Anti-Homeless Spikes

When you enter a railway station, shopping centre or other large indoor space, you'll often find that all the horizontal surfaces above the ground are covered with short spikes. This is to discourage pigeons and other birds from entering the space by giving them no place to perch. Somebody has decided to apply the same principle to the homeless. A couple of areas where people regularly sleep rough have had the ground covered by rows of spikes to make lying down there too uncomfortable. The first appeared in the doorway of a block of luxury apartments in London, but others have been installed under flyovers and on low window ledges. This has caused a media scandal, see: http://www.channel4.com/news/londons-anti-homeless-spikes-criticised. The subtext is that homeless people are to be treated as a pest like pigeons. They have no place in society; they are even no longer human. I find it ironic that in his book Down and Out in Paris and London George Orwell reveals that the nickname for a homeless hostel in the 1920's was a "spike", see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/down-and-out-in-oxford.html. With increasing poverty more and more people are losing their homes and are forced to sleep outdoors and these spikes are effectively punishing them for that. This is not the first time this kind of thing has been done. There's a park in Oxford near a place called Manzil Way which used to be a gathering place for homeless people, but then the council put in new benches specially designed not to be comfortable to sit on for too long. So the homeless moved elsewhere. Naturally Katie Hopkins supports the spikes... or says she does, see: http://www.closeronline.co.uk/2014/06/katie-hopkins-supports-anti-homeless-spikes-would-you-want-vermin-in-your-doorway. (I've written about Katie Hopkins before, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/uniforms-for-unemployed.html. The more I listen to her odious tirades the more I question her sincerity. I wonder if she's acting out a role cast for her by the media, or perhaps she's just stirring up controversy for its own sake; Christopher Hitchens without the brains!) I sometimes read The Big Issue and talk to the vendors about life on the streets. One man told me that he hates begging and wished he didn't have to do it. He says it's nice when people give him a few coins, but it's almost as nice when the decline politely. What really hurts is when they just walk past him without even looking at him, acting as if he's not there. It's dehumanizing, just like those spikes. So always reply to a beggar when they approach you, even if it's just to say "no".