Dear Homeless people of Honolulu and possibly the rest of America,
To call myself disappointed and irritated by all of you is an understatement. You see, I used to not mind that you sleep on the sidewalks outside of my building, or that you would ask if the take home bag I was carrying contained leftovers. Heck, we even went downstairs to give you people a bag of apples once. True, apples aren’t drugs and unless you found some way to turn it into a crack pipe or somehow trade them for meth, they probably did little good for you, as did the spare change I have given you on occasion. I am writing this letter to inform you today that I will tolerate your begging and asking of my leftovers no longer.
This sudden change of heart comes since one of you stole my bicycle from my workplace. You may not know what that is, but it is the place that I reluctantly go to five or six days a week for eight or nine hours a day to get yelled at and bossed around in exchange for money in the form of a bi-weekly paycheck (a voucher from my employer which can be exchanged for cash at most banks and some supermarkets [we’ll have to touch on direct deposit later]). I was not the least bit amused that when I was finally able to get home that I could not, because my bike had been stolen. By one of you. Now, I have no problem with you asking people for things they may not want anymore, but I clearly still wanted my bicycle. You may not realize that since there was no sign indicating this on the bike (that you probably wouldn’t have been able to read anyways), but I thought that the lock that was on it was indication enough that I was not, in fact, offering you to take my bike. I don’t even know where you might have gotten bolt cutters from, but maybe you were able to pick the lock with disease-infested hypodermic needles you may have had with you at the time, but I don’t appreciate it either way.
This little “misunderstanding” got me thinking about all of you “sidewalk sleepers” and how much I really don’t like any of you at all. You see, you are all just lazy, smelly, sewer-sucking, societal eyesores – a type of malignant culture cancer, that is just growing faster and dirtier until one day it will overtake the body which is the city, forcing the body to die while you will remain, unaided, to die. So to you, the crack-sniffing, heroine shooting, ice smoking, buck-begging, cardboard mattress-sleeping, makeshift shack out of umbrellas-living, street-pissing, foul-smelling, trash-eating, people-harassing, tax dollar-draining, gutter-polluting, item-stealing, flea-scratching, one-shoe wearing, educationless, tactless, penniless, showerless, disease ridden, rotten-toothed, jibberish-speaking bumbag vagabonds, I say this: GIVE ME MY DAMN BIKE BACK!
Honestly, you sleep on our streets (I say “our” not including you, since you don’t pay taxes), bring filth into the sight of anyone who passes, doing your drugs, defecating on our lawns, pissing on our buildings, littering our sidewalks, making people uncomfortable and often afraid to walk down the streets at night, and stealing our things, and then have the gall to EXPECT us to give you our food and money? I have friends whom you’ve asked for a drink from their soda, or a bite of their cheeseburger even! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Really. Get a job – true, it is no fun to work, but most of us choose to because the alternative is the pathetic lifestyle that you people live.
I understand that in not all of your cases it is a choice to live that way, and not all of you are bad people, but I say you should use those who are bad people as motivation to rise up and separate yourselves from these leeches. Be like the rest of us and try your hardest to claw your way to the top; it isn’t easy, but at least you can say you’re trying, unlike your fellow vile vagabonds. I also realize that this letter won’t be seen by any of you homeless people unless somebody stumbles across this site, prints it out, and reads it to one of you. I hope you are as offended to hear all of this as I was to see my bicycle gone on Saturday afternoon. Hopefully somebody will be more kind than I and have more patience than I to read this to you, so you can see just how much of a stain on our sidewalks and parks you really are. It must hurt to know that if you all were gone tomorrow, nobody would feel remorse – in fact, I’m quite sure they’d feel just the opposite.
So please, stop being homeless. If that means overdosing on your drugs to the point of death, please just find a quiet, out of the way place to do it where you can decay without disturbing us. If that means actually saving up what you have and what people give you so you can get a shave and a haircut to go get a job, by all means, do it. Just stay out of my way until you become a productive member of society, because until that point I will no longer help you. At all. So stop asking, and tell your friends to leave me alone, get out of my way when I walk by, do your drugs somewhere else, and for Christ’s sake, STOP STEALING MY THINGS!
Love,
Steve.
Slapbacks