Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 13, 2015

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for Alice.

I suppose that the snow formed a camera around her mouth and nose for let her brathe

I’ve often wondered if there was a way to put a breathalyzer control on the comments.

Snow is an excellent insulator, so as far as that goes she should be all right. But if she’s an alcoholic that will put her in greater danger, because alcohol tends to dilate peripheral blood vessels. In the short term this makes you feel warmer, but in the long term it causes a rapid loss of body heat.

Unfortunately homelessness has always been a problem in this country. Its just that sometimes we choose to recognize it, and other times we willfully choose to ignore it.

And DC is only in sixth place in the number of homeless. The numbers have been slowly decreasing as of late. The number of homeless students shocks me. (https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2014-AHAR-Part1.pdf)

If you’ve not heard the story, search “Alfred Postell”

Around the White House is a “classy neighborhood”? Have you been there after dark? (Probably not, if you’re neither a criminal nor looking for one.)

We’re still stuck on blaming the homeless for their state, rather than doing something constructive to end it.

DC looks good in snow…from a distance.

That last panel is a kicker.

Sadly, when it comes to homelessness, nothing has changed at all.

This was the beginning of rampant homelessness. I remember one homeless person from my teens & twenties in the Detroit area — we called her Greektown Gertie, she chose to be homeless and everybody gave her food while she slept in the doorways of Greektown in downtown Detroit. Everybody knew about her because she was the only visible one around.

“politicians were advocating “a better life for the mentally ill” and closed Mental Health facilities. They said they would acclimate into a normal life. It has been a fail.!!”.In the early ‘80s, I worked in Luanda in The People’s Republic of Angola. People walked around naked or wearing clear plastic sheets and dug rotten food out of dumpsters, smiling all the way..I asked one of the locals what the story was.He explained that when Angola got its independence and became a Communist state, the director of the local insane asylum announced that since mental problems were caused by Capitalism and they had put that evil behind them, they would no longer be insane and he released all the inmates. The mal lucos, I think they were called, The Bad Crazies.It seems even becoming Communist does not cure mental disease.(My understanding was that the USSR didn’t have prisons, they had insane asylums because it was obvious anyone committing a criminal act under Communism was nuts.).He also said the former director committed suicide when he realized his solution hadn’t worked.

So, she’s on a bench outside of the capital and not one police officer stopped to see if she were alive or dead in the cold weather. Wow, really??!!

You’re right…but I think it was actually in the early 80s when they decided to close so many institutions and “mainstream” the mentally ill. Now they are either on the streets homeless or in jail.