Ask HN: Just got an innocent man out of prison. What now?

Since the major city and the county have the same name and I was still in the county, I decided to make it a countywide resource to the best of my ability.

It is shockingly hard for a homeless person to find the information they need online. I have had a college class on how to do online search and sometimes have difficulty finding things online so I can get an address and phone number even when I know for a fact they exist.

Most websites for homeless service providers are not intended to be client facing. They are intended to impress potential donors. They typically do a poor job of telling needy individuals what they need to know.

So, there is demand for the info. I assure you, I am not getting rich off of it. One of my Achilles heels is that I like being helpful. So, although this is, sadly, one of the most successful projects I have ever had in terms of traffic and being taken seriously as a valuable resource and making a difference in the world, it has put damn little money in my pocket.

Further, I find it galling that a homeless individual is being criticized for trying to monetize their expertise in the topic. Most of the time, I get this shitty attitude that admitting to being homeless online amounts to me trying to panhandle people. So, in other words, I am homeless, I am not allowed to merit an earned income. I am only allowed to hope for charity and ingratiate myself for crumbs. No matter how I get my money, it is inherently immoral.

And people wonder why my financial problems are proving to be so stubborn, as well as why I have such strong feelings that the wrongly convicted individual we are discussing should be allowed to pursue an income that doesn't involve making a spectacle of his misfortune.

But, this is HN so...I guess it's to be expected.

(And I say "sadly" it is one of my most successful projects in part because homelessness is on the rise nationwide. The general rise in homelessness is part of why there is demand for the info. In my case, "getting rich" would mean what? Getting off the street? How dare I aspire to such self indulgence and selfishness when there are poorer homeless people than I.)

That said, it isn't a normal job training program. If you had a friend with no criminal record who was looking for work, I doubt you send him to Homeboy Industries in order to get job training.

Ray was in prison, but he isn't someone trying to turn his life around after falling in with gangs or crime. He was a Sergeant in the U.S. military who had his freedom taken for no reason.

He has just been forced to spend 11 years of his life with people from backgrounds that led them into the criminal-justice system. Some of them are good people, others are not. But none of them came from the same circumstances as Ray, a man who risked his life for our country and never did anything to society for which he needs to atone.

I will certainly tell him about Homeboy Industries and let him make his own decisions. But I think it's totally reasonable if, after being forced to spend 11 years surrounded by convicts, he now chooses to seek out situations where he will be able to spend time around "normal" folks.

Ray enlisted in the Army National Guard in the 90s when he was 17. Do you think that was morally reprehensible? If not, when did he lose your respect and sympathy?

He followed orders to deploy to Iraq once the United States had already invaded the country and deposed its government. The missions he carried out were intended to find bombmakers who were indiscriminately slaughtering civilians and soldiers with IEDs.

He never took the life of a single Iraqi. His main priority was ensuring that the young men under his command came back alive to their families in the United States. Was that not a task that justified his presence and his best efforts?

Individual soldiers are not in a position to judge the merits of foreign military interventions. They do not have access to the intelligence that political leaders rely on in order to make those decisions. A military can only function when soldiers fulfill their responsibility to carry out all lawful orders.

The responsibility for holding our political leaders accountable for improper military interventions falls on the PEOPLE of the United States, not the soldiers who have taken an oath to serve their commander in chief.

Equating an average American soldier serving in Iraq with a Nazi war criminal is not only disgusting but counterproductive. It erases the moral culpability of the latter for willfully carrying out genocide.

The Iraq war was a horrifying mistake. But our leaders' misjudgment doesn't entitle you to slander the names of the men and women who risked (and gave) their lives in that conflict.