Relocate the homeless

I wondered how many tickets from the decreasingly beautiful Lilac City to the appropriately self-described weird Rose City that $1.8 million would buy (re: “City Council approves new shelter contract,” July 2). That amount is just the most recent City Council outlay to shelter vagrants at a time when employers can’t find enough workers. The number of train or bus tickets from Spokane to Portland that would buy is 36,000, or 45,000 to Seattle, if we relocate them in-state.

Yet the total homeless number in Spokane is only about 1,250. Couldn’t the city at least relocate chronic street-corner panhandlers? That is, of course, merely a rhetorical question these days. The stupid hippies of my generation have finally fulfilled their mandate to “Let your freak flag fly.” So we have cacophony without any standards of decency and accountability to one another.

Many people choose the easy downhill path to dependency when there are no longer expectations that one is primarily responsible for one’s own well-being in the freest country on Earth. When dignity, self-respect and good character are no longer ideals, society becomes undignified and disrespectful. That is what we have degenerated to unless the moral pendulum somehow swings back.

Paul Unger

Spokane