Happy Holidays, You're a Hero, Thanks, Now Get Out of Here.

So apparently, being a bona fide hero in Arizona means you're spared the indignity of deportation proceedings when they cart your rear end back to Mexico. A boy and his mother (daddy had passed away, I believe) were camping in southern Arizona over Thanksgiving, when the van they were in went off the side of a cliff. Mom was trapped, the boy survived:

The boy, Christopher Buztheitner, was found on Thanksgiving evening wandering in a remote canyon a few miles north of the Mexican border by an immigrant trying to walk into the U.S. The boy led the man back to his mother's crashed van, Estrada said.

The migrant was identified as Jesus Manuel Cordova, 26, of Magdalena de Kino in the northern Mexican state of Sonora.

So Jesus finds this kid, wandering in the wilderness, builds him a fire, comforts him, and flags down some hunters. Remember, this whole time Jesus is breaking the law by being in the United States, and likely knows that he is endangering himself to help this child. Apparently he went peacefully, too:

About 8 a.m. Friday, Cordova flagged down a group of hunters and they called for help. Cordova surrendered to Border Patrol agents and agreed to be returned to Mexico without going through formal deportation proceedings.

Law enforcement even seemed to recognize that this was a good human being:

[Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony] Estrada said earlier that Cordova's actions likely saved the boy and he risked being caught to do what was right. He said it should serve as a reminder that most undocumented migrants are good people.

"They respond where there's a need," Estrada said. "We're very grateful that he was there."

Industrious, compassionate, responsive, helpful, people named Jesus are certainly not the type of people we want entering this country, right?

Flagstaff Shows its Compassion

So, some people in Flag have been able to push pretty hard for the opening of a new homeless shelter. This makes me feel very good about the town I live in. However, this response from locals doesn't.

Certain people, and I'm not pointing my finger at any particular person, party, or political mindset, are of the opinion that homelessness is the fault of the homeless person, and that anyone who doesn't have a place to sleep at night must have made bad choices, or have made the choice to live off the hard work of others. There are volumes filled on the debate about the causes of homelessness, and I don't intend to get into that debate here. I care about the causes of homelessness, because understanding the cause is important if you want to solve the problem. When the question is whether or not we should help homeless people, though, I really don't give a cup full of piss who you put the blame on. Homelessness is everyone's problem, it's everyone's responsibility.

Desperate people do desperate things. It doesn't matter why a person is desperate, whether they got laid off from work and can't afford a place to live, or they're mentally ill and are off their meds, or they're addicted to drugs, or they've got no work ethic, or they're one of the estimated 195,000 Veterans who is homeless on any given night. Desperate is desperate, and if you don't have a home, that's desperate. Drinking your entire income away is an act of desperation. Crime, begging, and prostitution are acts of desperation. They aren't particularly productive acts, and they aren't acts that anyone should look up to, or feel good about. What matters, though, is that they are things people will do if they are living on the street.

Building a new homeless shelter keeps people off of the street. It doesn't solve all of their problems, and it might not stop them from hassling you for change, or stealing your purse, or getting drunk and passing out in a puddle of their own urine in your front yard. Then again, it might. Who knows? It's certainly got a better chance of reducing crime than sticking with the status quo. What a new shelter will do is keep them from dying in the below freezing temperatures that are already upon us. Or getting ill from exposure and sent to the hospital. If you're the kind of person who thinks that they're just getting what they deserve, remember this: when a person without money dies or goes to the hospital, it's the taxpayers who pay the bill. I'm not the type who gets angry about paying taxes, but if I am given the choice between paying taxes to save someone's life, or paying taxes to cover the cost of their death... I'd rather they live.

The other thing that building the homeless shelter will do is give some people a chance. Yes, some people don't believe that any homeless person will take the chances offered at the shelter to get their lives back on track. Believe it or not, some of them will. If even one person will turn their life around, it's better than what we have now.

Furthermore, I can tell you some things that building a new homeless shelter will not do. It won't spontaneously cause more people to choose to be homeless, or to migrate to Flagstaff from somewhere else. It won't make them more likely to commit crimes or drink or do drugs. If anything, it will make them slightly less likely to do those things because it will make them slightly less desperate. Even if it doesn't reduce the crime rate, however, the worst case scenario is that some people's lives will be improved because they will have a place to spend the night. A place that isn't your front lawn.

I'm the kind of person who takes pity on those whose lives are not as good as mine. I don't care how you got into the fix you're in. If you don't have shelter, or don't know where your next meal is coming from, I feel sorry for you, and I want to help. I'm not addressing the people who think like me, though. They don't need convincing. I'm addressing everyone who has felt threatened or disgusted by homeless people. I'm even addressing everyone who has been a victim of a crime committed by a homeless man or woman. Placing blame doesn't solve anything. Failing to build a shelter will just keep things the way they are. Opening a new shelter won't solve everything, but it can help some. It certainly can't hurt.

Green Bandit Out.

P.S. -- Commenting still disabled. If you want to comment, I'll make an entry on my LiveJournal and you can post there.

Temporarily suspended comments

Okay, so apparently the new cool thing to do for spammers is to find a blogger account and post lots and lost of spam comments, which then show up in my inbox. This is inconvenient for me, especially because the occasional comment from the three people on the planet who read this blog is the only thing that reassures me that there aren't zero people on the planet reading this blog. For now, however, comments are suspended, until I can find the time to learn how to filter out the spam.

Thanks for your patience,

The Management

Green Bandit Out.