I'm reminded of my first year as a mental health worker, and how they sent me out to "treat" this woman who had lost custody of her kids, and was teetering on losing full custody. She had been born as the daughter of a truck stop prostitute, and had been prostituted out herself at about 8 years old. Her primary achievement in life was giving birth to both her kids sober, and with a husband, who had been shot to death as a bystander in an armed robbery when her kids were tiny. She lost it after that, and went back to drugs, etc.
What exactly are you imagining would have helped this woman? I can think of a lot of things, but I'll tell you, the 45 minutes of counseling paid for by the state to schlep my white ass over to her apartment once a week to talk about the horrific abuse, suffering, loneliness and pain of her situation was never going to be enough to fix anything.
Did she bear personal responsibility for her situation? Sure, I guess. But I'll tell you, as a parent myself, my life has been relatively easy. I have parents. I have an education. I have medical care. I have memories of my family that don't involve being molested or abused or exploited in some way. She did not.
I once asked her during one of our sessions what her happiest memory was. It was the one time..THE ONE TIME..she had gone to the beach. She didn't realize there were tides, or waves, she said, until she had seen them. Nor did she realize the water would be so blue.
We live 30 minutes from the ocean here in LA.
What I am saying is, it was a privilege and a total growing experience for me to walk with her for the brief time i did counseling with her. She taught me, not the other way around. What happened to her? I don't know. But i do know, she was a good person, who had finally crumpled against odds that the rest of us would have crumpled a lot sooner if we'd been forced to face them. Fuck, I fall apart when my washer doesn't suds properly. Who could say what I would have been if I hadn't had the love, the support, and the financial help of my family?
So don't tell me people don't want help. I believe everyone, more or less, wants the same things out of life. To matter. To belong. To feel like their lives are worth something. And our society, and people like you in your comments, and people like me at times too, conspire to keep them believing they're worth nothing, and they'll never change, and fucking forget it. Be losers. See if we care.
It's sad. And it's wrong. But it is.
So have a little compassion. There but for the grace of God, Chtuhulu, Satan or whoever your Universal Creator of choice, go us.
NOTE: I changed some details of this person's life to keep it private).