You can take the bum out of the slum, but you can't take the slum out of the bum.

How would you feel if you gave someone $500 - $1000 a month to help with his rent, and he came back and complained to you because he couldn't find the kind of place he wanted for that amount? Wouldn't you tell the ungrateful bum he could pay his own rent?

That's exactly what's happening to those of us who work and pay taxes. Inclusive Communities Project Inc., a Dallas-based civil rights group, is suing the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs because the apartment complexes it has financed are not in the areas they want to live in. In a separate suit filed in 1995, a federal judge ordered rental assistance vouchers to allow residents to move to predominantly white areas without concentrations of poverty so they could live away from the slums and blight. The vouchers "provide extra financial assistance so residents can pay the higher rents in those neighborhoods." In other words, the beggars are living in better houses than a lot of us who are supporting them can afford. Their complaint is that they can't find enough section 8 houses in "good areas."

As for the slums and blight -- why do they think most affluent, predominantly white areas are averse to housing projects being built in their neighborhoods? It's because they don't want their nice neighborhoods turned into -- blighted slums! It's the bums living in the slums who make them slums, and when they move to another neighborhood, it becomes a slum, too. Being poor is no excuse for filth, drug dealing, and sitting around on the porch drinking all day. Mr. Essie May and I both grew up in very poor families, yet we never dealt or did drugs, we always had untorn screens on our windows, and our parents always had employment -- low-paying employment, but the point is they worked!

So to those who filed this ridiculous lawsuit -- you can live anywhere you want by getting a job and paying for it yourself! Otherwise, take what you're given and quit complaining.