I have seen a number of movies about the plight of people illiterate or sub-literate with big stars in the leading roll.

 There was Robert Dinero and recently I watched a movie that starred singer Johnny Cash. Neither character was homeless but they were certainly on the brink of it.

   Nobody should be homeless whatever their character defects or mis-education. A touching story here. Good natured people ignore or shun the homeless for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with hardness of heart.

    One of them is this : individuals inclined to help are frightened by the mere appearance of hopelessness. It is dangerous to rescue a desperate drowning person - to descend into a personal maelstrom.

   But at least illiteracy is rarely hopeless. Malcolm X conquered it in jail - then spent the next five years getting a prison-university education. Soon the whole world was listening to Brother Malcolm.

   Not for nothing the old Southern slave masters were terrified of black slaves who could read " subversive " books - giving them pernicious ideas of human rights and equality. Ask Frederick Douglass.