'Don't Feed The Bums'

Many of you are familiar with our national park system, and the many signs always posted in Yellowstone, Yosemite and Grand Teton national parks “Do not feed the bears.” What happens when tourists hand out to mooching bears handfuls of goodies in their picnic baskets? You get more and more mooching bears. Bears are not stupid, and neither are professional bums, for the most part. And when I say 'professional bums,' you know who I mean; the scuzzy moochers who beg for money on every major metropolitan street corner as a way of life. Both of these populations - bears and bums - exhibit predictable behaviors: give them freebies, and the word spreads that freebies are afoot. Pretty soon, the place is crawling with moochers - both bums and bears. Speaking of begging, this phenomenon begs the question: just how do we as a nation go about dealing with our ‘professional bum infestation' in the United States these days? What should we do with them? Scoop them up and hose them off? Put them to work…? How about we just stop as a nation supporting the ‘bumly’ way of life? Like all living creatures, bears will choose the easiest way to survive, and not waste any unnecessary energy in inefficient ways. Scrounging for low caloric foods such as nuts, berries and grubs is highly inefficient when they have access to an alternative unending stream of tourists who toss them fat and sugar laden high caloric yummies such as turkey drumsticks, slices of cherry pie and Hostess Twinkies. With such feasts laid out in the parking lot for the taking, only the dumbest of bears are still out foraging for berries and grubs. The bears with any brains whatsoever are hanging out in parking lots and other places where tourists feed them like kings. When tourists feed bears at our national parks, these bears no longer forage for natural sources of food, but rather congregate in great numbers near their human benefactors, where they become at best a nuisance, or at worst dangerous. So it is with bums, and there is no perceptible difference between the behaviors of these two species of mammals. Like any other mammal, they will flourish in environments where the pickings are easy. And our professional bums are doing just that. They typically hang out where they are most visible, likely in urban settings, and beg for money from passers by. They are sure to make themselves look as pathetic as possible, and have their sad sack, down on their luck stories polished to a highly toned presentation. What happened to all of those bears that were congregating in the parking lots of our national parks? Once the park service started cracking down on bear feeding by clueless tourists, did we see bears dropping dead by the hundreds of starvation, clogging the parking lots with their dead corpses? Did the park service personnel have to stack up dead bear bodies like cord wood? Of course not. These bears, once the food supply dried up, simply moved on in search of better and more reliable fare. Governor Tommy Thompson (R-WI) started several programs such as these in Wisconsin several years ago, and once they were originally proposed, liberal bleeding heart opponents wailed and gnashed their teeth at the cruelty of such draconian measures, predicting that the homeless and forlorn would die in the streets in great numbers. Remember that prediction? They said that if these mean spirited measures were enacted, the loss of lives and mass starvation would be shocking.

What happened?

Bums no longer got hand outs from the state, but were required to start working instead. The bums in Wisconsin just started working, or moved out of state to where the pickin’s were easier. Governor Thompson just “stopped feeding the bums.” And we never saw any bum bodies stacked up like cord wood in alley ways, as they dropped dead from hunger. As usual, the liberal pinkos that predicted doom and gloom, death and woe for their homeless constituents were dead wrong. 'Don't Feed The Bums.' It’s as simple as that. We need more welfare to work programs, and a bit more ‘tough love’ with these moochers. When populations (bear or otherwise) are forced to mend their ways, they do so every time. But how do we change the climate here in the U.S. that has become used to feeding and tolerating “the homeless,” the “unsheltered” and those “displaced populations?” Like all liberal programs and ideologies, they were not embedded into our national consciousness over night. They were purposely and insidiously fed to us in bits and bites, incrementally increasing our tolerance of the bums in our midst to their current unacceptable levels over years and decades. We will just have to start to reverse the trend with public service announcements such as “Please Do Not Feed The Homeless.” Then in time work on placing more derision on these moochers among us as time progresses. We have to make the ‘bumly’ way of life an embarrassment like it used to be in the good ol’ days. Sure, there will always be bums, but just not so many of them. Our goal is to attach some shame to begging and mooching, rather than tolerate these moocher’s bumly way of life as an acceptable profession.

Once begging for a living no longer works, these bums will move on to other more productive behaviors, just like the bears did.

So just remember, 'don't feed the bums.'