Lessons From Kansas - Homelessness
Kansas is well-known for its history of wacky politics. Its present is pretty wacky as well. When I feel like defending my former home state, I'm fairly quick to offer up Lawrence as a bastion of liberalism within a great sea of conservatism. My favorite magazine The Nation also featured Lawrence as a prominent blue spot among the red states.
Alas, Lawrence also happens to be on the radar of the National Coalition of the Homeless, which ranked the town #2 on its list of "meanest cities."
New York, which spent the majority of the Guiliani years drowning the homeless in the East River, comes in at #14. How fucking mean must Lawrence be?
I see two Lessons From Kansas here:
1) Liberals can be jerks, too.
2) If you choose homelessness, avoid Lawrence.
posted by Dan G @ 5:10 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
But the NYC homeless don't get to see such spectacular skies! (Or much of any sky, for that matter...)
First you destroy McHale's, then you block the sky. DAMN YOU, TALL BUILDINGS!
A news report on Kansas Public Radio (out of Lawrence) had a spokesperson for the city (or was he the mayor?) saying that the only reason Lawrence made the list at all was because of recent ordinances against panhandling and loitering, which are activities that ANYONE could engage in - not just the homeless.
I find this kind of weasling abhorrent and along the same lines of "putting my dick in someone else's mouth isn't sexual" and "stuffing a man inside a sleeping bag, tying it off with an electrical cord, sitting on his chest and covering his mouth isn't torture, it's interrogation." My friend, Newspeak has taken over our political discourse.
Yeah, like most college towns, what makes Lawrence appear so liberal and free-thinking is simply that they usually manage to hide their nasty underbelly better than bigger cities can.
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