiment, and you see the ghosts. They’re everywhere. Shuffling down the sidewalks of our quiet, respectable, and completely dying cities. And the first, most beautiful, and completely brilliant lie they sold you was the name.
They call them “the homeless.”
Christ. That’s a work of goddamn genius. “Homeless.” It’s a clean, polite, and completely fraudulent word. It paints a picture of a poor, respectable bastard who just got behind on his mortgage, a guy who’s one good job offer away from getting back on his feet. It’s a word designed to pull at your heartstrings, to wring a little empathy, and a few billion dollars, out of your wallet.
But you and I, we’re not blind. We’ve walked the streets of this goddamn third-world armpit called Tucson. We’ve seen the real product. The shuffling, dead-eyed, open-sored men and women, the “drug zombies,” taking a shit in the middle of the street at high noon, a needle dangling from a leg that’s already rotting off the bone. That’s not a man who’s “a little behind on his mortgage.” That’s not a housing issue. That’s a goddamn product.
And you have to ask yourself, who’s the farmer?
It ain’t the Republicans. It ain’t the conservatives. No. The farmers are a new, quiet, and beautiful breed. They’re the “helpers.” The non-profits. The NGOs. The “Homeless Industrial Complex.” It’s a whole goddamn army of women I’ve met, the ones with the $40,000-a-year liberal arts counseling degrees, the ones with the sad, empathetic eyes, the ones who just want to “rub the drool” off the cheeks of the broken. They’re not fixing a problem; they’re managing one. They’re not saving souls; they’re Drug Zombie Farmers.
And here’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely diabolical genius of the scam. You follow the money, like that blue-haired wackjob on my Facebook feed was screaming about. She was just pointing the goddamn gun in the wrong direction.
These “charities,” these “helpers,” they get paid by the state, by the city, proportionate to the number of drug zombies they “service.” They get billions. So if you’re a farmer, and you get paid per head of cattle, what’s your incentive? To cure the cattle? To open the goddamn gate and set them free?
Fuck no.
Your incentive is to maximize the herd. To keep the pens full.
And it’s a beautiful, self-licking ice cream cone of a system. You don’t arrest the drug dealers. Christ, no. Why would you? That’s the guy delivering the goddamn feed. You arrest the dealers, the zombies get clean or move on, and your funding dries up. No. You know exactly who the dealers are, and you let them work. You and the cops, you’re all in on the same quiet, respectable, and completely rotten game.
The goal isn’t to get the zombies clean. It’s to keep them in a perfect, quiet, and completely profitable state of “just barely alive.” Not too many drugs, or they overdose and you lose a unit. Not too few, or they get sober and you lose a unit. You just keep them shuffling, keep them addicted, keep them on the books.
And the money… Jesus. When you add it all up, the tax, the grants, the whole goddamn beautiful, bureaucratic shithole, they’re spending, in some places, close to a million dollars per zombie, per year. A million dollars. To keep a man shitting on a sidewalk.
Where’s the money going? It ain’t going to the poor bastard with the needle in his leg. It’s going to the farmers. To the salaries of the “helpers.” To the administrators. To the goddamn real estate. It’s a job. An industry. Just like global warming, it’s a beautiful, recession-proof scam built on a foundation of manufactured guilt and quiet, respectable, left-wing greed.
I’m 57 years old. I grew up in a world, in a quiet, respectable town, where this shit didn’t happen. Not like this. A bum was a bum, a drunk was a drunk. They weren’t a goddamn political constituency. They weren’t a billion-dollar industry.
This is new. This is the beautiful, ugly, and completely logical end-point of a system that has decided it’s more profitable to “manage” a problem than to goddamn solve it. They don’t want to fix the rot.
They’re just selling the mushrooms that grow on it. And business, my friend, is booming.
