The thing that people are missing is how much dealing with this on a day-to-day basis changes you. You can't walk past/through that much human misery without ha

The thing that people are missing is how much dealing with this on a day-to-day basis changes you. You can't walk past/through that much human misery without hardening your heart towards it. My commute to work for the past 4 years has taken me through the 6th st corridor. I walk past homeless people, SRO hotels and what I believe is a methadone clinic. People in wheelchairs with diabetic amputations are disturbingly common. And even those with all their limbs seem broken physically in a way that means they'll never be productive members of society, even if they could get past the mental illness/drugs. Any money spent on them is simply softening their descent into death rather than helping them live. At first, you feel bad for these people. But, over time, it changes you and you stop feeling as much empathy towards them. They're the people yelling at 3am in the morning that make you tired at work the next day. They're the people shitting on the sidewalk and forcing you to jump around it or walk in the street. They're the people leaving uncapped needles on the sidewalks. And add to this that the situation has gotten significantly worse lately. SF is a powder keg ready to explode. There are two SFs living in close proximity to each other and both headed in opposite directions. As the one SF has gotten richer and the other has gotten poorer and evictions have increased, there's a general feeling of combativeness that's very scary. It's common for people to try to intimidate me on the sidewalks as I walk to work. They stare at me and walk directly at me no matter which side of the sidewalk I attempt to walk on. My projection is that there's a message being delivered..."you may have everything else, but I'm taking the sidewalk." Homeless people will urinate/defecate in the middle of the sidewalk in ways that make it as difficult as possible to avoid. And while it's mostly passive aggression at the moment, it feels like we're not too far off from that aggression turning active. This deeply unhealthy dynamic is why I've chosen to leave SF. It would take an extraordinary person to be dealing with this on an everyday basis and not try to compartmentalize it in ways that appear cold and unfeeling to people viewing it from the outside. You can't understand the fear, and fear will cause people to do and say things that others would consider unconscionable. You can't understand the hopelessness of the situation that leads you to write those people off a subhuman. Out of sight is really out of mind. And anyone that isn't experiencing this problem on a daily basis isn't going to really understand this open letter. They're going to attribute the tone and callousness of the letter to the individual who wrote it rather than the experiences they've been subjected to.