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Before I leave aside the Great Homelessness Debate - after owning a mean and thoughtless tweet - I'm going to make two observations that some of you won't like about empathy and narratives. Feel free to ignore or block without the need to issue a declaration. /1
Whenever I've said I have no pity for farmers going under because they voted for Trump, none of you felt the need to lecture me on empathy. I said: choices have consequences, and many of you were fine that. Some of you seem to have, ah, selective empathy for choices and ruin./2
Second, many of you - rightly - reproached me for building a narrative based on almost no information. I did that, because I have my own biases and I'm glad to be pulled up short on them. But many of you similarly created entire narratives *also* based on nothing. /3
In other words, the rule today was that it's okay to make giant assumptions as long as those assumptions say good things about you. I knew this would happen, but I forget that a little provocation goes a long way. That's on me. I should know better. /4
Finally, I will never, ever be comfortable with treating poor people like they are barnyard animals who have no self-control, no ability to make decisions, no agency as human beings. Pushing back against that removal of humanity from the poor is why I turned right in the 70s. /5
You might find that odd, but growing up in Mass. and *knowing* people who were poor, I never accepted treating them like household pets who need constant supervision. While I reject the "let them die" freaks of the right, I will always ask about choices behind a pic like that. /6
Still, I should be more careful about assuming that I know what happened. But I reflexively reject the going-in position is that it's always the system and never the person. To me, that assumption treats others as less than capable human beings. /
Whether I need to be better about space for flawed human beings - well, that's obvious. I should. I'm a flawed man who's made a lot of mistakes in his life. But not gonna lie: I bristle at the notion that I'm not responsible for those mistakes. Never understood that approach. /8x
