i’m so enraged.
I don’t have a great deal of followers and probably not one of you will reblog this, but please, please, take your time and read.
I live in Hungary, which is, frankly, a rather fucked up place to live.
Authorities have been recently negotiating about the criminalization of homelessness in a certain district of our capital city, and to be honest, I did not follow whether it was made legal or not. However, I’ve just seen it on the evening news that now, if you’re a homeless person on the streets, you will be fined 150,000 HUF (that’s approx 660 US dollars accoring to my computer). Now may I ask a question, who the hell would think that a homeless person has this money? If they had enough money to pay this fine, would they still be homeless? Well, probably not. Apparently, when news reports were speaking about criminalizing homelessness - which could have meant that homeless people end up in prison for the sole reason of not having roof over their heads - I was thinking to myself, “Well, that sounds bad enough, but if they’re put in prison, at least they are not going to freeze during the winter.” Obviously, there are not enough shelters for the homeless so many people end up spending their days in underground tunnels or passages, which is a phenomenon that I have not yet managed to grow accustomed to (please note that I don’t live in the capital, where the general living standards are better than in some other parts of my country and also we have only about one ninth of Budapest’s population living here, so there aren’t as many homeless people), so, whenever I am in the capital, I can’t help shooting a pityful look at them. I am astonished how many people walk by homeless people day by day choosing to ignore them. Of course, this is a problem present nearly everywhere in the world, but the solution is definitely not deeming them criminals. Yes, they are very often stinky alcoholics, some of them are rude enough to shout curses at bypassers, but actually, I’ve met a few homeless people who were quite nice and often I’ve felt sad for not giving them some spare change (because I refuse to carry money with me pretty much… not very wise, I know).
Granted, if they chose to pay the fine, they could easily turn to stealing… where we have a case of crime more or less created by the government. Have you heard that story how a man in the US stole like 10 dollars from a bank and then voluntarily gave himself up so he was sent to jail for a few years, while some company illegally got thousands of dollars and all they had to do was to pay a fine? Well, I’m looking forward to when that happens here.
So, to finally come to a conclusion: I am not always very fond of homeless people, especially when they are rude, but for God’s sake, fining them for being in a situation that they probably cannot change is simply mindless.
Please, if you agree with me at least a little bit, take one moment to reblog or share this post. I have no idea if it could do any help at all, probably not much, but it’s still nice to let people know that in this corner of the world, some mindless people are expecting homeless people to pay a fine of a rather big amount of money just because they don’t have a place to live.
