Respect is a two-way street, though. People don’t deserve to be disrespected or dehumanized just because they’ve fallen on hard times, it could happen to any of us, after all. My respect for crackheads is about as limited for my respect for the guys jerking off to lone women on the subway, though. If the system has chewed you up so thoroughly that you need to smoke crack to get through the day, you have my sympathy Go do you, hope things get better for you. On the other hand, I’ve got effectively no sympathy for the crackheads where I used to live that would get high as hell, then shit in the staircases, get into fights with the only elevator in the building until it broke, or just sat outside all night, screaming and blasting music.

I’m a reasonably healthy younger person, so having the elevator out of commision for months at a time because of their antics was a nuisance, especially when it came time to haul groceries up to my apartment on the seventh floor, or bring my laundry down to the basement to wash it. It was outright dangerous for more elderly residents on the upper floors, who essentially became housebound, though. My mother-in-law couldn’t deal with all those steps, and there were elderly people on higher floors put at risk because paramedics couldn’t reach them nearly as quickly if they had an emergency, not to mention the challenge of bringing someone down a bunch of narrow stairs on a stretcher.

Just because they’re suffering at a given moment doesn’t give them the right to degrade everyone else’s quality of life, if not outright endanger their lives.