Posted on 02/10/2019 12:24:11 PM PST by hapnHal
Yep. And we can’t return to that soon enough.
My guess is that the fools that we have for elected officials won’t act until tolerating the homeless results in a lot of non-homeless deaths from some outbreak of typhus or cholera or one of the other forgotten plagues that public hygiene suppresses.
So too the eventual adoption of new era mental institutions. It will have been around 50 years since CA closed down the old style mental hospitals. The thinking at that time - primarily driven by our friends on the left - was that it was inhumane to deny basic civil rights to those who had committed no crime.
Well, like progs everywhere, especially in the Bay area and SF, hard lessons learned firsthand have a way of stimulating rationalization. When leftists finally come around and agree to open new facilities, it will be under terms they define. That is, it will "humane" and the advancement of basic civil rights to "help" the mentally ill homeless.
The change in thinking will be something to watch. It should be pretty fun - it's like your teen maturing in their 20s and actually becoming a "normal", rational and measured individual. So too the progs, because only they can make the new institutions happen. And when they move in a collective wave, Katy bar the door.
We completely agree.
Addiction to drugs and/or alcohol is a mental illness. Addicts/Alcoholics live in denial, refusing to connect their actions to the results.
If you give a drunk on the corner $5 for food, he'll go buy beer. By the time they end up on the streets, beer is all they can afford, and in truth, beer is addictive, has as much alcohol as a shot of bourbon--and the alcohol in all drinks is ethanol. Wrecks brain cells.
A terrible downward spiral. I don't think anyone grows up wanting to be a street person.
“Leftwing judges closed our mental institutions.”
It wasn’t just the left. Governor Reagan signed the bill in California. There was a broad consensus signing up for this bad idea.
Behavior is a major causal factor in homelessness.
In my professional fantasies villages exist within every large city like youndescribe, completely enclosed and safe, with varying degrees of freedom within their walls, for the untreatably mentally ill.
As far as freedom goes, I’d give them access 4x a year or so to a panel of experts to determine whether they are competent enough for true freedom.
If they don’t pass, giving these helpless people the care and supervision they need is better than freedom. Kinder.
Who's going to pay for it?
You don’t even list 1, 2 and 3...
Alcohol, drugs, mental illness.
The misfortunate that have some economic, medical calamity, whatever is probably less than 10, even 5 percent
That massive Santa Ana River Trail encampment helped focus our attention.
That, and the Santa Ana Civic Center camp. The camps along the 91. The camps in all of the parks of North Orange County. The camps in downtown LA.
It’s unbelievable how this problem was allowed to grow to such immense size.
We always have had the mentally ill, and a lot of drug abusers at least since the late ‘60s.
What we didn’t use to have is vast herds of them living on the streets.
The homeless population in the United States SKYROCKETED after the Supreme Court ruled that a person cannot be institutionalized if they are not a physical threat to the public. I think this was 1975 or so.
After that ruling, the mental hospitals opened their doors and the street became flooded with people unable to hold jobs and take care of themselves.
The Dems want death/disease, they have fairly openly stated they think the world is over populated.
So, take urban areas and bring in the “homeless”, because with them come death/mayhem/disease like the plague if we just give it a chance.
needles, unsanitary conditions, sex, rats, feces, urine, unclean bedding....
Perfect scenario for a pandemic disease....
Back then the evil empire, the old Soviet Union was using mental health facilities to imprison any dissidents they didn't kill. Perhaps Reagan and the good guys wanted to preclude that possibility when the left returned to power.
Government
So I'm an advocate of bringing the asylums back - for humanitarian reasons. I'm not talking about restoring the way asylums were, with straitjackets and rooms with rubber walls, etc., but a more humane asylum where people can be treated or if necessary, held indefinitely in a place where they at least have food and shelter as well as a modicum of safety.
They way we (as a society) manage the homeless situation is far more cruel. Nobody should be allowed to live and sleep out on a city street. Working in Manhattan, I see a lot of these people and many of them absolutely should be committed to an institution.
There is one homeless person in particular who I see sleeping right on the sidewalk at Lexington Avenue near 43th Street across from Grand Central almost every morning. For months now. Even when it's near zero degrees, that guy is lying down on the street in rags and just socks on his feet. He stinks so badly that I have to hold my breath when I walk by. Usually there is an empty bottle of booze and fast food wrappers surrounding him. It's a disgrace that this is allowed to happen. That guy should have been picked up long ago and brought to a facility.
In a Santa Ana neighborhood, people living with schizophrenia find an oasis
Bingo!
Good call.
I’m technically homeless. Then again, I’m forced to take drugs to maintain my health and not because I’m a drug addict.
And I need help to take them hence I’m now living in an assisted living apartment. I consider myself fortunate.
Being without a place to live should be on no one’s list of the good life.
My son and his wife and two sons were EMPLOYED and HOMELESS in southern Utah for four (4—count ‘em) months. Slept in their vehicles in truckstop parking lots. Worked days, barely survived nights. Sometimes friends or relatives would get them a hotel room for a night or two so they could shower and sleep in real beds. Because the parents both worked (even though it was minimum wage), they didn’t qualify for ANY kinds of assistance, housing, or shelter.
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