Homelessness is a Decision not a Condition

Homelessness is a Decision not a Condition

Homeless people are not always the victims that the media have portrayed them to be. The alarming fact is that many of the homeless are there by choice. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to portray all homeless people as lazy people who dont want to take care of themselves. This couldn't be further from the truth. In my experience with the homeless they are usually either in bad health, addicted to drugs, mentally ill or a combination of any of these. To compound matters worse, they are usually without any type of legitimate income to support themselves.

One day last winter, I was leaving work and I was approached by a street-person. Living in the city most of my life, I had grown accustomed to this type of solicitation. This particular gentleman gave me a well rehearsed monologue about how his car had broken down and he was just trying to get enough money up to catch a bus home. Needless to say, I have heard this particular story in every city I had ever been to, by other street people in cities far bigger than Dayton, Ohio. I like to always give people the benifit of the doubt, but this story was a little overused. I told him I would take him up to the Greyhound station and pay for his ticket if he wanted to get home. He refused my offer, telling me that there was other business that he would have to take care of first. I had called his bluff and he knew it. I then asked him what he was doing out on the streets at 4:30 in the morning. He told me that he was "making a living".

After chatting with him for about twenty minutes, I was able to get him to reveal a few very important details about himself. He had been on the streets for about the past 6 y...

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... no longer employed their.

I was also told that Adrian was constantly begging other employees for money. It seemed like he just couldn't discriminate between his life on the street and his position in the workplace.

Much later I would find out that I was just enabling Adrian. I would find that Adrian's biggest problem was his drug addiction. Judging by the the fresh needle marks on his arm, it was quite obvious that Adrian was shooting up some type of narcotic on a regular basis. He had been offered help before and refused to straighten his life out. Instead, he chose a life on the streets with no direction. A life with little to look forward to and little to lose. It was disheartening to see such human potential go to waste. It seemed that Adrian had gone past that point where we choose life over death. He made the choice to give up life long ago.