I was walking home on Grand Avenue, across the street from Lake Merritt by the Senior Center, when I saw a man in a wheelchair coming toward me, about a half block away. As we neared each other, I noticed the man was holding what appeared to be a sawed-off piece of thick wooden broomstick, about two feet long. When we were about 12 feet from each other, the man deliberately steered his wheelchair directly into my path, brandishing his wooden stick menacingly in the air. He looked at me and said, “Oh, I like this one.”
WTF? I stepped off the sidewalk into the street to avoid him. Meanwhile, there was a third man, young, tall and clean cut, whom I’ll call Andy. As I passed Wheelchair Man, I noticed Andy had stopped beside him and was engaging in conversation. Then Andy trotted over to me and introduced himself.
He was a game developer and lived a half-block away. He said he was familiar with the man because every morning he would be ranting in the streets. “He’s schizophrenic. I try to calm him down.” I mentioned feeling threatened and Andy said, “Yeah. When I saw him raise the stick at you, I thought, ‘Oh, here we go.’ But what do you expect? It’s Oakland.”
With all due respect to Andy, who seems like a very nice, caring person, his reaction—"But what do you expect? It’s Oakland”—is not helpful. We can’t let Oakland off the hook for allowing this kind of crazy public behavior. This isn’t the Oakland of quirky, creative types; it’s an Oakland of social breakdown. Once we accept the inevitability of Oakland being filled with mentally ill, and possibly dangerous, individuals, we have given up on rescuing our town. Chris probably thinks of himself as idealistic and progressive. I wanted to say to him that “It’s Oakland” is profoundly untrue. What Oakland has become, under progressive malfeasance, is not Oakland. It’s not what Oakland has historically been or what it could once again be. And our enemy is not people like Andy, and not even Wheelchair Man, but the complacency Andy exhibited in his remark, as if it has to be this dysfunctional.
Speaking of Lake Merritt, Carroll Fife proclaims herself a devoted lover of the lake and Lakeside Park. She touted a “Love Our Lake” event on twitter, calling the lake “the heart of Oakland, always the perfect spot for gathering, being in community.”
Well, yes, it used to be. But guess what, Carroll Fife: Lake Merritt today is a junkie-homeless slum, filled with dirty tents, sketchy denizens, and the detritus that homeless people accumulate. There are actually more tents today in Lakeside Park than ever before, because Fife and her “progressive” allies on the City Council have declared to all the homeless people that they’re welcome in Oakland, where authorities will not bother them. From the grassy slopes near The Pergola southward to Lake Merritt Boulevard and all along the eastern and western shores are tents, with Peralta Park, running down to the estuary, featuring one of the most horrible homeless slums in the city since the heyday of Wood Street.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s long overdue decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, it’s now perfectly legal for cities to eliminate tents in parks and on other public property. San Francisco, Berkeley to some extent, and San Jose all have acted to clean up these areas, thank goodness, after years of allowing them to fall into decrepitude. But have you heard a word from Oakland? No, and you won’t. For Thao, Fife, Kaplan, Bas, Kalb and the rest of the homeless enablers, it’s business as usual. The tent slums will remain where they are, and these elected officials will do nothing to actually make Lake Merritt “the perfect spot for gathering.” That is, unless you like gathering amidst addicts, loonies and sociopaths.
Our politicians have decided there are two classes of citizen: those, like you and me, who lead lawful, orderly lives, and the homeless, who used to be called “incorrigible” but are now supposed to be the objects of our compassion. You and I have no rights, according to the Fife-Thao-Bas interpretation of reality, when it comes to enjoying and feeling secure in our public spaces. But the homeless have an infinitely wide spectrum of rights, including the right to defecate in public, set illegal fires that threaten us all this long, hot summer, shoot up in public, and put up their tents in spaces that can’t even be maintained by the Oakland Parks and Recreation Department, who keep a careful distance from encampments when they try to mow the lawns and clean up the garbage because they know the inhabitants are potentially dangerous.
We shouldn’t be surprised by Fife’s flagrant disrespect for the law. After all, she got her political start by illegally squatting in that house with her “Moms 4 Housing” group, which was (and is) essentially a gang of criminals extorting the private sector for free real estate. The “law” is, to Fife, the White Man’s law, which is racist and therefore need not be obeyed. Fife is a firm believer in the Black Panther-inspired “By Any Means Necessary” ideology, and if that includes seizing someone else’s property, so be it. Property is theft, says the anarchist Left that spawned Fife; if she had her way, nobody would own anything, and all our homes would be seized by the State and redistributed to Fife’s constituency: poor people of color.
It’s fine for Fife to believe whatever she wants, but that doesn’t give her the right to make everybody else suffer. Speaking for myself, I will never stop demanding that our city clean up our parks and streets. I will never accept the inevitability of tent encampments. Nor will I accept that we, the people, have to be further bled with taxes and fees in order to support a class of people who have largely proven themselves unwilling to lead lives of civic virtue. This isn’t to say that I’m entirely unsympathetic with homeless people. But I am convinced that most are homeless by choice, and even London Breed, when she’s being honest, concedes that too many homeless people refuse offers of shelter when offered by city officials. Let me be blunt: if any homeless person refuses to leave a space when ordered to do so by OPD or any other public official, that person should be immediately arrested, with all his or her stuff put into storage for up to three months, after which it will be discarded if it is not reclaimed.
This is tough love, but it’s the only way we can make Oakland function normally again. The “compassion” claimed by people like Fife hasn’t worked and will not work. It has simply enabled people who are at war with society to drag down our town and in too many cases be rewarded for doing it.
Steve Heimoff