@Mame,
My point was that
anyone can be annoying but society likes to sweep away its dregs with any excuse it can. And in doing so it likes to come up with justifications (a common human characteristic is to prefer to ascribe the misfortune of others to dispositional causes, while preferring to write their own misfortune off to situational causes) on the basis of annoyance, laziness and other negative characteristics that nobody else is getting run out of town because of except the folks that society also just happens not to want to have to look at.
I know what aggressive beggars are like, and how annoying they can be ("sir, one coin?" is like nails on a chalkboard to some folks here already as the crackheads chase them down the street shouting it). In some places I've lived it gets to the point where the rich paid off-duty cops to have them killed and the nuisance eliminated. Around the world, in places where classism is more acceptable people talk about it openly. The rich are the "beautiful people" and these are the "ugly people" and they don't want them spoiling the landscape.
I just wish they weren't always first in line to be swept under the rug, because some of them are fighting legitimate situational hardship (even if they often add to it with dispositional failings themselves) and don't need the extra obstacles (and little things like not being able to hang out near a public phone can make it that much harder to land the gainful employment to pull you out). There are plenty of well-off douche bags, spoiled screaming little brats, and self-righteous pricks occupying public space that I wish society didn't jump so quickly to try to sweep their unfortunate from view on the flimsy basis of such common human flaws as laziness or being annoying. But it's easier to just move them, dump them somewhere else and ascribe all their misfortune to their laziness so that society doesn't feel bad about it.
When I was homeless as a teenager I never panhandled (too proud to ever ask for help), I never annoyed anyone and I certainly wasn't lazy. But people just plain didn't want to see me sleeping on the park bench when they took their early morning walks, they didn't want to let me use the free gyms when they found out I was using them for the showers, and they just didn't want to be around me if they found out I was homeless. Simply put, they didn't want homeless people in their society. It didn't matter if they didn't know a minute before and thought I was a stout fellow if they found out I was a full-time outdoorsman they didn't want their kids around me, I was suddenly a bad influence solely on on the basis of being shelter-challenged and was systemically ostracized and kicked out of the small town and this effort by society to rid itself of its dregs makes it so much harder for them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. So many go out of their way to kick them, scold them and use them to feel superior to them.
Cops would pick me up, and just drive me to some other town ("your parents are in Brazil? ****, let's just drop him off somewhere.") to be someone else's problem, and I'd spend the night walking back to the park bench (later dugout, which offered much more shelter) where drunk idiots could drive by and call me lazy and throw beer bottles at me. I was the hardest working mother ****** in that town but at a glance most people decided that if I was homeless I was lazy and either way just didn't want me around. I worked my ass off however I could but being America there were, of course, laws against me working ("child labor"), laws against me being homeless (curfew as a minor), and laws preventing me from continuing my education without a complex emancipation that I was not going to be able to win because of the whole being poor thing. I couldn't dig myself out of my hole in that town (my only legal option would have to become a ward of the state) and I had to leave and find a place that didn't beat its least fortunate members down even further to start bootstrapping. I actually had to leave the land of the rich, where it was against the law to be as badly off as I was and where people liked to kick and mock the poor and move to a third world country to get back on my feet. Without society actively rejecting me for being too poor (I was then not the worst off in that third-world society) it was easy to get back on my feet and come back to America on good terms.
There are plenty of lazy bums (just as there are plenty of lazy non-bums), but I also think that there are a lot of people who would rather write them off that way than face a less comfortable reality. There are a lot of people who are annoyed by the mere sight of their lot in life and just don't want to deal with it. That reaction often results in an additional burden and obstacle for them.
