What's With Bums Calling Themselves Hobos?

It's not right. Throughout my life I have been confronted with people- usually on the old-ish side of young- who proudly refer to themselves as hobos. They're not. They would know that if they had access to Wikipedia. Or cared to access Wikipedia to find out exactly what the hell they were talking about. I'm going to first demonstrate my point with two pictures.



These are hobos.

























This is a bum.






What is the difference, you ask? They both have tattered clothing and hats. They both are broke. But there is a big difference between what is going on in these two pictures. "Hobo" is a slang term invented in the late part of the 19th century to describe often penniless migrant workers. Traveling men who went where the work was. Men who had no prospects at home so they had to travel to sustain themselves. I guess, the most important things about hobos is that they work.

Bums do not.

Bums sit around thinking of clever things to put on cardboard signs so people will give them money they are to later spend on a 40. Not that 40s are wrong. They aren't. Hobos certainly drink 40s. They just do hours of manual labor to enjoy that 40- whether it be on a street or on a train car. Bums do nothing of the kind. Bums may ride train cars but they have absolutely no ambition to get a job. I hate to say "mooching on society" because it makes me feel like Glenn Beck. It's just- well- bums get to lay around all day. Once again, not that laying around all day is wrong. It's not.

It's just that when bums lie around all day they form wildly implausible theories about how the government controls our lives, or that 9/11 is an inside job or that the Cold War is still going on. These theories are catastrophic to society because they make the real paranoid-personalities flip their shit. This is what bums do. They make people flip their shit. Whether it be the men and women they take advantage of or the conservatives who hate them just because they are bums. And that's true, it's bums who make conservatives veto every welfare bill. Because conservatives think all hobos are bums. Which they aren't. At all. So poverty continues to grow and unemployment ravages the country because these two different kind of people are mixed up.


Recently, at a party, I found myself talking to a young man. I asked said young man what he did and he said "I'm a hobo!" I nodded and then asked what he did all day and he said "Party." I asked if that was all and he confirmed that that was all. This man is not a hobo, and after that exchange I felt it imperative to write this blog entry.