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Why does it seem like the author has an oozing derision for the "chronically housed"? Presumably the goal of any homeless program is to make those people also i

Why does it seem like the author has an oozing derision for the "chronically housed"? Presumably the goal of any homeless program is to make those people also into chronically housed?

rossdavidh 7y ago
Just a guess: being subject to oozing derision _from_ the chronically housed, makes it emotionally difficult not to respond in kind.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I have oozing derision for incompetence and stupidity. This dates to my childhood when I was always one of the smarty pants kids in school. It was heavily fostered by my high school drop-out father who had enormous derision for "overeducated" but incompetent fools and he wore it very aggressively on his sleeve. As my post-secondary education crept towards six years of college, I've actively worked at toning down my contempt for the "overeducated" as it was gradually turning into hypocrisy. ;) I'm critiquing a paper basically coming out of the White House that can't get a simple and obvious fact right that "climate" is not remotely the same thing as "daytime January temps." It's clear in my mind that part of why the paper gets this important detail wrong is that a high percentage of people with white collar jobs have spent precious little time outside. They don't do much if any manual labor out of doors. They don't walk anywhere as a form of transportation. They don't go camping. The well off in developed countries are increasingly out of touch with how weather actually works and how it impacts people who need to walk in it and what not. I didn't want to spend a lot of time getting into the psychology of that, but I did want to in a nutshell capture the fact that people of privilege who spend the vast majority of their lives either in a building or traveling between buildings in a vehicle are failing to grasp something fundamental that would have been far more obvious to anyone a hundred years ago. This new norm of people spending so little time out of doors came into being within my lifetime. When I was young, people walked places. Middle class and upper class college students took summer construction jobs. People routinely slept with the windows open. Etc. All of that has largely gone away in recent decades. We now have people in the US who only ever visit the outdoors during pleasant weather as a form of recreation who have little experience dealing with weather for purposes of getting anything practical done. If you think "chronically housed" is some kind of insult, I'm open to suggestions for better ways to succinctly express all of the above. I'm a freelance writer by trade. It's absolutely not a best practice to have a multi paragraph derail at the start of an article to try to explain a concept of that sort. But I think it is essential to paint a picture that "you folks writing policy papers -- who hardly ever go outside -- have a giant hole in your experiences that is a de facto barrier to understanding the problem space and here is the reality on the ground."

Why does it seem like the author has an oozing derision for the "chronically housed"? Presumably the goal of any homeless program is to make those people also into chronically housed?

rossdavidh 7y ago

Just a guess: being subject to oozing derision _from_ the chronically housed, makes it emotionally difficult not to respond in kind.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I have oozing derision for incompetence and stupidity. This dates to my childhood when I was always one of the smarty pants kids in school. It was heavily fostered by my high school drop-out father who had enormous derision for "overeducated" but incompetent fools and he wore it very aggressively on his sleeve. As my post-secondary education crept towards six years of college, I've actively worked at toning down my contempt for the "overeducated" as it was gradually turning into hypocrisy. ;) I'm critiquing a paper basically coming out of the White House that can't get a simple and obvious fact right that "climate" is not remotely the same thing as "daytime January temps." It's clear in my mind that part of why the paper gets this important detail wrong is that a high percentage of people with white collar jobs have spent precious little time outside. They don't do much if any manual labor out of doors. They don't walk anywhere as a form of transportation. They don't go camping. The well off in developed countries are increasingly out of touch with how weather actually works and how it impacts people who need to walk in it and what not. I didn't want to spend a lot of time getting into the psychology of that, but I did want to in a nutshell capture the fact that people of privilege who spend the vast majority of their lives either in a building or traveling between buildings in a vehicle are failing to grasp something fundamental that would have been far more obvious to anyone a hundred years ago. This new norm of people spending so little time out of doors came into being within my lifetime. When I was young, people walked places. Middle class and upper class college students took summer construction jobs. People routinely slept with the windows open. Etc. All of that has largely gone away in recent decades. We now have people in the US who only ever visit the outdoors during pleasant weather as a form of recreation who have little experience dealing with weather for purposes of getting anything practical done. If you think "chronically housed" is some kind of insult, I'm open to suggestions for better ways to succinctly express all of the above. I'm a freelance writer by trade. It's absolutely not a best practice to have a multi paragraph derail at the start of an article to try to explain a concept of that sort. But I think it is essential to paint a picture that "you folks writing policy papers -- who hardly ever go outside -- have a giant hole in your experiences that is a de facto barrier to understanding the problem space and here is the reality on the ground."