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Comment by deepspace | Hacker News Reader

When we look back at the history of the US, the one practice that stands out is slavery. Today, we can only shake our heads and wonder how so-called civilized people allowed that abomination to continue for as long as it did. How can so many people have looked upon so much human suffering for so long, without lifting a finger?

Today, we are forcing people out into the street through low wages and callous layoffs to increase corporate profits. All the while, condoning skyrocketing rents due to the commoditization of housing. Meanwhile, we provide virtually no support for homeless people. We literally leave them out to die in the street, as the article states. This attitude will likely be viewed in a similar light a hundred years from now as we view slavery today.

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I've volunteered with the homeless for years. Someone doesn't get laid off from a corporate job and go live on the street. These are folks who exhausted the social safety nets, ran out of family members to impose on, ran out of friends' couches -- they're alcohol and drug addicts who burned all their bridges. Many of them have never held jobs at all.

What are you trying to say? It's their own fault?

I also volunteered working with the homeless. There is nobody who chooses to live on the streets. Those who do have mental health issues.

I am 100% sure it is a society problem, not an individual problem.

Yes, there absolutely are individuals whose homelessness is their own fault - every case is unique, some definitely did it to themselves and the majority did not. But placing all homeless on some sort of pedestal of morality is a really bizarre opinion from my view.

And therefore they do not deserve to live.

No, but unfortunately they're much harder to help than the former ones.

You're trying to put these words in the mouth of a person that has volunteered with the homeless. Isn't there a contradiction somewhere?

Spoken like someone who has never actually encountered a real homeless person, and only has an abstract, idealistic image of what a homeless person might hypothetically be like.

When participating in a conversation it is more helpful to first test what you are going to say before saying it. In this case what you have said applies equally to your own statement, and doesn't progress the conversation intellectually.

Often if a statement looks like rhetoric, it's because it is.

Having worked with, been, and always at the risk of homelessness, OP is half correct. Not everyone is there because they want to get out, but even when you do you're there in the first place because the systems of society are beyond broken.

I am not the commenter to whom you’re replying. But for what it’s worth, I regularly “actually encounter[]” homeless people, and personally interact with at least a few of them multiple times per week. My image of them is neither abstract nor idealistic. I agree with what deepspace wrote.

> This attitude will likely be viewed in a similar light a hundred years from now as we view slavery today.

A fun (when done right, for some people at least) activity is contemplating various strategies one could execute to accelerate this process, and thousands of other much needed cognitive optimizations.

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