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I’m sitting here cracking up over that one.
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Sorry for the typo gracchus,
Yeah, but ya can't force it. The individual has to want to be "cured". Cooperation IS required... when tends to mean a certain amount of, to use a word of ill repute, conformance. Generally enforced and not at all what well meaning type consider "free". This is how the mentally/emotionally ill got dumped on the streets, not to mention the abuses that happen under that system.
And I've been down and DO walk that road too. It's simple, just put one foot in front of the other. Did I mention there are a lot of funky rocks and they shift a lot? Sometimes they jump up and hit ya in the head too. No fun, but needful.
Meds, in my experience, tend to be a shortcut... "OK he's stable, nothing more to do here... On to the next".
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It’s not me who’s owed the apology.
The same goes for non-mental illnesses. Mental illness adds an extra layer of difficulty as the nature of the disease can often make a rational choice to co-operate with treatment impossible without a lot of extra work.
That’s only part of the story. The “snake-pit”/“cuckoo’s nest” mental hospitals definitely needed to be closed in the 1980s, but Reagan and his bunch had the option to find better and more modern institutions where the mentally ill could be placed; instead they were left to fend for themselves on the streets.
Your experience is your own. The problem people in this topic are having is that you’re generalising your own “simple to solve” situation with those of others who may not have had as many options.
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gracchus
You're absolutely correct. Rational decisions, as you and I (did I just say I'm rational?) might think it, aren't really possible in that state. BUT, the society we inhabit has made a WHOLE bunch of choices that aren't rational. Some due to greed. Some due to pure... I don't know what. I do know we can't force treatment and/or medication... And there are semi-good reasons for that too.
We have corporate "citizens" who refuse to pay their fair share so the funding to make things work for all of just is not there. Yes, that IS greed, but it REALLY is just a very small percentage of the population. But it has the rest of us tearing at one another's throats like the Kilkenny cats, screaming "you should do something!!!" and the the politicians, some good, some bad working hard to not get hit by the flying rocks.
Go find a book called Future Shock, Alvin Toffler. When you finish that one go find another called Shock Wave Rider, John Brunner. You tell me what you think?
I think, as a society, we're ALL in future shock (PTSD) and the ad men have figured out just how useful it is to keep us there.... Some just have a worse case than others. I also think the only way out is to sometimes make compromises. We came just a hair away from starting a solution... But we got something else because "I can't vote for that crook" and got something FAR worse instead. People forget NOT voting isn't a vote against, it's do what you want, I don't care.
So, in the next election, even if you don't get exactly what you want. Consider at the alternative. If you don't like that, do what I did the last time go for the one you like better. Do vote; vomit into your mouth if you must, but DO vote.
Progress... Not perfectionSimple to solve? Oh… well, simple only if one ignores the details and there are a LOT of those pesky details.
Yes, and the the snake pits were closed, in California, long before the 80's... Try the late 60's and it didn't happen because of Reagan. The abuses were so egregious that no one could stand them. We had street people in the 70's and they weren't "hippies".
Yes, later on, at the federal level it was "presumed" that "community" solutions would rise to meet the demand. Those had no hope happening because even in '78 corporations weren't paying their fair share; individual property taxes were sky rocketing and clever marketers scared the electorate into voting for bread and circuses. Now the fed have no money, states, counties and cities have no money and and what they do have is often wasted on quite stupid but popular things like sports stadiums etc.
Two years later we got the equivalent of the "tea party" and Reagan at the federal level.
Yeah, it's greed. Everyone has their hands out. No one wants to grub. Everyone thinks the other guy should do more... But it's always the other guy.
The problem I have the finger wagging and scolding.
The funds available from the, shall we say 98 percent, of the population are NOT sufficient for anything even approximating a solution. Scolding and wring hands do nothing towards a solution, not did or does "occupy" or street protests in anything but the most extreme circumstance.
Real change takes time and patience.
I want patience and I want it RIGHT NOW!The term you’re looking for is “the neoliberal consensus.” This article puts it in perspective:
Whether you’re talking about Objectivists, “free” market fundamentalists, piggish plutocrats, or Third-Way technocrats like Clinton and Blair, the basic message to one degree or another is “you’re on your own” – the main difference is the degree to which they’re willing (if they’re willing at all) to help the losers in the system tug on their bootstraps. Given that it’s not 1992 anymore, opposing it is not a matter of seeking perfection but rather of seeking a political-economic way that will work going forward.
I read both more than two decades ago. “Future Shock” doesn’t hold up so well as “The Shockwave Rider” does, mainly because Toffler in the mid-'60s to early '70s didn’t anticipate the true displacement that would occur for many people from the combination of automation and global neoliberalism. Toffler, still living in the relatively prosperous world of the post-war economic anomaly, also didn’t grasp that many of the shocked would respond not by becoming paralysed but by actively embracing and promoting the very forces that were destroying them.
Brunner, on the other hand, extrapolated on then-nascent information technologies (and speculated on now-nascent biochemical/genetic ones) and the speculated on the societies they would create in a way that makes him seem remarkably prescient on many developments we’re witnessing currently.
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Well… It’s like this; I’ve actually BEEN homeless and on the streets. Seen it with my own eyes up close and personal, not just looking with pity as I ride/walk by. And yes, it was VERY easy to get there and VERY VERY hard to get out of it. It doesn’t take someone or something richer. Just bigger, stronger and more vicious… and it happens even on the street. I got there by being too tired and broken down to even try any more.
And no, you are absolutely correct, there is no wish, magic or prayer to make it go away.
If you refer to the individual who drifted to California and was held out as an example of what can’t be allowed, or the people or know who are still there, the only “problem” they are is that they will die in fear, pain and badly. And that is, to use words entirely too small, no fun to watch.
You presume entirely too much
I’m not the one proposing simple solutions, mainly because I’m not the one who’s been generalising my own experiences to others.
Do you remember who was governor of California at the time? Hint: the same guy who took the policy national in the 1980s when he was elected president. The presumption about “community solutions” was the same convenient one that prioritised cutting taxes, shrinking government services (like better public mental health institutions), and serving corporate “persons” before human ones.
Don’t make this a “we’re all equally selfish” situation. Movement conservatism and neoliberal fundamentalism has made a significant portion of the electorate far more greedy and selfish than the rest of us. Instead of responding to this by moving leftward over the past 30 years the Dems and Labour in the UK have, until recently, responded by moving rightward.
In a society that’s this mired in the dogma of greed and selfishness, to the point where Fukayama declared its triumph to be the end of history, you better believe that this is needed. For all the problems with the Occupy movement, it pushed the concept of growing inequality into the national discourse at a time when the “liberal” media and establishment Dems were unwilling to mention it.
It does, but when those with the power and the ostensible goal of doing so are complacent and happy with the current situation they need a good hard shove. That’s what Occupy and Sanders and the DSA are doing with a Dem establishment that thinks it can carry on with a glacial pace of change (and with climate change, the glaciers seem to be moving faster than the DNC establishment these days).
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“the neoliberal consensus" Nice label. Doesn’t explain why and stops at just the label hence useless and ti also doesn’t go back far enough. I’m still trying to figure out the genesis becaue there is always a root and Reagan/Thatcher were “just” the “logical” result of what happened before.
Yeah, Future Shock had zero idea of how far it could go. We've gone there and well beyond.
We're seeing things now that even Brunner might be shocked by.Unfortunately, we live in an era where if we can, we do with little to no thought of what the unintended consequences are.
It's like huge chunks of society become like Wernher Von Braun in the old Tom Lehrer song...
[ "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun](https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-wernher-von-braun-lyrics#note-14235722)