Natural Law in Austin

Nobody asked but …

Let’s face it.  There is no single stroke of governance that will make the homeless campers of Austin, TX go away.  You cannot put toothpaste back in a tube.

If you could undo the tangled compendium of the past, let’s start with wars and imprisonment in general, or more specifically American slave holding and the Civil War.  But there may be earlier snafus that we could undo which, in turn would preempt indenture and thus causes of the Civil War.  Could we head off antiquated European imperial ideas about supremacy?

There’s the rub.  How do we decide how far back to go?  And how do we pick the things that caused future blight?  Confronted with a tapestry of human error which loomings do we repair?  Are we sure?  Do we have a perfect guide as to what is wrong and what is right?

I do not oppose modest proposals as such, but I have less than modest expectations for their success.

The past of Austin, like all other urban locations, is littered with human error — most of it unintentional, most of it arising from combinations of unintended innocent acts that went before.  One of the unintentional acts was to choose a settlement location with a mild climate, which would attract a significant number of homeless campers as time went by.

Do-gooders are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

— Kilgore Forelle