Scary situation! That water doesn't look too user friendly. Glad you're OK.

Societies more relaxed attitude towards drugs has created more opportunity for addiction. Instead of arresting offenders we are providing them with free needles or ask them to go into rehab a dozen times at our expense. Pushers are fined or not even prosecuted. Rather than enforcing vagrancy statutes we close off sidewalks so tents can be erected and provide outhouses. Free meals at mostly taxpayer funded facilities are the norm in big cities. When Jimmy Carter released the mentally ill to fend for themselves on the street this is the result. It may sound heartless and impractical to return to the old ways but it should be obvious that this social experiment is a resounding failure.

Carl, not all homeless are mentally ill or on drugs and alcohol, but all of them I have dealt with are.

When I was an undergrad, I worked for a security company over Christmas break, that had me hunting down the homeless people who would sneak into Chem Ed Center in Cincinnati, the parking garage and the underground tunnels that connected it to the Central Trust Building. It was like a strange LARP D&D Game. The building was under construction and extremely porous. The homeless would sneak in to steal and to find a place to sleep and stay warm. It's an immense building, 32 stories tall, 553,659 square feet above ground, with an immense parking garage, with several levels more underground including tunnels that connect to many other buildings, the sewers and electrical line tunnels. I could not walk it all in an 8 hour shift. The elevator only went part way up at the time and the upper levels were still open, with no windows. There were no lights in most of the tunnels. I had to use a flashlight. Some of the tunnels were lined with limestone and were probably built in the 1800s. The homeless would build nests under stairs, in the tunnels and in weird little rooms off of the tunnels, out of any sort of soft, warm material they could find. Some of the rag piles were nearly 2 feet deep. Some of the homeless would stay buried in until I pulled them out. I would find between 3 and 20 homeless people a shift, sometimes the same ones a few times a night. As long as they were cooperative, I would let them keep their belongings, minus any tools or building supplies they had taken and just escort them out.

After I graduated, a friend and I started a security company. We had an account with some upscale, loft style apartments in Dayton, where we had huge problems with the homeless, stealing and harrasing the tenants.

Keith

But they can vote.

Around every election time, the democrats in Dayton would give out free food, clothing and other goods to the homeless for registering to vote and then give them more stuff to get on buses to be taken to the polls on election day. I drove by on election day one time and there was a big mob of homeless people being directed, by a couple of well dressed women, to board the buses, while several homeless men urinated on the door and wall, in full view.

Keith

Admittedly, my memory is foggy....But...i believe that was Reagan

jimmy carter's Mental Health Services Act let the mentally ill out of the asylums. Then President Ronald Reagan did not allow the funding to go through to treat the mentally ill that jimmy released.

Keith

Wait just a minute, it wasn't me.

It is sad, at least here we don’t have a lot of them I think some of this is because of our colder weather and lower population of Iowa.