Quote:
Originally Posted by strombad
Homeless people often suffer the effects of issues out of their control (including mental health issues and societal issues) and the desire to fix their situation is less than ideal.
Cancer patients generally smoke, eat poorly, or do many other that have a great impact on the likelihood of developing the disease, and then seek help and a cure once they inevitably get it.
They really aren't much different. One's desire for a cure does not absolve them of fault for their diagnosis. I'm not trying to demonise cancer patients of course, it's a horrendous disease and no matter how you lived your life you should get any treatment you'd like. Homelessness is the same. It's not a problem to simply be policed or relocated.
Claims of the East Village failing because people were doing drugs in the toilet are based in profound ignorance. These are still people like you and I, and can be lived WITH, not around.
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Here is where I don't agree with you though. To simplify how people become homeless let's say they get addicted drugs, or don't get help for a mental health issue. The same can be simplified for a cancer patient saying they ate bad, smoked, didn't exercise. So what happens is they are now homless or a cancer patient based off of their actions.
Now a lot of cancer patients seek help because they want to get better. What I was saying about the homeless is that a lot of them don't seek help. That is why I said you can offer all the programs you want, but people have to want to use them.
This of course says nothing about the programs that are available to help homless people, but I assume we spend more money on trying to cure cancer than we do on curing homelessness.