I guess she must go somewhere else some of the time, but in the last several dozen times I’ve been on that block, she’s been there, no matter the time of day.
- She’s young, though it’s hard to say exactly how young, given the way that homelessness ages you.
- She can’t be much older than 30, though, if she’s that.
- She’s obviously afflicted by mental illness, drug abuse, or both.
- And she’s clearly dying. She’s emaciated, she’s jaundiced, her stomach is distended, her skin hangs off of her in spots, she’s got open sores, sometimes her breathing is labored. She appears permanently disoriented, moving slowly and unnaturally, often seeming ready to collapse.
She lives like that so close to a university with a $40 billion dollar endowment that you could throw a rock from her spot and hit the walls of one of the tasteful gothic buildings...
The trouble, or so I’ve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it.
- To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, that’s the end of the story. Nothing to be done.
- For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die.
And letting them die is exactly what we’re doing...
