It's okay if you don't want your city overrun by mentally ill homeless people
Looking the other way on public drug addiction is not a virtue.
Bethany Mandel has a habit of writing normal, uncontroversial, reasonable things on Twitter and getting absolutely roasted for it. This week her entry in this long-running and critically acclaimed series involves a recent trip to New York in which she remarked on seeing what she very likely correctly assumed was a mentally ill drug addict out in public:
In a followup to the predictable furor that followed, Mandel noted the tweet was not about the drug addict in question but rather how her children’s brains often remember the irrelevant details of a given day rather than the important ones. But no matter, the blood was in the water and the dead-eyes, gape-jawed sharks were circling. Here were some of the replies:
"We were supposed to be having an outing filled with our massive privilege, but then some street person ruined it all by being in our sight line." Hopefully your kids will grow up to have more empathy than their mother.
seems like that was a good opportunity to teach your children about empathy. unfortunately you are a bad person and parent.
Funny you could have used that as an important teaching moment for your kids but instead chose to gripe that your privileged day was ruined.
-Do you expect Manhattan to adjust to your delicate sensibilities? -How do you know the person is an addict? -If they are an addict, why does that negatively affect your children? -Isn’t dancing a fun thing?
Now, obviously, a large part of these fuming responses stem from the fact that Bethany Mandel is conservative, and the chief animating principle of a great many people’s lives is that they must affirm that they themselves are not conservative. If a conservative commentator says something, many people feel they must scramble to signal that they hate whatever it is she said, that they hate her, and that they themselves are not only not conservative but absolutely in no way, shape or form anything resembling one. Etc.
But beyond that, this needless little controversy underscores an important and bizarre undercurrent of modern progressive thought, which is that if you don’t want a ton of mentally ill, dangerous, unhealthy homeless people on your city streets, then you’re somehow a bad person. Progressives have come to talk about homelessness as if it’s a noble, almost ascetic virtue, and they seem to picture homeless people themselves as uniformly an austere, dignified, completely harmless class that poses literally no threat of any kind to anybody. Of course neither of these things is true. A rise in homelessness is not a good thing, and the homeless—while fully deserving of the full range of sympathy, compassion, outreach and help that we can offer them—are often deeply unwell and unstable people who can pose legitimate threats to bodily safety and civic order.
Progressives know this. In fact, progressives tend to be deeply uncomfortable about homeless people themselves; you can tell this because they are constantly inventing an ever-more-creative lexicon of ways to refer to the homeless, e.g., “people who are homeless,” “people experiencing homelessness,” “the unsheltered,” “people without housing.” (“Mention that a person is homeless only when relevant,” the AP’s stylebook dryly noted a few years ago.) This complex and silly vocabulary is most likely a reflection of what to most progressives much seem like an irreconcilable left-wing quandary: A swelling and dangerous urban homeless population is very often a legitimate hazard to civic order and a thriving social fabric, but also if they speak too plainly about it someone might think they’re a conservative. So you get terminology like “those struggling with homelessness,” and you have this bizarre impulse to pretend that drug addicts running around in the street might not “negatively affect” the children who see them. Okay.
I suppose you could argue that Mandel was right on the practical and wrong on the philosophical: She could have been more sympathetic to the homeless man’s plight, say, even as she expressed frustration that New York municipal mismanagement has made his destabilizing presence all the more likely. The problem is twofold: First, the same exact people would be 100% just as mad at her for that sort of remark as they were for the one she actually published. Secondly, this type of carefully managed, saccharine, faux-concerned front-facing pablum is just an awful way to do commentary of any kind. “Yesterday I saw a man struggling with homelessness who I think was on drugs. I hope the city takes care of him. We need to ensure that people experiencing unhoused homelessness have access to all the resources needed for a safe and healthy life. There is nothing wrong with being homeless.”
Yeah nobody thinks or talks like this. It would be utterly exhausting and functionally crippling to align your thoughts or your remarks with the rhetorical desires of progressives. Even progressives don’t really do it!
Here’s a bit of advice you should carry with you for the rest of your life: It’s okay to talk and think normally. It’s fine if you want to discuss difficult and uncomfortable subjects without plastering your remarks in about 75 layers of tedious, tremulous politically correct qualifications. It’s okay to unhappily note that you saw “an addict dancing with some pigeons” in the middle of a pleasant outing with your children. Don’t sweat it! You might fry the brains of some Internet progressives if you speak so bluntly, but normal and sane people will recognize that you’re not a “bad person and [bad] parent” for doing so.
So, to sum it up, all of these things can be true: Yes, we should very proactively address the needs of, and take care of, our homeless people, including (obviously) those with drug addictions and mental problems. Yes, a large homeless population will tend to bring with it significant and pressing issues of public safety and civic decay, and people should be at least modestly wary about city centers with high levels of homeless activity. Yes, it’s unpleasant to see drug addicts being addicted to drugs in public. No, you don’t have to be shy or scared of pointing that out. If you don’t want to see the city streets crowded with sick and unstable people, that doesn’t mean you have “delicate sensibilities,” it means you’re absolutely a 100% normal person. It’s fine.