People turn to pooping on the streets and shooting up in the middle of the street because they have nowhere else to go. Getting hoisted out of rock-bottom is extremely difficult, and the longer you slip through the cracks of any kind of support the more cemented you get there. If society is kicking the ladder out from under you like this then respectability is the last thing on your mind. Being shipped off to a desert concentration camp is really the icing on the cake here.
The ("progressive") opinion that you express is ultimately de-humanizing. You take away all agency from people and treat them as mindless victims.
It's all the society's fault, awlays someone else do blame. People who poop on the street can't find any other place (perhaps, a bush?), people who throw needles on the street have no other place to take drugs (perhaps, the supervised drug injection site where they get the drugs?).
Empathy must come with responsibility and not with a patronizing de-humanizing pseudo-compassion. Which is, of course, just enablement under a different name.
This talk about not pooping on the street and not shooting up in the street is not really solving the material issues of homeless people. How does pooping in a bush or going to a supervised drug injection site get you out of abject poverty?
How is it not a structural problem when homelessness is a growing epidemic? Do you think that if every homeless person took a little more personal responsibility this issue would be fixed already?
> Do you think that if every homeless person took a little more personal responsibility this issue would be fixed already?
Yes. A little more personal responsibility leads to taking more and more personal responsibility. I dislike talking about homeless people as a homogenous group, but the visibly/street homeless need to take more responsibility for their life in order to improve it. There are many resources available that can make their journey out of homelessness faster.
