The year 1984 has come and gone. The novel of the same name lives on as a possible expression of a variety of repugnant futures. Currently, we are looking back to the future of a society buttressed by forced dormitory life.
It was never particularly clear in the famous novel why citizens lived in bunk rooms. But currently, that prediction is emerging again. There are multiple efforts underway to place inconveniently vulnerable citizens in a location they have occupied before: compulsory institutionalization. Such a prediction of a once former, now future life is threatening a significant chunk of the American population.
How so? Inconvenienced home-owning citizens currently lobby their governments to corral the unhoused, declaring them as carriers of disease, which renders them medically unfit to associate with polite society.
The solution currently favoured? Indefinite warehousing in mental institutions when people without houses fail to be ‘cured’ by cursory attempts — or, from previous experience, virtually no attempts at all — to change their supposed aberrant behaviours.
America has done it before. The results were generally evaluated as an expensive and ineffective failure. But no matter.
There is a growing implication that the country should ignore the human and financial costs of such a misguided venture, and do it all again.
Read more in Politico: Mental hospitals warehoused the sick. Congress wants to let them try again.
