The Police and courts don't want to spend all days dealing with crazy street bums when they're backlogged with more serious cases and their cells are needed for more dangerous criminals. In theory this is where mental health services should be picking up the slack but 1) they don't have the funding and 2) that approach only works on compliant people which Dan is not.
There's thousands of crazy street bums all over Colorado just like Dan, maybe hundreds of thousands all over the country. They live out their entire lives on the streets yelling at cars until they succumb to addiction or the elements, but that can take decades. People are acting shocked at how people like Dan or Cobes are spiralling downwards, but it just shows a bit of naivete to yell "won't someone do something?" That's most people's first reaction to finding out that homeless people aren't in fact another species, they were at some point people just like you or me and then things went wrong. Sometimes those things were their fault, sometimes not, but usually, like with Cobes and Dan, it's a complex mixture where it's hard to point the finger at one person, event or problem and say "that's why he's homeless". What's different about Dan and Cobes is that we are seeing, for many people for the first time, the process by which people go from safe, housed, loved and secure to crazy/alcoholic hobos on the street. Cobes isn't homeless yet, but he's going through the process.
Dan and Cobes, in terms of what is happening to them mentally and physically, are not unusual people. This is just the human-to-bum pipeline in action the way it has been for millennia. There have been crazy shouting street people for as long as there have been streets for them to shout in.
Two things are different, though.
The first is that we are seeing these people descend in real-time, on livestream. Some people in both threads are really shocked by what is happening, as if people spiralling into homelessness is unusual and thinking that Surely Something Must Be Done. Nope. The simple fact is that life is often unimaginably cruel. In fact, to most people on the planet, that cruelty is the norm. I hope that people might learn from those insights. There's a bitter irony that the people gaining more understanding and empathy for these situations are Kiwifarmers, the Worst People On The Internet (tm), and the people treating them as interactive zoo exhibits are on Reddit, which is the Good Part Of The Internet (tm) because they ban you if you say retarded rather than regarded, as if that somehow makes you a better person.
The second, of course, is that both these people are being fucked with for clout. Unlike the millennia-old bum problem, this Truman Show shit is new. People are trying to predict what the future is for Dan and Cobes, (and maybe Cyrax once his grandma dies), but at this point I don't know. It could reach a breaking point. It could go on forever. It could peter out as the weens lose interest and move on. I don't know, nobody does, and this is new. We're just going to have to watch and see what happens. I think the likes of Cobes and Dan are a bellwether for where our society and culture is going. They really do bring into focus the fact that people are now judged based on what they say, not what they do. The Kiwis who observe are evil because they sometimes say "Tranny". The Redditors who torment homeless retards are good because they don't. Holy shit we're fucked.
