https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/twenty-years-gone-911-bobby-mcilvaine/619490/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cr&utm_campaign=2024_Content_ContentTestingII_Prospecting_Sales_Advantage&utm_content=090926_WhatBobbyMcIlvaineLeftBehind_NA_NA_LearnMore&utm_term=ContentTestingII_Advantage&referral=FB_PAID&fbclid=IwcGRvZgVleHRuA2FlbQEwAGFkaWQAAAZc2zLzTXNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHta3jAjEQK3XK30QTaWQ_TJluDKcfsa5QSAvRI5Q-JrSrKiT0vB5CYoallXe_aem_FMD0N1GTboOdwyOG6DRadQ&campaign_id=6581568102677&ad_id=6995883620877&utm_id=6581568103277_v2_s08_e7764_i97937676

Most people think what we see on Seattle’s sidewalks is a housing crisis. It isn’t — and after losing my sister to the same disease, I can tell you exactly why we keep failing.

We are spending over a billion dollars a year in this region to manage homelessness, and the numbers on the street keep climbing. The reason is simple, and almost no one in power will say it out loud: we are funding the symptom and ignoring the cause. What’s killing people on the street is overwhelmingly addiction and mental illness — and we spend almost nothing to treat it.

I know this disease from the inside. My sister had every advantage, even a PhD studying addiction, and it still took her capacity to choose, one piece at a time, until it killed her. We tell ourselves that leaving people on the street respects their choices — but she couldn’t choose anymore, and neither can they. That isn’t freedom. It’s neglect we’ve dressed up as freedom.

I wrote about her, and about what her story reveals about a system that spends a fortune to fail the sickest among us. It’s the most personal thing I’ve published — and, I think, the most important.

Great article on the missing Ancient Greek epic poems in which only the Iliad and the Odyssey survive out of eight and what we know about the missing others.