We’d all jump the bus to Santa Monica for another day of hanging out and asking for spare change. Couple of the kids would head over to a janky motel in Hollywood to get high and “earn” some money. I actually went with a few of them one day just to have the opportunity to see how they lived their lives. VERY eye-opening. Far cry from the “glitz and glamour”.

I gained a new respect for the trials and tribulations of living a homeless life. But I did learn one very important thing . . . each one of those kids had at least one phenomenal talent. Issue is, they just didn’t know how to use that talent in a business world. i.e. – turn that talent into a revenue stream. I’ve yet to meet anyone living on the streets that didn’t have at least one talent.

We do the homeless no justice by “giving” them the means to stay on the street. What we NEED to be giving them is an opportunity. The easier people made it for those kids, the more they stayed the same. There was no need to change if they could just survive taking the easy way out. Am I saying that living on the street is the “easy” way? Not a chance in hell. Nothing about it is easy. But try waking up at 6am every morning, fighting traffic for an hour, sitting in the same cubicle everyday of your life, only to return to the traffic in the afternoon, and repeat the whole process day-after-day. Nothing easy about that, either.

I do agree with you that we shouldn’t just ignore them. But we also, as a collective society, need to challenge them. Not just give them money, t-shirts, food, etc… Each one of those kids, at some point in their life, was presented with an opportunity to better their situation. Each one of them turned it down. Why? Because we make it too easy for them not to change. Proof of that was the near $20/hour some of these kids could make doing absolutely nothing but politely engaging passerby’s, smoking cigarettes in the sun, skateboarding around town, and cooling off with a swim in the ocean and a cold beer. Sounds like a fine life to me.