Musical Chairs

The sight of homeless or emotionally disturbed people, sometimes flea-bitten, smelly and irascible, stretched out over multiple seats in a subway car may be aesthetically repellant, an unwanted curiosity for tourists and a tip-off to probably fare beating, but cops should not be rounding them up, chasing them away, ticketing them or hauling them off to court.

People who often are victims of their own star-crossed innocence should not be treated as criminals. When they are, the rule of law should be countermanded by the human heart.

Insulting our sensibilities should not be a prosecutable offense.

As usual, in the game of accountability, the MTA and NYPD are playing musical chairs, while the city government is deaf to the sounds and blind to the furniture. The NYPD says it's only following orders, the MTA defers to the NYPD and the city gives busted lip-service to the screwball pretexts of "transit safety and quality of life."

Despite all the inter-generational outreach programs trumpeted by publicity hounds in government, and regardless of all the profligate spending on doomed-to-fail remedies that are cyclically conceived by politicians for their 15 minutes of career promotional fame, there never was any hope, chance or desire for success.

No vagabond soul is so cognitively compromised as to prefer co-habitation in a city-run shelter to slumbering with rats between subway tunnels.

The routine, involuntary detention for psychiatric evaluation, currently limited by law to 72 hours, almost invariably results in release, being taken into custody again and then re-release. Patients are sedated and then tested on the catechism: "Will you harm yourself? Will you hurt anybody else?" 

They know the unwavering magic word to get sprung free, and they're back on the "E" train pronto.

The whole process is a nauseating, farcical continuum of administrative ass-covering. A mortal amusement ride.

Nothing is being done to help these people, and their plight will not correct itself.

Eventually, even beggars and derelicts need to lie down, and subway seats are not deluxe beds, but are better than none at all.  And profoundly depressed folks need toilets too. 

But because there are no public toilets, and they get tossed out on sight upon entering retail establishments, what are their choices? Irking passersby by public urination and soiling themselves in defiance of etiquette?

It's not complicated. Natural functions supersede MTA and NYPD sanctions.

"Tough love" is needed. Laws should be enacted to temporarily suspend certain civil rights for individuals whose judgmental and behavioral incapacities prevent them from attending to their own sustenance.

Coercive practices, properly conceived and borne out, can be more humane than the status quo.

There should be involuntary, non-punitive and untraditional therapy more akin to boot camp than the interminable, unproductive counseling that is the mainstay of the mental health industries and treatment establishments. These are the entrenched standard protocol, together with the excessive, high dosage and rarely tapered off prescriptions for psychotropic drugs that paralyze judgement and motivation, negate self-awareness and sap life energy.

Better for an authoritarian hand to pull these victims back from the precipice, than to honor their self-determination by letting them smash into the rocks below and later set up a memorial shrine for them.

Many homeless and emotionally disturbed people got that way, at least in part, because of opioid medications they were originally duly prescribed for pain from injury and illness.

Since 2000, more than a million people have died from drug overdoses in the United States. Not all were opioid-related, but in the sample year of 2023, 76 percent of the fatalities were.

"Big Pharma" was largely culpable, especially Purdue Pharma, controlled by the extensive, long-established Sackler family, which recently reached a $7.4 billion settlement with multiple attorneys general, including New York's Letitia James. 

Their company finally went out of business. Much too long in coming.

The pain-killing value of their smash hit drug Oxycontin, is neither disputed nor condemned. But their deceitful advertising, aggressive marketing and calculated failure to acknowledge or remedy the drug's known addictive property, sacrificing patients on the altar of corporate profits, was diabolical.

Let the Sackler family stake out the subway tunnels and claim first dibs between a pair of third rails.

The family's large-scale charitable donations to worthy causes do not mitigate their venality. The Court should have bankrupted them entirely and not left them enough to maintain the lifestyle to which they have been accustomed in the lap of luxury.

The timing couldn't be better. The poor just caught a break.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits will now allow the federal food stamp program to pay for rotisserie chickens that are hot, not only to those that are cold, as had been the case.  It took vigorous debate, but Congress put its best foot forward, and in the fullness of time, passed the ''Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act."

Some members of Congress, including New York City Democrats Grace Meng and Hakeem Jeffries, voted against the bill on the grounds that it was not inclusive enough, and should have covered any hot prepared meal, including lasagna or anything else that is available to the general population.  Many families don't have utility kitchens, and should be able to purchase groceries, though arguably with restrictions on junk food.

But what exactly is "junk food" and how would it be policed?  I bought some packaged lox the other day and noticed it's got sodium nitrates, which is worse than sugar, artificial sweeteners and empty carbs.

In Florida,  which got a waiver from the federal government to impose its own taboos, SNAP no longer pays for "ultra-processed prepared desserts," but granola bars and toaster strudels are okay. By the end of this year, around 18 additional states are expected to impose their own limitations. 

Many of the same people who prattle about the virtues of minimalist government that should stay out of the lives of Americans except for providing for the military defense of the nation, want the government to disentitle 41 million SNAP recipients from their own freedom of choice. These detractors should confine their focus not just to SNAP, but also include waste and fraud elsewhere, which is on a grand scale. 

When people got their wealth inconspicuously in the shadows of the underground economy, pooling and hiding it except for tell-tale evidence of late model luxury cars and ostentatious homes, and then audaciously apply for public assistance in any form, sometimes with the help of community organizations, they are ripping off the less bold, but genuinely needy, who are denied it because the treasury goes into defensive austerity mode.

The city could take up some of the slack by redeploying financial assets from security coverage for the Met Gala. 

Those billionaire A-list airheads can pay for their themselves.