June 30, 2004
Beat It

Beat it!  Amscray!  Get outta here.  A local District Attorney candidate is advocating the DA’s office solve Grand Junction’s homeless panhandlers problem by awarding the denizens of the intersections a one-way ticket to Arizona. 

My guess is the District Attorney hopeful wanted to accomplish two goals with his itinerant removal program.  First, not having a huge campaign war chest, here was an issue guaranteeing free ink in the local broadsheet.  (It worked).  Second he wanted to establish himself as a hard liner.  If memory serves me correctly no Mesa County District Attorney has been elected on the “Caring and Compassion” platform.  The local electorate might look for those qualities in a candidate for the Sisters of Mercy but they’re not perceived as ideal qualities in a District Attorney 

But were homeless deportation to Arizona a real possibility it could lead to a “quid pro quo” (I love lawyer talk) problem with folks in the land of Sun Devils and Wildcats.  First off, maybe, just maybe, Arizona doesn’t want street corner beggars any more than we do.  So to get even, officials in Tucson, or Phoenix, or both, might just decide turnabout is fair play and clear their streets of homeless by awarding each and every Arizona indigent a free bus trip to Western Colorado.  Folks that would compare to be the Pea Green Volunteer Fire Department playing football against the Bronco’s.  It’s not a fair fight.  We would be out numbered, out weighed and out beggared. 

Plus sending the homeless to Arizona in the summer heat might pose as punishment but sending the same folks South in winter might be perceived as a reward.  Come November snowbirds from all over our valley will be standing on street corners, sign in hand, hoping to be classified as homeless and rewarded with a free winter trip to Sun City alleviating the worry about the two bucks a gallon necessary for driving to the Valley of the Sun. 

Obviously locals see a need alternative sentencing to discourage the search for a free handout here in Happy Valley.  Yours truly to the rescue.  Under the Maynard “panhandlers cessation” plan first time offenders would be required to watch a complete nine inning Rockies game on TV.  No bathroom breaks, no liquid refreshments, no Cheeto’s, nothing but sitting and staring at the Rockies as they endlessly change pitchers while their opponents circle the bases with sickening regularity.  

Any individual caught mooching in public a second time would face a more severe punishment.  This would involve transgressors spending three straight days of forced listening to NPR’s endless beg-a-thon. If there’s anything more aggravating in the history of radio I’ve yet to hear it.   

For third time offenders comes the ultimate punishment.  True this is a humiliation so venal it would violate the rules of the Geneva Convention but dammit these people have been punished twice and still insist on a free handout from John Q. Public.  Therefore, third time miscreants will be required to sit through an entire County Commissioners land use hearing.  I know it’s punishment cruel beyond imagination but such a sentence puts real teeth in the “If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime” scenario. 

Still homeless deportation remains the favorite “over coffee” conversation of late.  It’s a subject so dear to the hearts of locals it threatens to replace Hillary and the city logo as the topic du jour among coffee klatch’s valley-wide.  The odds-on favorite deportation sites include Fargo in January, Boulder anytime, the feeling being the homeless would blend right in, since Boulderites would assume from their appearance and demeanor the indigents getting off the bus were grad students returning to campus, and any of the red states, those dominions on the outer edges of our country that continually vote Democratic.   

I, of course, have my own destination in mind for the “Take A Trip Away From Grand Junction” award.  But that location must remain nameless due to a tacit agreement with the Daily Sentinel’s editor and publisher whereas Maynard will only write one Pueblo column every fifty years.