I learned in an editorial department meeting this week that there is a move to decommission recreational vehicles (RV) used by homeless people. The idea is to get the people out of the RVs into regular housing and then make sure that no one else can use the RV. I don’t want to go into this in more detail, but I have some thoughts on the overall idea.
So, basically, homeless people are once again going to be treated as a class apart from the rest of us citizens. A separate species even. Like they were conceived homeless. This yanks my chain.
If anyone else moves out of an RV into an apartment, they still own their RV and can sell it or keep it if they can find a place to park it. But if authorities decide the occupant of the RV was a member of the homeless class, the RV is seized and mothballed.
I say let’s go all the way. If homeless people are going to get this treatment, why don’t we go all out and seize all RVs? Make RVs illegal altogether. If homeless people don’t get to have RVs: Nobody should. Homeless people aren’t a species apart from the rest of us. Whatever you do to them, do to everyone, or lay off.
Say your retired aunt and uncle, Lolly and Oli, are tooling around the countryside in an RV. We should make them get into fixed-place conventional housing, seize their RV and destroy it so no other shameless retired couple can use it to behave so unacceptably. Zigeuneren, heraus! (Romani, out of here!)
The idea of banning vehicles is getting traction lately as some legislators want to ban gas-powered vehicles. This calls to mind something I’ve brought up before, but it was a while ago and no one did anything about it, so here we go again.
Soundproof cars are an abomination.
I will explain why. Because of soundproof cars, emergency vehicles, fire, police and ambulances are forced to increase the volume of their sirens. The problem is that there are pedestrians out there who get caught in the crossfire in the sound wars. We are getting our eardrums destroyed.
So I have a proposal in line with the alarms about RVs and gas-powered cars.
No, I am not going so far as to say laws should be passed to eliminate all soundproof cars.
My proposal would be to allow people to continue to drive their soundproof cars, but only if they have devices installed in them that can accept incoming signals that would be sent out by emergency vehicles when their sirens are on. The devices would be able to correlate the emergency vehicle’s GPS with that of the passenger car, sound an alarm and display where on a map the emergency vehicle is in relation to the car.
See, I can be charitable. I can play nice. It would be a great deal for hearing-impaired drivers. The alarm could be customized to flash lights. Say a pedestrian had their ears blown out in the past by sirens. They could have a cell phone app that could accept the incoming signals from the emergency vehicles, set the phone vibrating and show where the vehicle is on a Google map.
Of course some car owners aren’t going to want to go to the trouble of getting such devices for their plush, soundproof chariots. I get that. Government regulations, damn liberals, it’s against our rights, blah, blah. In that case, my proposal says we kick them out of their cars and get rid of the abominable cars. No more nice. Their rights end when they cause my hearing to be destroyed.
Speaking of homelessness and things I’ve said before but I’ll keep on saying until I think enough people have heard me: If you are a homeless person sleeping outside and you get spotted by a member of a point-in-time count team, you are an idiot.
It’s stupid to sleep where people can find you. Study up. Learn how military snipers stay hidden. You can read about it online. You don’t have to go to libraries anymore. This is not your grandpa’s information age. All grandpa had was the Whole Earth Catalog. You’ve got the internet now. Use it.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the July 19-25, 2023 issue.