Can I ask a stupid question?
How is it that we now accept as normal, people sleeping and p***ing and s***ing and God knows what else in the streets????
How is it that we didn’t have these critical masses of homeless in 1950 or 1960???
What changed so that we as a society are unable or unwilling to get people off the streets??
I just am completely confused. These people who have no means of support, many of whom have mental illness, or other problems which prevent them from living normal lives, are just in the streets, and we accept it as normal. When did we as a society decide that people have a constitutional right to impose themselves on the rest of us in that manner????
In 1950 or 60, there were state mental facilities and people were put in them. Then, there was the discovery that some of them were horrible. So, the answer was not to improve them, but shut them down. Local governments were supposed to step in and communities were supposed to take care of their own. It didn’t happen much, especially because homeless people drift over to where they get a better deal, so a city could just do nothing and save money, or do a lot and get a whole lot of extra people as a “reward”.
There are also a lot of “normal” people on the streets now. People that have lost their jobs in the great “obama recovery” that cannot find new jobs. There are tons of homeless in town here that are families with children.
If you are really too young to know, and are asking a serious question...
Severely mentally ill folks used to be institutionalized to protect and treat them and to protect society. In the late 1960s, federal judges got the bright idea to turn them all out in the streets. Add to those numbers the folks that cooked their brains with drugs, and you have the present mess.
They can be relied on to vote democrat for a bottle of wine and a bus/van ride to the polling place.
Bums Inc.
“How is it that we now accept as normal, people sleeping and p***ing and s***ing and God knows what else in the streets????”
Man, you hit a nerve with me. I have a two-story commercial office building in a well-known SF Bay Area city. This week, we have had to clean up both sh!t and pee from both our stairwells. So after the “second occurrence,” I decided to “stake out my own property.” Sure enough, by 10 p.m. I had a guy sleeping on the second floor, so I called the cops to have him arrested (we have the building posted to facilitate the cops doing their duty). Seems as though all the cops on the night shift were busy on a single high-priority call, so they didn’t get around to me until almost 1 a.m. So what did they do? They rousted the guy, issued him a citation, and sent him on his way! Seems as though CA now classifies this kind of intrusion as a misdemeanor and they cannot arrest him. And FWIW, they told me that now breaking into your car in CA is also a misdemeanor with the same procedure, so long as the thief takes $900 or less out of your vehicle.
These people who have no means of support, many of whom have mental illness,...When lib lawyers saw a pay day for letting these poor people out of the asylums, they did them no favor.