> It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o is a survey of American domestic and foreign policy that goes into this question. The speaker is a distinguished US diplomat of the post-war era, who also served as Nixon's Mandarin interpreter when he first went to China. His short answer is that for interlocking reasons that make it hard to change, military spending is the only kind of stimulus spending that's politically feasible in the US, and infrastructure spending hasn't yet been able to break that lock, though it needs to.
The point is that all the same arguments were brought up against the previous anti-apartheid movement (the one in South Africa) at the time, and today almost no one would argue that those sanctions (and boycotts and divestments) weren't justified. Least of all on the basis that they "hurt, not help" the oppressed population. So this objection to the same tactics now is unconvincing.
By that argument, if you're grieving the loss of a loved one, deciding whether to marry, struggling to write a novel, or even fixing a bug in a computer program, you have a disease. All those presumably have some biochemical correlate.