Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder? You gotta be shitting me....

[busterb]

Well said

[xoxoxoBruce]

There are NO homeless people on the streets of Switzerland.

Where are they?

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Where are they?

At home!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by marichiko

At home!

So there are no working poor, drug addicts or crazy people? Yeah sure, home is a home with locks on the outside of the door. :p

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

So there are no working poor, drug addicts or crazy people? Yeah sure, home is a home with locks on the outside of the door. :p

Believe it or not, Bruce, very few. Switzerland is not some utopia, but the problems Swiss society faces really do not include homelessness to any great extent. The Swiss, like the Americans, are a hard working industrious people. They also enjoy the advantage of having an unemployment rate that hovers around a mere two or 3 percent. Add to that the strong social safety nets that Switzerland (along with the rest of Europe) has in place, and it becomes highly unusual for any Swiss to find themselves homeless. When I last visited there some years back, Zurich did have a sort of equivalent to Amsterdamn's "needle park." The Swiss at that point had few laws regarding illegal drugs, so a small "scene" of sorts had developed near Zurich's downtown. My older Swiss aunt who is quite conservative was rather outraged about the whole thing and claimed that the majority of the denizens of "needle park" were not Swiss, but foreigners attracted by the easy availability of their favorate poisons. The whole thing was such an oddity that my then husband and I went down to the area to see it, and I was so impressed to see someone actually sleeping on a park bench in Switzerland that I took his picture. This was in the middle of the day, however. I never saw anyone sleeping on park benches or huddled in doorways at night. I have heard that since my last visit the Swiss have cracked down somewhat, and "needle park" no longer exists. Jag tells me that Switzerland is changing, but I'd be really surprised to encounter homeless people on the streets there, still. I'm sure Jag will correct me if things have changed so much in only a few years.