Let's help the homeless by sending them on Caribbean vacations

I stepped out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air. We’re in the second day of a fierce blizzard. My thoughts turned to the plight of the homeless, or if you prefer, those unhoused, housing deficient, or living in a flimsy tent in a storm like this. The unhoused keep a lot of people busy. Cops. Social workers. Paramedics. City employees who clean up after them. And don’t forget all the academics interogating the manifold intersections of race, class, and gender that can be studied in your typical homeless encampment. On any given day there are dozens of such studies underway, and every research project got grant money from somewhere. Obviously, there’s a lot of investment in the unhoused. Too bad none of it goes into building housing! I came back inside and snuggled up with Bruno in front of the fire. I did a little research of my own. Did you know you can get an all-in caribbean holiday for under a thousand bucks? Our town has several dozen hard-core unhoused. If you add up all those expenses above, I’m guessing those folks eat up half a million of the town budget, easy. So here’s the plan. We round up that hard-core crowd, preferably during a blizzard, and hand them their tickets to a warm caribbean resort! And wtf does a weeklong holiday have to do with alleviating homelessness, you ask? Think it through. You sent them south in the dead of winter. One week is long enough for them to realize they’re in a place where living year-round in a tent is not only feasible and sustainable, it’s considered a middle-class lifestyle. They ain’t never coming back!