This past election buttered few parsnips for me. I just wasn’t all that engaged. But several items, both of them local, jumped out at me as being worthy of attention, while the rest of the whole shebang puddled around in a gray goo of indifference.
Item One: anything to get rid of Gavin Newsom. Result: no-lose voting. I vote ‘yes’ to send him to Sacramento to twiddle his thumbs as Lt. Gov., and he’s gone. I vote ‘no’ to deny him further slurping on the public nipple, and he’ll be gone by the end of his term.
Item Two: the “sit/lie” ordinance so bemoaned by the Board of Supes and so enthusiastically embraced by the voters. The ordinance is simple and direct: it makes it a crime to sit or lie on a public sidewalk during certain hours. It targets the homeless, cry the sob sisters whose livelihoods depend on a steady supply of druggies, winos, crackheads, and other assorted nimcompoops, failures, and dropouts. Precisely the point, my dears. But homeless my foot. San Francisco is overrun with vagrants, hobos, bums. Losers without honor or dignity or responsibility. Crack addicts, meth addicts, not even together enough to become halfway decent criminals. They have dropped to the lowest level of society by their own actions, by their own fecklessness and greed and irresponsibility and stupidity and weakness. And that’s their right; nobody can legislate success or failure.
But that doesn’t mean I have to step over their excrement in public. That doesn’t mean I have to deal with crack-addled losers lying comatose on the sidewalk as I go work. The advocates may say that the druggies have a right to cadge ‘spare change’ from passersby. But I’m here too, and I have rights of my own, and one of those rights is to vote for an ordinance that makes sitting and lying on the sidewalk a crime. If this city can mandate the nature of a grocery store’s shopping bags, then this city can mandate just about anything — including issues that might make life more civilized rather than the opposite.
The citizens of a locality have not only a right, but a responsibility, to ensure that they live in the kind of environment they value. It is not fascist to prohibit urinating against the sides of public buildings, or to insist on a minimal code of conduct from citizens. We are a society of laws, not anarchy. To be a resident of San Francisco brings certain responsibilities, such as following traffic and parking regulations, refraining from attacking your neighbors with machetes, and serving on juries if summoned. We pay taxes to maintain the city streets and public buildings, to support police and fire services, to keep our libraries stocked and staffed and open. Our tax dollars go towards a variety of civic improvement functions including parks and traffic lights. Each of us is expected to contribute as we can. And we do.
But the vagrants? There’s no contributing there. Nothing but take, take, and more taking. City services abound to aid them, and for what? Just to encourage more of them to come here and suck freebies. Even the passage of the laws restricting city aid doesn’t seem to have stopped the onslaught. They just come here and they come here. It never gets cold enough to freeze them out, and a lot of San Francisco residents seem to have given up hope. The people charged with running the city are Dadaist and can’t or won’t do anything to stop the city’s slide into the pit.
Nor can the police do much about vagrants under current laws. So at least the sit/lie law gives the police one more lever to use. San Francisco has become a dirty, filthy, overall disgusting city. Why did this have to happen? For so much of its history this city has served as a bellwether to others, a place that “knows how” and that provided an enviable lifestyle to its residents. But now? It’s one thing for the town to be insanely expensive; it has that in common with a lot of other major hubs. But this city, so dependent on its tourist industry, risks its very livelihood by sinking ever more into squalor.
Maybe tourism hasn’t been sufficiently threatened as of yet. Maybe the filth is just part of the fun of coming here: why don’t we go to a real pesthole this time instead of a nice place? Now, honey, I know you wanted to go to Calcutta, but we can get to San Francisco just as cheaply and it’s almost as bad there, right?
But for those of us who live and work here, enough is enough. The sit/lie ordinance is only a start, but it could be an opening wedge in a movement to take back this city from the squatters who are degrading it, and to start making headway against the entrenched special interests groups who have every reason in the world to keep those druggies and winos right there on the sidewalks.
I’m not surprised that the Board of Supervisors opposes sit/lie. Those street vagrants hold up a greasy mirror to the Supes: worthless parasites, every one of us, right?