You're absolutely right. No act is ever, under any circumstances in the whole of the history of humanity, the sum of a person. I applaud the kindness and compas

You're absolutely right. No act is ever, under any circumstances in the whole of the history of humanity, the sum of a person. I applaud the kindness and compassion that fills your heart for centering this key insight. > We are making a choice to punish people for their illnesses. We are making a choice to punish people for their behavior. Their behavior may be due to their illnesses, but the two shouldn't be reflexively equated. Not unless you genuinely desire society to actively seek to punish illness instead of concerning itself with behavior. It's perhaps worth remembering that the American public did not turn against institutionalization for no reason. Those places were visions of Hell that would have turned Danté's stomach. These visions were conjured into reality by our Progressive desires to help the less fortunate meeting an inability to do so reliably and humanely at scale. Good intentions, kindness and compassion and a genuine desire to help, were not enough. I won't fault anyone for being skeptical about that being fundamentally different now.