For what it's worth, I am annoyed by my own self-righteous tone. I didn't respond with maturity. I've admitted as much elsewhere if you read the thread. Than

For what it's worth, I am annoyed by my own self-righteous tone. I didn't respond with maturity. I've admitted as much elsewhere if you read the thread. Thank you for clarifying many of the issues here. I don't agree that challenging negative language and asserting neutral language is "whitewashing". I believe that it helps matters relative to the negative language. If you wouldn't use language to somebody's face, it's still abusive to use it behind their back, because it doesn't encourage kindness towards them. Would you call a homeless person with a crack addiction that you knew by name a crackhead to his face? If I take a moment to imagine going outside and doing this, it makes me want to cry. Whitewashing is what I associate with taking something bad and making it look good by changing the language. I don't want to do that. But then there's even the more generic argument for not talking badly about people behind their backs: if person A says something mean to person B about person C behind their back, it actually hurts A because person B will start operating on the basis that when their back is turned, person A will talk about them in a similarly bad way to persons D, E, and F. By the way, this page says 1/3 of the homeless population has severe mental illness (not just schizophrenia): http://www.schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm http://www.schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm I don't think that page includes simple alcoholism and drug addiction, which are legitimately disabling physical and mental illnesses on their own. After that, I'm not sure there are any homeless that are unaccounted for. None of them are there because they are "lazy bums".