“Shocking” — hardly, given the aforementioned extensive media coverage of the situation.
“Unpleasant to be around” — I personally find lots of folks unpleasant to be around; the homeless fall somewhere in the middle of the scale. I’m far less concerned with their drug use than with the intoxication of people owning and operating cars, for example. I know far more people negatively and physically impacted by DUI than by random assault by the homeless.
I’m also less bothered by the existence of folks without homes than I am by folks who — upon registering their own discomfort with the situation — seek to move the problem out of view rather than addressing the root cause.
The process you’re seeking to describe as a “desensitization” is instead a growing comfort with a larger swath of communities than folks who don’t live in such cities are fortunate enough to encounter. In reality, it would seem that desensitization actually occurs when folks are exposed to endlessly “othering” media, with very little personal experience to speak of.
Policing has taken a similar path from “community engagement based decision making” to “birds eye statistical algorithmic policing”. It’s going about as well as addressing the actual causes of homelessness.
To split hairs: I would have to assume any person capable of visiting an American city, but somehow without any media exposure at all would have to be homeless themselves, and people are generally not shocked by others living their same experience.
I’m trying to think of another scenario where such a hypothetical person might exist, but my imagination fails me.
Yes, you are totally correct that such a person would probably not visit Seattle. That part of my reply was an abstract clarifying question aimed at "It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin".
I.e. the negative feeling one gets when one is in a city with people living in tents as they do in Seattle today is not necessarily strictly or even primarily due to media consumption, because (I assert) a theoretical human unexposed to media would still have a qualitatively-same instinctive negative reaction. Do you disagree? If so I am interested in why you disagree.
For example, if you somehow talked an orthodox Amish person into visiting Seattle with you (and perhaps had them read a few books about what cities are like in general first), they would still be shocked by the tent areas and find them unpleasant, despite never being exposed to whatever news outlets you consider inflammatory, immoral, incorrect, etc (and I do agree that all news outlets are all of these things, I personally avoid the stuff).
Relatedly, if you then asked the Amish person if they would prefer to stay in Seattle and help try to fix the problem, or to just return to their Amish village and ignore the problem, I think they would 100% of the time go with the latter? Are they wrong?
No the Amish person is not wrong to return home in such a situation -- in that scenario, it sounds like the Amish person doesn't like the realities of city life, and therefore chooses to remove themselves from the situation, as they dislike elements of the city, and are unwilling to work to address them at their root causes. As opposed to trying to get someone else removed.
My position is that people who do not want to do the work needed to actually combat homelessness -- not simply shift it around -- should move out of the city. They are a selfish drain of city resources, demanding with their greater personal resources that ever greater public resources be spent on their personal peace of mind. A peace of mind that comes at the expense of additional resources directed at actually addressing the issues, long-term.
City life and its advantages are guaranteed to nobody. You have to contribute to your community in order for it to improve. Same with rural life, just in another direction.
But to return to your initial point about a visiting Amish -- the Amish have an existing modern culture and plenty of exposure to media. The real test would be a member of an uncontacted tribe.
Should such a person suddenly find themselves downtown, which do you think they would find more "shocking and unpleasant" -- the group of people living communally and nomadically, or the individual folks in giant metal machines spewing cancerous fog into our shared atmosphere, so they can get to work on time?
Let me dwell for a moment on your nitpicking dismissal of the Amish example. My understanding of the spirit of Amishness is basically to live within a cultural snapshot of preindustrial Germany, since with postindustrial life comes a huge web of dependencies on other people where, if the web collapses, most of us will die. The Amish have placed a very long bet, and it is not clear to me that it will turn out to have been an unwise bet in the end. Sure, more liberal Amish do accept some technology and contact with the outside world, but I believe orthodox Amish, at least aspirationally, do not.
We today are culturally massively(!!!) more similar to preindustrial Germany than to hunter gatherer tribes, and the orthodox Amish are at least abstractly aware of modern technology existing in the outside world. Jumping all the way to hunter gatherers drags in a huge amount of unnecessary confounding factors. Yes, quite obviously, hunter gatherers would be more surprised by cars than by tent people. I believe the Amish would see cars as dirty mechanized wagons, whereas hunter gatherers would see them as (evil?) magic. Also, one can be shocked by more than one thing at a time, and the presence of one type of shock does not invalidate the others.
Just because homelessness is not the worst modern problem, does not mean it is not a problem. The fact that it is a recent problem here in America (to the degree we see it today, anyway) suggests that it may be more tractable than, say, cars or industry (which I don't disagree are also problems).
I agree that people who do not want to contribute to a community should leave. There is an interesting symmetry here though - do you feel the same way about non-native (to the city) homeless? Are the homeless contributing? Or are they exempt from this requirement? I assume you will say they are exempt or that they are contributing in some way, and if you don't mind I am interested to hear your reasoning.
Answering this earnestly with the assumption that the final paragraph is in good faith. And stating for the record that the below summarizes my attempt to imagine the best we could do with the ingredients we have. If I were building a world out of whole cloth, my ambition would be grander.
To be clear about the whole Amish/uncontacted tribe/et all scenarios -- the point I intended (but perhaps did not make) was that I'm not especially interested in what hypothetical people think about anything. They don't exist. Every single real world example suffers from problems in the vein of those present with the Amish example. Kowtowing to the needs of hypothetical people has, historically, caused far greater harm than good.
To your questions -- my beliefs in this arena largely boil down to this: each member of a community has an inherent responsibility to contribute that which they are able, both in terms of ability and in terms of resources. No more, but also no less.
The reason this responsibility exists is that every member's success is inextricably linked with their community -- because success (beyond sheer survival) is measured by community. One cannot exist without the other -- and a high tide lifts all boats. In our current global system, living outside of any community is, practically, impossible -- so the responsibility is inherent.
Homeless are not exempt, but consideration would be made for the distinction between folks of comfortable means versus those living on a day-by-day basis. One group has resources and ability in excess of their needs. Another group lacks the resources to sustain ability. To lift them up is to lift the community. Sure some folks would refuse to change in accordance with societal standards -- but a lot less than you might expect, once the barriers of social shame, inefficient and needlessly cruel bureaucracy, and infantilization are removed. And yes, were we to implement this tomorrow, the above wouldn't happen overnight. The point is consistency and transparency in service of making everyone understand that they the individual is part of a greater whole.
Which is to say: I believe that the more one contributes to a community, the more the community becomes what it's meant to be: a collection of disparate people making up a symbiotic human ecosystem.
Obviously this system assumes folks acting in good faith, which feels lacking at the moment. But I'm hardly alone in believing that lack is due in large part to the current lack of everyone having skin the game, due to policies pushing problems back and forth, costing everyone money and attention, and accomplishing nothing but creating frustrated factions.
“Unpleasant to be around” — I personally find lots of folks unpleasant to be around; the homeless fall somewhere in the middle of the scale. I’m far less concerned with their drug use than with the intoxication of people owning and operating cars, for example. I know far more people negatively and physically impacted by DUI than by random assault by the homeless.
I’m also less bothered by the existence of folks without homes than I am by folks who — upon registering their own discomfort with the situation — seek to move the problem out of view rather than addressing the root cause.
The process you’re seeking to describe as a “desensitization” is instead a growing comfort with a larger swath of communities than folks who don’t live in such cities are fortunate enough to encounter. In reality, it would seem that desensitization actually occurs when folks are exposed to endlessly “othering” media, with very little personal experience to speak of.
Policing has taken a similar path from “community engagement based decision making” to “birds eye statistical algorithmic policing”. It’s going about as well as addressing the actual causes of homelessness.