What's Needed Now Is Not False 'Compassion' but Real Courage

[Ptarmigan]

What's Needed Now Is Not False 'Compassion' but Real Courage
https://townhall.com/columnists/joshhammer/2023/05/05/whats-needed-now-is-not-false-compassion-but-real-courage-n2622870

An obsession with a distorted sense of "compassion" is strangling our national debate on the most important issues of our time and contributing to the ongoing deterioration of the country. Leftist activists and politicians love to appeal to people's "compassion" in support of policies with demonstrably destructive results, and we must stop being taken in by this deceit if we are to have any hope of repairing our damaged nation.

Blue city/blue state policies on mental illness, drug use and homelessness are perfect examples. An NPR article from 2017 described "deinstitutionalization" -- the nationwide effort to close mental hospitals and other long-term psychiatric facilities in the 1950s and 1960s -- as being an outgrowth of the civil rights movement. But the hoped-for move to "community-based" care was a chimera; in fact, thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of the most seriously mentally ill have ended up homeless. There they have stayed, and their numbers have grown -- particularly in places where policies permit it.

California is perhaps the best (worst) example. Los Angeles County alone has nearly 70,000 homeless. The San Francisco Chronicle projected that city's homeless population to be around 20,000 last year. Sacramento has seen a 70% increase in homelessness just since 2019.

The official narrative at present is that homelessness is primarily a function of lack of affordable housing, but this is a sleight of hand. According to author Michael Shellenberger, fully two-thirds of Los Angeles' homeless population deal with addiction or mental illness, and half of the homeless in San Francisco are dealing with both. Affordable housing will solve neither problem. Progressives attack Shellenberger because he has the audacity to attack California's so-called progressive policies as contributing to the crisis. But homelessness and mental illness are national phenomena, so comparing statistics from different states shores up Shellenberger's arguments.

The left has a distorted obsession of "compassion".

The problem isn't poverty and anti-immigrant hysteria. It's policy.

Those who promote these disastrous policies never want to answer difficult questions, preferring to hide behind false "compassion." It isn't really compassion, either, if it forbids nuance, ignores multiple perspectives or dismisses complicated and conflicting interests. People capable of real compassion can admit, for example, that they have concern for children struggling with gender dysphoria and for girls who do not want biological males undressing in their locker rooms, or taking away their athletic opportunities.

Admittedly, it takes courage to speak up. The word "compassion" is thrown around now as a thinly veiled threat: agree with us and support our policies, or we'll call you a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, a transphobe; someone who wants children, the poor and the mentally ill to die.

[Old n Grumpy]

The problem isn't poverty and anti-immigrant hysteria. It's activism and attorneys with to much free time.

All the so called do gooders don’t have to live with the consequences of their actions..

As pelosi was famous for saying when trying to give us a crap sandwich “do it for the children “

[Eupher]

Hammer's a very bright attorney and he's not entirely wrong in his op-ed.

But when you break it down, policy isn't the problem. The problem is cultural.

California is perhaps the hotbed of cultural insanity, where most of the rest of the Nation scratches its head in stunning disbelief at the garbage that the politicians there foist on its people.

This didn't come by itself. Cultural shifts, especially in that leftist state (with an acknowledgement to the few pockets of sanity that remain) have driven policy.