Do Mormons really affect you?

[straightlineorbust]

More than half of the homeless around Rio Grande are not actually from Utah, they have gotten her due to a variety of mismanaged programs in the west that literally just sends homeless people to different states.

Utah has a few rapid rehousing programs, but the reality is that they are at capacity and they currently aim to house people who will have the largest potential for success and are also part of the most vulnerable populations.

The people around the Rio Grande however will pretty much never fit in to these programs because they still need to be able to live up to pretty much normal lease terms (albeit they may not have any monetary requirements), but drugs etc. will get them kicked out of their apartments, or just other general bullshit mentally ill people get up to.

Utah's homeless problem is really not too much worse than other places, it's just centralized. That soon won't be the case when the road home closes and the population gets more dispersed.

Ohhhhhh, and actually the panhandling problem is because Utahn's actually give to panhandlers way more than other places, so if it's effective no doubt they'd do it. But most of them are vagrants, but not homeless.

[Skidog]

Fuck panhandlers. I see them on the 11400 exit all the time. Like wtf if you're homeless how the fuck did you get to your sandy panhandle location? Lying pieces of shit. Check the shoes, backpack, usually pretty new. I wanna smack them.

[BobMc]

I drive all about the valley giving rides to customers, shagging parts, etc. It's the same damn people all over the valley. They switch places here and there, you'll see the same dude at 3500 S and 5600 W, then see him at 7th East and 1800 S. There was a lady that sat in her "mobility chair" at the Walmart at 3100 S and 5600 W for three years, she finally disappeared and I wondered if she got a job, a week later I see her at the Walmart on 3rd West and 1400 S.

At the end of the day they walk over to their car and drive home.

[skifishbum]

When I first moved to Sandy, one of the strangest things was when missionaries showed up. I remember thinking "there's missionaries in Utah?...who doesn't know about the church in Sandy fucking Utah"...
Anyway, since they offered to fill me in on the church, and I was going to be living in Utah, it seemed like a reasonable opportunity. So I made a compromise with elder Novak from North Carolina and elder Marmberg from Alberta: I clearly stated I was not interested in joining, but I was interested in learning about the religion because I was new in Utah and thought it might help with understanding the place, and instead of reading the book of mormon, I read Under the Banner of Heaven; then, each week for about 2 months, Marmberg and Novak would come over and I'd ask questions.
Eventually it reached a stage where they were making a lot of effort to have me join the church or attend church functions, and I had learned plenty, so I thanked them for the lesson and that was that.

It was worth doing. The whole lds/Utah experience was a mixed deal. I strongly disagree with the whole concept of a church state, and with the overwrought fake patriotism that covers up strong elements harboring a deep desire to secede and expatriate the gentiles. I found the militarism over marijuana and alcohol both a nuisance and a blessing insomuch as it probably does as much as anything to keep some level of control over the population influx.
Yet, with all the bitter politics at an abstract level, I met so many great lds individuals: skiers, neighbors, coworkers. Militarism about it aside, I liked the fact that gross drunkenness isn't culturally acceptable (and having moved back to the upper midwest I now find it kind of gross that everyone's social life here revolves around drinking, and often drinking and driving).
I liked the fact that the lds church does good community work, and that they form a robust social safety net for their members. I appreciated living around people who were prepared to help in an emergency. I really, really appreciated the orderly and organized nature of the public infrastructure around Salt Lake. The roads make sense, the signage makes sense, the utilties all work well, my credit union was outstanding...I attribute a lot of that to the positive community-oriented influence of the church. There are strong social elements in that church state that seem to really help when they want to get something done, like a freeway or a rail system....compared to the clusterfuck of living in MIchigan it's impressive.

To quell the inevitable bouts of bitterness over frustrating sociopolitical stuff (like when a kid went missing in my neighborhood and the mormons decided they would just show up and bully me into searching my house; or when the cops I played hockey with would brag about busting people bringing alcohol from Wyoming as if they were saving lives, or when they penned everyone in at the Clark planetarium and had us walk through a gauntlet of police and drug dogs...on and on)...anyway, to quell the inevitable bitterness from that stuff, I put this up in my bathroom where I'd see it and read some of it every day:

....to remind me of all the good the church does by way of its good people.

It's such a complicated deal. Literally two of my most favorite coworkers in Utah were serious mormons, they were great to work with, but we worked in wildland fire....people get stressed to the max and tired and raw, and in those revealing moments, both of them let it fly that they don't think non-mormons should even be in Utah. So as nice as they both were, when the layers peeled away, they both harbored a deep-seated feeling that Utah was really Deseret and that gentile skiers from out of town should not be allowed to live there unless they wanted to convert and participate in the church. That's the essence of my relationship to the church while I lived in Utah...I loved the people as individuals because they were so nice to me, and I loved the ways that the church had manifested niceness in the community, but I also had good reason to suspect they did not love me or my kind and I was constantly encountering political stuff that felt profoundly unwelcoming.

i still gots ya winnin a 34 page thread
sure they affect me
we bought a 3700 sqft 7 bedroom fixer upper smack dab in granite broburbia from one who raised her 10 kids there
found this missionary love letter to one of her daughters during remodeling

i keep it on the fridge in the mancave
cause it makes me smile and belongs in the house