The Cruelty of “Compassion”: When Ideology Fails in New York... and California
The left often claims the moral high ground on compassion, accusing conservatives of being cold or uncaring. But real compassion isn’t about signaling virtue, it’s about protecting human beings, especially the most vulnerable. And when policies that sound compassionate collide with reality, the results can be devastating.
New York just lived through that lesson. During one of the coldest stretches in years, 18 people died outdoors, many from hypothermia. Mayor Zohran Mamdani halted homeless encampment sweeps during freezing weather, breaking with decades of Code Blue protocol that moved people indoors when temperatures became life‑threatening. For more than 30 years, NYPD and outreach teams removed people from the streets during extreme cold to prevent exactly these kinds of deaths. As a result, human beings froze to death on the streets of a city that prides itself on its “compassionate” approach to homelessness.
But this isn’t just a New York story.
California has been living their own versions of the same tragedy.
For years, California leaders have embraced policies framed as compassionate, refusing to enforce basic standards, allowing open‑air drug use, and treating encampments as untouchable “communities.” The result hasn’t been dignity or safety. It’s been the opposite.
Homelessness has grown year after year, even as the state spends more than any other place in America. Entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland have become open‑air drug markets where people cycle between addiction, mental illness, and street living with no real path out. Residents see people slumped on sidewalks, wandering in traffic, or passed out on transit platforms not because they are “choosing freedom,” but because the system has abandoned them to their addictions.
Leaving people to deteriorate on the streets is not compassion, it’s neglect dressed up as virtue. And just like New York’s deadly freeze exposed the gap between progressive rhetoric and reality.
Real compassion means intervening. Real compassion means protecting people from themselves when they are in crisis.
Real compassion means policies that save lives, not policies that make leaders feel morally superior while people die on sidewalks, in tents, or under bridges.
New York’s 18 deaths were a warning. Mamdani promised to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” But when the temperature dropped, the warmth never came. The rhetoric was warm but the streets stayed cold.
And 18 New Yorkers paid the price.
Wake up Californians! Let's elect some leaders with common sense and turn this ship around in November!
Carol Pefley
Candidate for Ca State Assembly
