The following editorial, "Why We Shouldn’t Feed the Homeless," by C. Montgomery Hall appears in the Community Voice column of Vancouver Monthly magazine.
Organizations like Mission Services, the Salvation Army, Women’s Community House, and even the United Way act as enablers of homeless people. The fact that these institutions run shelters and social programs actually increases the problem.
Some of us may even have known of one case where a person faked a psychiatric problem just to get some time away from work and live in an institution for a month. He probably got free room and board at the expense of government funds.
Street life is not so bad in any case. Perhaps folks have also heard of people making hundreds of thousands of dollars pan-handling from sympathetic strangers and then taking a tax-free trip to Florida in the winter!
People who send charitable donations to finance food banks, student share shops, and local church hot-breakfast programs are like smelt that end up en masse in fishermen’s nets! These kind souls are being trapped by their own good intentions. Most people on welfare are cheating the system, and those who finance these dead-beats are simply encouraging abuse of tax-payers dollars that could be used to fix roads or preserve the environment for future generations of cottage owners.
If a person were to lose all financial support systems, have psychiatric problems or suffer from abuse as a teen, he or she would not necessarily hit the streets—the "victim" of such abuse could take up residence in one of the convenient shelters run by tax-payers dollars and the donations of fools. Why should people worry when these rescue operations can look after them?
We should all go with the majority on this issue, since charitable donations to organizations that feed the homeless are noticeably down in recent years: people are getting wise when it comes to saving their own money and not wasting it on those who do not deserve our sympathy or our care.
What is your general stance towards the author of the prompt’s argument? For example, for or against what Hall is arguing (quick thesis)?
Write three topic sentences, using subjective language to convey a controlling idea, and identifying a different subtopic that you might create your 3 body paragraphs from to support your stance above in question Next, highlight and underline each of the two parts controlling idea and topic for each of your topic sentences below.
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Write four supporting sentences, using a different kind of evidence that we discussed in class to support one of the three topic sentences from question #2 (make sure to highlight the topic sentence that you will support here in question 3). Next, identify what kind of evidence you are using for each (fact, stat, quote, etc.)
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