Here’s Your Hat. Where’s Your Hurry?

Have you ever thought about where you’d like to live if you were homeless? Obviously there are several factors to consider: sense of community, generosity of strangers, cleanliness of underpasses, etc. But, perhaps the most important consideration is climate.

I oftentimes find myself wondering how the homeless in the colder climates – say, Wisconsin – survive. Don’t get me wrong, I love Wisconsin with a capital L, but I mostly visit in the summer, when it’s 70 degrees and sunny – or as I like to call it, paradise.  I can’t imagine being there in the winter, which, let’s be honest, can last well into April. Heck, I was there in October – living in a house, not under a bridge – and I was still cold.

And it appears that I’m not alone in the assertion that warmer is better when it comes to living outside. It seems that the desire for a moderate climate has led quite a few house-challenged folks to, where else, Hawaii. (How you can afford airfare to Hawaii when you can’t afford shoes is a mystery to me, but perhaps they’re all a homegrown crop.)

Anyway, Hawaii sounds like a pretty good choice to me.  Sleep on the soft, white sand. Bathe in the crystal clear Pacific. Not a bad deal at all. 

   You could certainly have a worse view out your front door.    

Sure, it gets hot, but you have a plethora of palm trees to keep you shaded from the sun and it never gets too terribly cold. It’s a tropical paradise, as they say (if your idea of paradise includes thousands of pushy, sweaty tourists and overpriced everything).

Apparently, however, the state of Hawaii is no longer interested in housing – or, more importantly, funding – these beach-dwelling folks. In fact, in an effort to clean up its islands, the state is planning to start offering its homeless a one-way ticket back to the mainland, provided of course that they can prove that there’s someone on the other end to take them in.

My question is, how are they planning to monitor this? Record who comes and goes? Make sure that the people in question really qualify for the program? For instance, how does one prove that he or she is homeless? You can’t exactly bring in a driver’s license or cable bill with no address on it.

Yes, it seems to me that it would be pretty easy to abuse this program, swindling a free trip to the mainland out of the fine folks of the Aloha State.  

But I can’t worry about that now. I’m off to book a one-way ticket to the Islands. Anyone want to come with?