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June 05, 2009
The law is the law!
And police priorities are police priorities. Hear hear! A friend emailed me a link to a story about the repeated ticketing of a car with a dead man inside: A New York City woman says her father apparently lay dead for weeks in a minivan while police repeatedly left parking tickets on the vehicle.In another report, the body is described as severely decomposed with the vehicle window cracked open. The man was also described as "homeless." I suspect a dying or even dead dog would have merited more attention, as it's considered inhumane to leave a dog inside a car. Which it is, of course. But humans -- especially those considered "homeless" -- are left to rot. I remember seeing a man on the New York subway who was so decrepit that he had the entire subway car almost to himself. I couldn't stand the stench, but I stayed there long enough to observe that everyone who entered the car would leave immediately. The chronically ill man was lying horizontally on a row of seats. At the time I realized that had he been a dog something would have been done. In a post titled "Preferential Treatment for homeless dogs," I commented on the contradiction: .... to our enlightened way of thinking, dogs have the right to be cared for when they are clearly unable to care for themselves, whereas humans don't. In the name of some perversion of "rights" theory, humans are allowed to rot away in public places, because society has no right to help people who are clearly unable to take care of themselves if they are unwilling to accept help.It's easy for me to pontificate about these things, but to be fair to the bottom-level bureaucrats involved, I have to say that it would be a lot easier to report a canine problem than a human problem. "Just call animal control!" is an easy thing to remember, and there are probably brownie points awarded to any meter person enlightened enough to report an animal-in-car problem. But actually report a decrepit homeless man in a car? Heaven forfend! You might get in trouble with a supervisor over "priorities." Or the activists who work against harassing the homeless. I guess we should be glad that such a "system" wasn't designed deliberately. posted by Eric on 06.05.09 at 11:38 AM
Comments
Well, you're allowed to grab random dogs without asking their permission and put them in a caged institution for their own good, give them shots, and adopt them all out to a family they don't get to choose. Not so much with *people*. silvermine · June 5, 2009 12:46 PM We used to realize that these people needed to be cared for, and we put them in insane asylums. Then someone decided it was more humane to let them fester in their own filth in the streets and terrorize everyone else. Clayton Cramer has written a lot about de-institutionalization- even a book I think. dfenstrate · June 5, 2009 01:24 PM Blogger discovers that humans and dogs are different. Who knew? Paul A'Barge · June 6, 2009 08:55 AM I thought I was commenting on an ironic situation. Oh well. Eric Scheie · June 6, 2009 10:29 AM Dogs (and human children) are treated differently because their present circumstances were not a product of their choices. Roy Mustang · June 6, 2009 03:54 PM Roy nails it - if you saw a child in a subway car looking like the derelict adult you saw, you could (and likely someone would) call Child Protective Services. (This is more difficult if the child were a teenager, as they may be running from CPS, which doesn't always do a good job in marginal cases. There's also the issue of how much agency teenagers have versus adults and versus younger children. But if you saw a 6-year-old in rags and smelling bad and looking abandoned by the world, there's someone you can call.) Anthony · June 8, 2009 06:58 PM Post a comment
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I guess we should be glad that such a "system" wasn't designed deliberately.
I don't think I agree with that statement.
While evil is bad, willful ignorance is pretty much as bad and has worse aspects.
One reason they're worse is because the people who have caused that problem will not stop. They feel good about themselves, who are you to tell them they're making the problem worse?
You understand? If it were deliberately set up we could possibly shame them and/or get some activists to help us.
Unfortunately, the ones who would help are the very ones who are working to continue the conditions where urban outdoorsmen(Neil Boortz' appelation) are put at more risk.
And all so these fine, upstanding, socially-, intellectually- and morally-superior, willfully-ignorant tools can feel better about themselves.