Violence is an event and inherently ephemeral. Poop is a thing and it will sit there until removed giving me much more time to see it.
Maybe that's why?
I'm sure violence _would_ get on me pretty quickly, but I just don't see that much violence in the homeless in my local area.
Btw, it feels pretty disingenuous that your example is this group of perfect angel homeless people sleeping and praying on the corner. That rhetoric pretty much immediately loses anyone who has regular contact and they think "welp this person doesn't know what they are talking about"
EDIT: To be clear. I realize shit is gross. It's the most toxic thing a human regularly encounters.
But the implication of the grossness of shit being a 'bright red line' for lost empathy is that no reasonable human would EVER deal with someone else's shit, when that is demonstrably untrue.
We choose to empathize with babies and not homeless people. That's fine, I guess, but feels sort of gross on the cosmic scale.
Its totally fair, and expected that people lose sympathy when they have to clean up shit.
Yes, if there were safe, available, places to shit then that'd be a good step to avoid this issue. But the root issue is that people no longer have sympathy because its so disruptive and so gross and has been going on for so long.
> I find it so weird that people blame homeless people for defecating on the streets.
They're blamed because they did it. They did it because there is no alt, but they did it, and "it" is gross and not desirable. SF has been talking about the issue for years, and its not resolved, so your tolerance and sympathy drops over time.