Where else can they go? One of c. 2 dozen 'pit stops' that mostly close by 8pm?
That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?
Its totally fair, and expected that people lose sympathy when they have to clean up shit.
Yes, if there were safe, available, places to shit then that'd be a good step to avoid this issue. But the root issue is that people no longer have sympathy because its so disruptive and so gross and has been going on for so long.
> I find it so weird that people blame homeless people for defecating on the streets.
They're blamed because they did it. They did it because there is no alt, but they did it, and "it" is gross and not desirable. SF has been talking about the issue for years, and its not resolved, so your tolerance and sympathy drops over time.
EDIT: To be clear. I realize shit is gross. It's the most toxic thing a human regularly encounters.
But the implication of the grossness of shit being a 'bright red line' for lost empathy is that no reasonable human would EVER deal with someone else's shit, when that is demonstrably untrue.
We choose to empathize with babies and not homeless people. That's fine, I guess, but feels sort of gross on the cosmic scale.
Violence is an event and inherently ephemeral. Poop is a thing and it will sit there until removed giving me much more time to see it.
Maybe that's why?
I'm sure violence _would_ get on me pretty quickly, but I just don't see that much violence in the homeless in my local area.
Btw, it feels pretty disingenuous that your example is this group of perfect angel homeless people sleeping and praying on the corner. That rhetoric pretty much immediately loses anyone who has regular contact and they think "welp this person doesn't know what they are talking about"
Oxytocin--the hormone critically involved in empathy and social behaviors--has been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1]. If that link holds, it suggests why public defecation is the emerging turning point of the debate.
Rhetorically, this means trivializing the problem is unlikely to be successful. People will lose empathy for people who shit on their street. On the flip side, this offers a well-scoped beachhead. Solving the public defecation problem could rebuild empathy for San Francisco's homeless and give political oxygen to the broader, more-intractable problem of homelessness overall.
(I'm honestly shocked nobody has run for office in San Francisco on a vision zero-esque pledge to eliminate public defecation.)
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbb.12...
If I, as an adult, can clean up your poop for you, then it escapes me why you, homeless but also adult, can't pick it up and put it in a dumpster. The logical conclusion is that you do not wish to.
So, I'm not so sure that the baby/dog to encampment dweller connection makes the most appropriate vehicle for mentally dealing with the poop. Or, maybe, it is the right vehicle. I really don't know.
When I rationalize my poop scooping duties by juxtaposing them with the duties of parents and dog owners, I end up placing the babies, dogs, and adult poopers in the same category. I don't know if that categorization actually reflects reality, and therefore I can't tell if that kind of rationalization will actually help me react to the poop in a constructive way.
Nope, I lost empathy because in Seattle the homeless are exempt from prosecution and commit crimes with impunity. People like Francisco Calderon (https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/warrant-issued-for...) or Travis Berge (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/meth-mental-illness-murder-...) are repeatedly released to commit crimes and harm others.