The headline read Hungarian Law Criminalizing Homelessness! Some 30,000 to 35,000 men, women and children are pushed into living in the street in Hungary because of economic conditions and are now subject to criminal sanction. The law has all the earmarks of being inhuman, punitive, out of another era, belonging to an authoritarian regime. It seemed to create such a burden for the poor, be so unfair to those who had reached the end of their rope. And then I realized that in Los Angeles and/or some of its surrounding cities, the homeless can’t be in underpasses, sleep on park benches, be in the awnings of building, block driveways, sleep in beach parking lots. If they are they are cited and often arrested.
In Hungary, Los Angeles, or anywhere else where such laws are passed the real criminals may not be the homeless, but those who enact them.