This question has become central to the whole conversation about homelessness. By “incorrigibles” I mean the drug addicts and shiftless types who roam our streets, break into our cars, trash our city, and make life miserable for so many store owners. If you listen to the progressives, the answer is “We owe these poor, unfortunate people everything.” We not only need to feel compassion for them, we need to devote whatever resources it takes to cure them so they can re-enter society. And resources, of course, cost money, so we need to raise as much money as possible, even if that means taking money away from the traditional responsibilities of government—like police.
This is the position our extreme progressive city government takes. Led by the existing leftists on the City Council—Kaplan, Fife, Bas and Kalb—and abetted by the new leftists—Ramachandran and Jenkins—and with far-left Sheng Thao as mayor, we’re going to hear a lot more about our moral responsibility to the fentanyl addicts. About how they’re our addicted brothers and sisters. About how they’re just people who’ve taken a wrong turn because of racism and an oppressive patriarchy. About how a progressive society must not let them down but invest whatever it takes to rehabilitate them. And since there is no longer any check or balance on this incoming City Council, we can expect Oakland to double down on the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s already thrown at homeless addicts, with little or no result. (Today’s Chronicle reports that Oakland spends $122 million a year on homelessness-related problems.)
But there is an alternative approach: a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest one that says, essentially, if people prove themselves utterly incapable of competing in our society, then we ought to let them be, to live out their lives according to the decisions they made that led them to their path of self-destruction.
Look: People have agency. Each of us determines how we wend our way along life’s path. When we look at the anti-social types who drop out of society and make a living pilfering and preying on others, there’s something pernicious about the choices they’ve deliberately made. It’s hard to avoid feeling that, since they made their own bed, despite all the warnings, then let them sleep in it.
Take Chet Peeples, for example; he was just profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle. A longtime addict who’s been in and out of jail and homeless, he lived in subsidized housing run by a nonprofit, but was recently evicted for sending a threatening email to the housing management warning them they would “literally and biblically go to hell” unless they did what he told them to.
His life had not been good. In addition to a string of felony convictions, including strongarm robbery and auto theft, according to the Chronicle, Peeples also had “several hit-and runs, [drug] prescription fraud, a Valium and Klonopin addiction and several suicide attempts.” He was placed multiple times in involuntary psychiatric detention in Contra Costa and San Francisco, and, after he was evicted, he alleged that management had “conspired to evict him with falsified stories.”
Peeples’ future is in grave doubt. Were we to heed to advice of progressives, we would find the money to house him yet another time, give him drug therapy, an education, pay his bills, and hope that, after a lifetime of warring against the majority culture, something in him will mercifully change.
There are thousands of others like Chet Peeples in San Francisco and Oakland. There is no conceivable way to house and treat them all—I wish the progressives for once would admit that and stop pretending that there is. Some individuals may be beyond help. I’m not saying Chet Peeples is, but for many years society has tried its best to sustain him, and nothing so far has worked. Is there any reason to believe that what hasn’t worked in the past will work in the future?
We have to admit that some people are beyond help. It may be time to start thinking about letting go of the people who are a drag on themselves and on the rest of us. What else are we to do with incorrigibles? Perhaps having to fend for themselves will be the shock they need to come around.
If there’s only so much money available—and obviously there is—I’d much rather spend it on schoolteachers, childcare workers, janitors, bus drivers, nurses, fast food workers and other frontline workers---people who actually help our society and deserve our help in turn. Increasingly, I find myself resenting diverting what little money government has to people who are undermining civilization. We can do better.
Steve Heimoff