Sidewalk sprawlers feeling the heat?

When squatters who were finally evicted on Sunday from Kakaako Waterfront Park trudged over to adjacent city sidewalks and started  planting their flags, the mayor said he was having none of it.

To his credit, Mayor Caldwell showed up on the scene yesterday and said he will not allow squatters to take over sidewalks around the Children’s Discovery Center yet again.  It’s high time he adopted that attitude — after callously allowing the area to degenerate into a squalid Third World shithole again and again over the past couple years.

Let’s see if he’s serious this time.

Now the City Council wants to expand the ban on sitting and lying across public sidewalks to include the entire island.  Yes, now it has come to this.  Some really stubborn, and in some cases very troubled, individuals have made people so angry and fed up that the council may take it that far.

Get ready for another big drama-fest with emotional accusations about “criminalizing the human body’s need for sleep” and other ridiculous nonsense.

Yes, the human body needs to sleep.  But no, humans do not need to sprawl across busy sidewalks, often covered in filth, in the middle of the day in order to take a rest.  We just don’t, and making excuses for that kind of totally unreasonable, unhealthy, and offensive conduct is not helping the homeless–and is certainly not helping anybody else.

And the sit-lie bans only apply during business hours anyway.  Plenty of people still sprawl across many of our sidewalks all night long and snooze to their hearts’ content.

It’s become a tired cliche, but it still makes a point:  People who see nothing wrong with surly drunks blocking public sidewalks all day long should just shut up and plant the drunks in front of their own homes.

Or, better yet, invite them inside and regale them with your philosophies.

That’s the big problem with so much of this debate.  So many of the people who reflexively jump on their high horses about the rights of bums — and that’s what quite a few of them really are — do so from on high and afar.  The discussion is all abstract and hypothetical dinner party banter for those who are not personally confronted with this unacceptable bullshit on a daily basis.

It’s sad that it has come to this.  Really sad.  Our society should be advanced enough at this point that it would be unthinkable for people to engage in the kind of conduct we’re talking about here, and they would be immediately engaged and directed to appropriate assistance if necessary.

But even after sit-lie bans were enacted for certain limited areas, enforcement ranges from spotty to nonexistent.  And it sure seems like our society is regressing further, rather than advancing.

So will enacting a sit-lie ban island-wide really stop people from making pigs of themselves?  And will it provide homes for the truly homeless who are actually trying to get it together, or who desperately need immediate intervention?  No, it won’t.  But it might provide authorities with another tool to deter some of the most egregious nonsense.

Unfortunately, in reality, an island-wide sit-lie ban will probably just get the city sued, and our “leaders” will just keep pointing fingers at each other while our community sinks further into neglect and squalor.