Majorllama

I've only ever reported homeless when they crossed the line.

I used to live near a creek in a city so homeless often line the banks and set up shelters in the trees against the back walls of the propertys along the creek. We had a gate so we had access to the creek if we wanted it (previous owner installed it). We had working relationships with the few guys that had built up against our wall. We left a hose running over the wall so they could have access to clean water. We asked them to be careful about leaving it running and we had a meter on the hose we could keep track of them using water. For years they were great. They would say hello if they saw in our backyard and they often thanked us for the water. If we ever had a party or anything we would make them plates or food.

Anyways for years all was well. Guys came and went. Some got jobs. Some just moved camps. But then someone started taking advantage of our kindness and they were using a lot of water (we suspect selling it to other homeless). Then they started hopping our back fence at night and trying to break into our shed. So finally we had to call the cops and get them moved.

I never said it wasn't a shitty system. Just that 900 bucks over the course of 5 years is not an unfathomably amount of money to pay for something. I've spent more than 900 on a single car repair several times in my life. Unless they have been living in abject poverty I just don't see how they couldn't have paid it off by now. Median American income for a household is 80k. Yeah they aren't living in luxury but they can afford the occasional expense.

If you can make actionable change by all means spend that energy. But letting something you cannot do anything about ruin your daily life is just stupid.

You cant change what the Trump administration is going to do by crying about it on the Internet. You CAN choose how you want to spend that energy every day though. Spend it on the little things that make your life and others better. Put it towards charitable work or combatting things going wrong locally. Don't just wallow in sadness on the Internet daily.

They are an American. It's not like 900 dollars is some insurmountable of money to pay off in 5 years. 180 bucks a year. 15 bucks a month.

That's literally a Spotify subscription.

My extended family is German and British. I am well aware how the gypsies are thought of by many over there.

I have lost track of how many times I have brought up gypsies when they are taking about how racist Americans are and then suddenly "it's different". They literally don't even look at it the same way. That's some wild shit.

The prison industrial complex and traditional slavery are two completely different beasts. I am not trying to take away from the very current and real problem with our country and its prison system, but this conversation is more talking about the good old-fashioned type of slavery that we abolished in 1865.

We ended our slavery (aside from the prison industrial complex, but that's kinda a different animal to "traditional" slavery) over 100 years ago. There are still many places in the world with slavery today that people seem less interested in talking about than our historical slavery.

I'm not trying to downplay our history but we can't exactly change the past. But we can put eyes on the current slavery going on but we often don't because people are still focusing on our old slavery. There's a real "America bad" boner on the Internet and it's always a little funny to me. Like yeah we are far from perfect, but it's a little weird to be shitting on us for something we ultimately stopped doing while other places are still actively doing it.

It is always funny when other places shit on America for our history of slavery. Like Koreans for example. They had the longest unbroken chain of slavery of any modern society and yet you'll still have some of them trying to say Americans are the worst because of our history of slavery.

It's like... All places in the world had (or still have) slavery going on. Why does the Internet seem to think we were the worst offenders???