Cruel Non-Judgmentalism

Lucianne.com links to a New York Post article about homelessness, and why it’s become such a problem. It is worth quoting at length.

For decades it’s been an open secret that “homeless” is, for the most part, a euphemism for chronic afflictions that have proven very difficult to treat. The overwhelming majority of homeless people end up on the streets either because they are mentally ill, or because they engage in self-destructive behaviors, or because they live in a cruelly compassionate “non-judgmental” society that no ­longer grants itself the moral authority to distinguish between illness and health.

In the mid-1980s, when I worked in New York’s City Hall, Mayor Ed Koch commissioned a detailed study of the city’s single homeless men. I no longer have the report, but I recall its main conclusions, which divided this population into five main groups.

A large segment was clinically diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. A smaller group suffered from severe personality disorders. They weren’t necessarily sick, but they had a hard time interacting with others.

Another 20 percent of the persistently homeless were crippled by substance abuse (though men in all five groups used drugs and alcohol to some extent). Hardcore slackers — what we used to call “bums” — made up about 15 percent of the total. They were generally healthy, and often had job skills, but preferred not to be tied down to regular jobs.

The remaining segment — roughly 10 percent of the homeless — were simply down on their luck. They had lost a job, they had been burned out of their apartment building or they had seen a marriage break up. They needed a helping hand to get back on their feet.

The report concluded that only this last 10 percent of the homeless population could be helped in any meaningful way, an observation that sheds light on why, despite billions in spending and hundreds of social programs, homelessness and the chaos it creates has reached the crisis point in cities and states across the country.

As young people, our grandparents would have been amazed homelessness could be a problem during a booming economy. Then most of these broken people would have been institutionalized, and only the “hardcore slackers” and those down on their luck would have lived in “hobo jungles” or at the county poor farm.