Reading Mr. Rushton’s poppycock of Tuesday June 3, 2008 about the people on the traffic islands with the begging signs was an experience containing incredible irony.

Irony abounds in the fact the homeless themselves distain these individuals with their signs seeking handouts because it re-enforces the prejudicial stereotyping of the homeless by the public, pundits and columnists.

It is also ironic that in rushing to make his sweeping and sophistic assertions, Mr. Rushton becomes the answer to his editor’s question with which he began his column.

Yes Ms. Editor, there are poverty (or homelessness) pimps out there; people who exploit the poor and homeless for their own economic ends and advantage, earning their thirty pieces of silver catering to the public’s uninformed view of the poor and homeless to fill their newspaper column space – without the need to think.

I do not suggest that Mr. Rushton pimps the poor and homeless to the public because he came down on the people with the signs. Knowing the story behind many of these individuals I too wanted to kick their asses out of there or stand there with a sign saying “Does not deserve your generosity”.

It is his broad, careless and misleading statements about how easy it is to find employment that, together with his apparent failure to apply any form of analytical thought process to these statements, render him a poverty (homelessness) pimp.

Try applying for a job when you are homeless and watch the employers reaction to that information – don’t call us we’ll call you. How does an employer willing to take the chance and hire the homeless contact the homeless person? Smoke signals? Jungle drums? Homeless and broke how do you manage personal hygiene, clean clothes etc to remain presentable enough to keep your job? With a job and thus unable to get to the Food Bank or the Salvation Army, is it Mr. Rushton’s belief that you pretty much starve for the three weeks until you get your first pay check?

Just how good a job of grunt work are you going to be doing on an empty stomach, at the end of the first week? Second week? Third week?

Jobs abound? Really? As I sit here I cannot think of any job that is available within the area I could walk to and from work. You are homeless, without transportation, living in Abbotsford a city where transit is of limited use – even if you could afford the $3 a day cost.

Here is an interesting problem that some Abbotsford citizens may already be facing and that more and more will face as gas prices continue to rise. You commute from Abbotsford to Vancouver daily. Lease or loan payments, insurance, repairs and maintenance and gas with its soaring prices – one may well find oneself spending more to get and from work than one is making as take home pay.

The job is there … or is it really there if it costs you more to commute to work than you make at work? A little conundrum that increasing numbers of commuters may face as gas spirals upward in cost.

Conundrums are what many homeless face in seeking employment.

Despite the baseless assertions to the contrary, finding employment for the poor and especially for the homeless is to run into barrier after barrier after barrier after barrier ….

I recently heard from someone who was on the verge of homelessness after a year of fruitless job searching having been repeatedly told she was “overqualified” for the job she was applying for. I know others, including myself, who have a stack of rejections on the grounds of being “overqualified”.

As for the woman seeking money for dog grooming tools, consider the following scenario. You’re poor and cannot afford new clothes; you have a job lined up but in order to meet the office dress code you need two pair of Khaki pants; so much for that job because you cannot get those pants – unless you can find someone of charitable consciousness to buy you those pants. This is not some impossible scenario – it happened to me.

When one is poor and/or homeless the statement “jobs abound” is often false and what abounds is multiple barriers, multiple layers of barriers, between employment and you, between housing and you.

The homeless derive no benefit from their homelessness. Benefits accrue to those who chose, by their behaviours and actions, to be poverty and homelessness pimps – a rather shameful irony.