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Originally Posted by Leeman4Gilmour
But, it seems rather clear this is cultural issue and I tend to agree part of that is too much compassion as a society.
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This is an absurd conclusion, though, considering nothing about our response or society’s treatment of homeless people and addicts indicates an abundance of compassion. If anything, it’s a half-hearted attempt at showing compassion. “We” are acting in a way we believe compassionate people act, which is incredibly different than acting with an abundance of compassion. If we had too much compassion, we likely would not have this problem, because we would have funnelled actual resources into fixing it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stone hands
I dont get what's so hard to understand about the fact that trying to get clean when you live underneath a bridge by the river is exponentially harder than trying to get sober with a predictable living situation. If our goal is to get people clean,we need to give them a place to live as a baseline before anything else because that lifestyle naturally leads itself towards maintaining the drug addict status quo. If you have nothing to live for, no place to stay, why WOULDNT you just do drugs to numb yourself from your awful existence
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I’m surprised a few posters aren’t understanding this. This fantasy of rounding up all the homeless addicts and arresting and imprisoning them or “ethically forcibly confining” them to a mental institution and then just forcing them to be fixed or die in prison or get beat to death by the police or something is cool and all if that’s the road people want to go down, but how is any of that remotely conducive to actually curing addiction? Why would they bother?
Sliver’s big issue is actually
seeing these people, he’s repeated it several times. Alleviating their HOMELESSNESS solves the immediate issue. You can alleviate their homelessness by
giving them a home. A crazy concept, I’m sure. Then, for those who are also suffering from addiction or mental health issues or a combination, you offer treatments (as many on site or near site as possible). For those who aren’t or are no longer suffering from addiction or mental health issues, you work with them on transitional employment to get them back on their own two feet and eventually to a place where they don’t need government housing. The idea isn’t to give them mansions, just places to live that are safe and comfortable, but places they will eventually want to move on from. For those who simply refuse to engage in the program at all, then there’s nothing inhumane about increasing the legal consequences for remaining homeless or addicts. But you have to wrap it all together.
The people complaining the loudest in this thread don’t seem to want comprehensive solutions. They want punishments, or to fix it while saving a buck, but i’m not seeing a lot of interest in actually solving the issue in a way that makes sense from the main complainers. They just want to try a slightly different half-measure, which history tells us is not going to work. Finland, Portugal, Japan, Denmark, there are different examples of effective approaches to the issue, none of them half measures, none of them as lazy as just opening up more mental institutions, all of them with a ways to go yet but still far ahead of where we are.
Another problem is that people view this as a political or ideological debate/issue, when it’s not. As soon as you blame the “other” group for not solving this, you lose 100% of your credibility. Part of the reason this doesn’t get solved is BECAUSE people politicize it. So stop being part of the problem.