SOME IN TEXAS WANT TO SECEDE FROM THE UNION. MAYBE WE SHOULD LET THEM?

…There are over 29,000 homeless vets in Texas

 

The Houston City Council has a different way of “cleaning up their streets”.

 

We all know that the people from the Great State of Texas are a little different from the rest of us.

 

I know this personally as my late father-in-law was originally from Texas.  He finally got himself to Southern California and got his thinking straightened out, but there are still relatives out there from that big, desert-like location.

 

I recall when we visited there years ago, we learned that some Texans have very large inferiority complexes.  During that visit, all we heard was that “everything in Texas is bigger, better, or they are in first place more than any other state’s is at anything”. 

 

If it’s not their state monument that’s taller than the Washington monument, or having the widest river or the most oil wells or whatever, Texas has the “biggest and best of everything”.  Even their tornados, floods, hurricanes or droughts are bigger and worse than those that occur in other states.

 

Well, now that big state has gone one step further.

 

In Houston, the City Council has decided that they want to have all their homeless people leave Houston and move on to other surrounding cities or even other states.

 

Yes, this land of six-guns, cattle rustling, ten-gallon hats and Enron has passed a new law that make it illegal to feed the homeless within the city without the permission of the property owners.  Today, you will receive a $500 fine for handing a sandwich to a homeless person in a City Park, or serving a bowl of soup out of any rented storefront.  And this is not the only law against their homeless.

 

Some charitable organizations that regularly provided meals for the homeless were financially unable to risk receiving these new city fines.  They have since relocated outside the city limits.

 

This is no joke as a Houston police officer recently ticketed a homeless man for another local anti-homeless law, that of fishing a donut from a trash bin in a public park.

 

Last week, James Kelly, a nine-year US Navy veteran was issued a citation for violating a Houston law on the books since 1942, and amended as recently as 2002.  This law “makes it illegal to remove any contents of any bin, bag or other container that has been placed for collection of garbage, trash or recyclable materials”.

 

Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, sheepishly stated, “I know on the face of it, it sounds very cruel.”    Ya think?

 

But this president added, “Most police officers would not cite someone for simply taking food from a dumpster.”

 

Well sorry Mr. Hunt, but that’s exactly what happened.  And a copy of the citation is available on the internet for all to see for themselves.  (Thousands of people have viewed the citation.)

 

Since the news broke of Kelly’s encounter with the law, there has been an outpouring of concern from less heartless Houstonians.

 

Randall Kallinen, a Houston attorney who’s fought against the “anti-feeding” ordinance, has taken on Mr. Kelly’s case.  Kallinen acknowledges that Kelly got his ticket based on the old garbage law not the feeding ordinance, but the lawyer says the two laws overlap in that both seek to achieve their one single goal.  That goal is to force Houston’s homeless out of Houston and into neighboring municipalities.

 

"The city of Houston has shown over many years, a hostile environment toward the homeless," said Kallinen, who plans to represent Mr. Kelly in court for free next month.

 

So, a major city in Texas is now the first to get rid of their homeless by citing them for trying to feed themselves from a dumpster.  But they also won’t allow those locals that want to help the homeless to do it legally within the City Limits.

 

As I said, they think a little differently in that big state of Texas.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2015