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This has not been my experience at all, living in precisely one of those western liberal cities.
San Diego has one of the worst homeless problems in the entire country; especially as someone who commutes primarily via public transit, I am in near-constant contact with the homeless, including the absolute worst and least functional of them; yesterday, while walking in a busy part of downtown, I walked by a homeless man who smelled so strongly of human shit that I detected his presence from across the street, several seconds before seeing him. A few months ago, I saw a homeless man literally drop his pants and shit on the floor of the trolley.
When I complain about these things to my extremely liberal/progressive friends, they nearly universally commiserate with me, and agree that these externalities of homelessness are disgusting and intolerable. Where they disagree with me is what ought to be done about it. Nearly nobody, outside of individuals who have built their identity around “homeless advocacy”, will look down on you for complaining about smelly insane bums. They just think that, as Jon Stewart memorably claimed, the continued existence of those smelly insane bums is “the price of our freedom.” They cannot countenance the kind of policies which would ultimately be necessary to do anything sustainable about it.
Thus, complaining about it is understood as simply blowing off steam, rather than the expression of serious politically-oriented opinion.
For a moment I thought you meant something like this epic display of civilizational decline: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DqfJYEKB8NQ
But trolley has multiple meanings.
Well. I won't disagree about the epic display of civilizational decline. But this particular showing is being put on by a pair of clowns. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-poop-in-nyc-mop-bucket/
Huh, I never knew that. I assumed that the homeless guy had been making a scene earlier and that's why cameras were filming but 'staged act' is a much more straightforward conclusion.
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I'm not saying they don't complain but my experience with it is that when people complain about it, it's only with trusted friends and the way they say it is as if it is transgressive to admit that they don't think it's acceptable that mentally ill people scream at them on the bus. Then it's usually followed by multiple phrases saying how obviously it's not those people's fault and how it's because we're so terrible, etc...
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