Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2023, 02:35 AMBut How does one get from A to B and how did a person get to be is state A (The state of being fucked.) to begin with.
Very good questions, and I can postulate a few answers with a little Sherlock Holmes type observation & deduction.
First thing is observing the demographic. These folks are mostly between the ages of 20-50, with the real hard cases being right in the middle in their late 20s-early 30s. Younger kids heading in that direction get picked up by CPS and given a little more in the way of help with group homes and counseling, and they haven't spent that much time on the street doing drugs they're totally fucked up yet. Folk older than 50 who have been consuming mass quantities of drugs and alcohol for a couple of decades tend to die as their livers resemble swiss cheese and give out.
The beginners in their 20s tend to come out of the foster homes system after bouncing around there for the first 20 years of their lives, having been removed from their original less than ideal living situation with a parent or parents at the low end of the socio economic spectrum. Said parents may have held some kind of crappy job, but probably had substance abuse issues of their own, and the kids learned everything they needed to know about drugs by the time they got to Junior High.
If they managed to graduate HS, they still couldn't read anything longer than a twitter message, although they might be able to add and subtract to do drug transactions and bargain at the pawn shop for how much the tv they stole is worth. They are basically unemployable, quickly land on the streets and busy themselves finding ways to get enough money to score some drugs. If they're female and still decent looking enough with a few teeth left, they work as prostitutes. If they're male,they go into the robbery and burglary bizness, along with dealing some drugs.
By the time they hit 30 if they make it that far they've been in countless fights with others like them on the streets, or with the cops. Violence has become a way of life, and if they are hopped up on some crystal meth, you have a human A-Bomb walking the streets ready to explode at any moment.
If you could even get these folks to counseling, do you really think you could fix psychological problems 30 years in the making with a couple of hours of therapy a week with an overworked social worker? Not gonna happen.
To fix this problem, you need to go back all the way to where it starts, back with the parents who bred them and the basically hopeless lives they lived at the bottom end of the society 30-50 years ago. Contrary to what you might think, everybody growing up then didn't live like Kevin & Winnie Cooper of the Wonder Years or the cast of Beverly Hills 90210. A much larger percentage of the population was living in the decaying cities of the rust belt and the dying towns out in West Texas, Kansas and Nebraska. Its the children of those folks who have migrated out to the cities of San Francisco and Seattle where the weather generally isn't too bad, they can find food, score some drugs and steal some cars or burglarize some McMansions.
Are we as a society doing anything to fix the etiology of this problem, which begins with the kids growing up in households with no hope, homes being foreclosed on and schools which fail to educate? Of course we're not, those problems are only getting worse, so one can predict with fair certainty the problem of whacked out homeless people will only increase for the forseeable future.
RE