We live in a country where leftist policies have impacted the mentally ill and mentally retarded for over 30 years.
Safe facilities where these people were boarded were closed. Although some were not good places, many were.
The mentally ill and mentally retarded were boarded, fed, given minimal healthcare, kept clean, and kept from being prey or preying upon the populace.
Families of the mentally ill or mentally retarded were no longer attempting to manage psychotic violent and vulnerable relatives.
Today the mentally ill and mentally retarded are loose in the streets. They are expected to follow medication regimes that they dislike and often run from. They are expected to manage the outside world when they cannot and they, if they are lucky, end up in homeless shelters that provide a dite of the care that was once provided at the local state hospitals.
The patient right laws do not permit less than the fullest freedoms and one has to flunk the test a lot in order to curtail the freedom of a mentally ill patient with continuous poor judgment.
Right now near you there are patients coming into hospitals nationwide, who are horrifically beaten because of their behaviors, who are filled with lice and bites because of their poor judgment, who are fantastically psychotic because they need a protective boundary to be able to continue to be medicated.
We no longer provide the care for the people that our forefathers thought was the basis of human compassion and charity.
Instead we have a government with out of control rules. It is heartbreaking. What is more heartbreaking is to see families whose hands are tied as their beloved child or spouse becomes increasingly insane and hurt.
My fear, that the leftist blob cannot go back to congregant custodial care. That instead, the blob will talk itself into mercy-killing these poor souls. Because they will make it a choice and an attractive option. It will fit the mindset of the intellectuals as we move in that direction as these self same intellectuals debate life and death and who gets to live and who gets to die.
It will not be pretty. But it will be logical. German doctors who killed numerous of the mentally ill and mentally retarded all had logical reasons to kill them. Reasons these educated people believed.
I guess we just may party like it is 1932 all over again.
What have we come to?
I think your history is spot-on and that that is coming next. Always the “unintended consequences” with the leftists.
My father and his family were in one of Hitler’s camps, and many of my relatives were murdered by cruel doctors/nurses in Siberian concentration camps. I have little doubt it’s all happening all over again — and my parents say the same thing.
Any country that can murder 50+ million babies, plus countless others (we both know plenty of examples), is not too far off from killing off the elderly, disabled, mentally ill, and so forth.
Any country that allows irradiation and molestation of innocent citizens, but especially the disabled and elderly, isn’t too far off from 1932, or many other horrific periods that are even more recent.
Many years ago when he was an up and coming news reporter a very young Geraldo Rivera did a news story about these kind of “hospitals”. Geraldo’s news camera had caught some very disturbing images. It was because of this story that the state closed this hospital and others followed as well. It was decided that the mentally retarded (for which this was a warehouse for) would be better in homes even if with foster families.
I personally don’t know which is better but I do know that after seeing the news article that we should never go back to that. The staff either did not care or pardon the pun, were just retarded themselves and could not care for these people. Most animal shelters would not have gotten away with the crap they pulled.
Excellent points.