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Wow, that sounds like a recipe for disaster in traffic; it may even be the kind of thing that could get you hooked up with a charge of negligent homicide.

Some thoughts are better left unsaid, let alone acted upon.

New York does just this, actually. Not necessarily street sweeping, but general urban cleanup. There's a non-profit organization that coordinates it -- they were always asking me for donations, ironically enough.

Here they are: The Doe Fund

Well, there you go. General urban cleanup. So long as they get snappy uniforms and hi-vis vests.

Paolino is chair of the Downtown Improvement District. He has proposed putting together a consortium of the various homeless agencies (Crossroads, etc.) to come up with a plan to address our homeless issue downtown. In fact he also noted how in New Bedford the businesses downtown gave homeless people jobs so he is already thinking along the same lines.

If members of our businesses downtown chip in a little to fund a CLeanup And Work plan to keep the downtown district clean maybe we can get some of the homeless to be part of the solution rather than a problem. Easier said than done, of course, but nothing worth doing is easy.

^^^ He (Paolino) should, he owns most of the buildings downtown Prov. J&W should pitch in too, they own most of the rest of them.

I give something to panhandlers in my own town (I live in SE Fl and plan to retire home to New England). If I don't "know" the panhandler b/c I am in a new place, and I am in my car, I am more cautious, because one hopped into my car once. He hopped out again when I scolded him. (Experienced teachers can give anyone the side-eye, it's better than pepper spray.)

There but for the grace of God go I.

I am from the Vietnam generation and the stories all of us who know Vietnam veterans cast on the tender mercies of the VA, would tell volumes though no one wants to hear them

Anyhow, a true story (much more recent) from Philadelphia. A friend gave a panhandler a dime a day on his way to the T stop where he went to work. One day, he was short on change and gave a nickel, which was all the change he had. Indignantly, the person said, "Hey, where's my dime?" I wonder if some of the panhandling is actually trying to have some kind of visibility in the community. It's almost impossible for a self-respecting human being not in a horrible culture, not to want to be "seen" and remembered by the people around him/her.

So many of my generation, so hopeful in the 1960s, went down (in part because of the draft and in part because of the delayed exit from Vietnam but then also in the bad economics of the later 1970s). Though I am a college teacher of adults now and see stresses from the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan that are similar.

Lip service is one thing and it helps not at all. I don't myself see flags as shorthand for "patriot." Human services are helpful. If they are not working, then we have panhandlers in our cities, because, in my view, the general public is at least a little bit nicer than the veteran's and the health-care bureaucracy.

^While veterans are some of the people panhandling, it doesn't seem they are the majority.

I'm curious why you give money directly to panhandlers rather than to a social service agency.