Homeless control

Rest easy Ghent property owners, apartment dwellers and Ghentophiles.

Here’s a solution to the homeless roaming your gentrified streets, peeing on your bushes (dogs get a pass for some odd reason) and scaring young mothers with babies.

In addition to trimming bushes and destroying park benches, just when the fall season of festivals begin. 

My idea isn’t original.

In fact, my inspiration germinated with animal groups arguing about whether feral cats should be trapped, neutered and released or trapped and killed.

I give you two options to control the homeless epidemic in Ghent.

You choose, readers, which option would work best in Ghent.

First, we can trap, neuter and release the homeless.

They’re easy to trap.

Offer them a cigarette or a dollar for a quart of beer and they’re caught.

Neutering them might be more difficult, but it can be done.

Send them to the warehouse of a major retailer (I can’t disclose the retailer’s name on condition of anonymity) that sells everything from condoms to anti-depressants.

Get someone from the hardware department to perform the surgery.

Easy as pie. No muss, no fuss. Maybe some wailing and weeping, but the walls of the warehouse are soundproof and customers are so consumed with consuming they won't notice. 

Splash some alcohol (not to drink) on the wound, bandage the damage, give them a pack of cigarettes and a dollar and they’ll be fine.

Here’s the next step.

Hustle them on to a ship bound for China. (They should be able to enter the country duty free).

When the ship arrives in China, they’ll be handed a bag filled with won ton soup, a bag of rice, chopsticks and a bowl and a copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

Here’s an excerpt.

“In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.”

Then: bye, bye.

Or we can trap and kill them.

Use the same trap method though you ought to be careful, as well as crafty, because by now they’ve heard what happened and might be reticent to take a handout.

Offer them a shower, as well.

That should do the trick.

The kill part is trickier.

But no one cares about the homeless, so you won’t have a public outcry except from bleeding heart liberal groups.

And for gosh sake, hash out your plans in a closed session, so the nosey reporters at The Virginian-Pilot don’t hear about your scheme.

Yes, the kill part…

Very tricky. You have to be clever and sly.

Load them into a tourist bus, plastered with a sign that says “The Gambling Boat; All Aboard for Atlantic City.”

 Drive to the Dismal Swamp and leave them in the woods.

You didn’t really think I would advocate euthanasia, did you?

Besides, it’s too expensive and a waste of valuable ammunition.

Keep the ammunition to kill feral cats, or maybe not. 
Maybe subversives instead.
Homo sapiens, the gentle, humble and compassionate species.