XPost: alt.politics.liberalism, talk.politics.guns, alt.politics.homosexuality   
   XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics   
   From: blue-death@sacbee.com   
      
   On 22 Jan 2023, Molly Bolt  posted some   
   news:777c3510-bbfa-46c5-a45b-8ba780242b36n@googlegroups.com:   
      
   > Thank Nancy Pelosi and all the East Coast Democrats for ruining   
   > California.   
      
   "There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San   
   Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been   
   LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city.   
   And many San Franciscans have had enough," writes Nellie Bowles.   
      
   San Francisco was conquered by the United States in 1846, and two years   
   later, the Americans discovered gold. That’s about when my ancestors   
   came—my German great-great-great-grandfather worked at a butcher shop on   
   Jackson Street. The gold dried up but too many young men with outlandish   
   dreams remained. The little city, prone to earthquakes and fires, kept   
   growing. The Beats came, then the hippies; the moxie and hubris of the   
   place remained.   
      
   My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned   
   young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by,   
   groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white   
   person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays   
   or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just   
   fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunt’s house, I learned you had to   
   let your strangeness breathe.   
      
   It was always weird, always a bit dangerous. Once, when I was very   
   little, a homeless man grabbed me by the hair, lifting me into the air   
   for a moment before the guy dropped me and my dad yelled. For years I   
   told anyone who would listen that I’d been kidnapped. But every   
   compromise San Francisco demanded was worth it. The hills are so steep   
   that I didn’t learn to ride a bike until high school, but every day I   
   saw the bay, and the cool fog rolling in over the water. When puberty   
   hit, I asked the bus driver to drop me off where the lesbians were, and   
   he did. A passenger shouted that he hoped I’d find a nice girlfriend,   
   and I waved back, smiling, my mouth full of braces and rubber bands.   
      
   So much has been written about the beauty and mythology of this city   
   that maybe it’s superfluous to add even a little more to the ledger. If   
   he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the town’s beloved old chronicler,   
   once said, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San   
   Francisco.” The cliffs, the stairs, the cold clean air, the low-slung   
   beauty of the Sunset, the cafés tucked along narrow streets, then Golden   
   Gate Park drawing you down from the middle of the city all the way to   
   the beach. It’s so goddamn whimsical and inspiring and temperate; so   
   full of redwoods and wild parrots and the smell of weed and sourdough,   
   brightly painted homes and backyard chickens, lines for the oyster bar   
   and gorgeous men in chaps at the leather festival. But it’s maddening   
   because the beauty and the mythology—the preciousness, the   
   self-regard—are part of what has almost killed it. And I, now in early   
   middle age, sometimes wish it weren’t so nice at all.   
      
   But I do need you to love San Francisco a little bit, like I do a lot,   
   in order to hear the story of how my city fell apart—and how it just   
   might be starting to pull itself back together.   
      
   Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district   
   attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t   
   seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in   
   service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s   
   not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from   
   housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive   
   leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to   
   create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.   
      
   On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new   
   Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an   
   open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the   
   sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching.   
   There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned   
   with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it,   
   stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the   
   enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes,   
   referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city   
   government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks   
   like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded   
   by half-eaten boxed lunches.   
      
   A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and   
   office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present   
   community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now   
   the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.   
      
   During the first part of the pandemic, San Francisco County lost more   
   than one in 20 residents—myself among them. Signs of the city’s pandemic   
   decline are everywhere—the boarded-up stores, the ghostly downtown, the   
   encampments. But walking these streets awakens me to how bad San   
   Francisco had gotten even before the coronavirus hit—to how much   
   suffering and squalor I’d come to think was normal.   
      
   Stepping over people’s bodies, blurring my eyes to not see a dull needle   
   jabbing and jabbing again between toes—it coarsened me. I’d gotten used   
   to the idea that some people just want to live like that. I was even a   
   little defensive of it: Hey, it’s America. It’s your choice.   
      
   If these ideas seem facile or perverse, well, they’re not the only ones   
   I’d come to harbor. Before I left, I’d gotten used to the idea of   
   housing so expensive that it would, as if by some natural law, force   
   couples out of town as soon as they had a kid. San Francisco now has the   
   fewest children per capita of any large American city, and a $117,400   
   salary counts as low-income for a family of four.   
      
   I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to   
   leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least   
   quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass   
   stating some variation of Nothing’s in the car. Don't smash the windows.   
   One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I   
   was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with   
   it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, a   
   tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal   
   thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it,   
   from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.   
      
   A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the   
   street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)