My friend Carrie, a longtime Coalition member, moved from her East Oakland home to another city some time ago. She didn’t want to leave but felt she had no choice: conditions in her neighborhood had deteriorated to the point where she no longer felt safe.
She wrote me the other day about something the mayor of her new city said. I’m bullet-pointing the quotes:
- it's time to factor accountability into the homelessness crisis
- all of the city's efforts focus on providing needed services to those seeking help and support, but we are at a point where outreach must be balanced with accountability. The homeless are accountable for their actions, and vandalism or camping on private property has legal consequences.
- our residents and business owners deserve relief from the costly and constant presence of homeless individuals choosing to live their lives on city sidewalks and streets.
-as the city, county and non-profits work to promote a higher quality of life for the homeless, they must also remember to provide the same opportunity to the city's residents and visitors.
- our city government mission statement is to enhance the quality of life for city residents, reflecting our high community standards. As a city councilmember, I'm responsible and accountable for ensuring those high standards.
“Can you imagine,” Carrie wondered, “the Oakland mayor and city council saying any of this? This is how some other cities are run and Oakland is an extreme outlier.”
Carrie’s exactly right. As we slowly emerge from the nadir of crime and death we’ve endured for years, it only becomes more apparent how criminally negligent our leaders have been. Carrie’s new mayor hit the nail on the head when he said “It’s time to factor accountability into the homelessness crisis.”
Accountability: a lovely word that means so much.
A hero of the Left, Mahatma Gandhi, noted, “It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts.” As a Hindu, Gandhi knew that the immortal law of karma prevents people from escaping the consequences of their acts in the long term. But they may fool themselves into thinking they can escape those consequences in the short term. From my observations, what the mayor meant was that many if not most homeless people find themselves in that situation due to their own stubbornness and bad decisions. Progressives love to blame the rest of us for homelessness, but that’s why Americans overwhelmingly turned against the Democratic Party on Nov. 5. They know that we’re not responsible for homelessness, or for poverty, or for crime. They look at the vagabonds and scoundrels they see in the streets, and they know they’re witnessing the worst of the worst: human failures who have decided not to play by the rules the rest of us respect, and who are thus suffering the consequences of their anti-social behavior.
I spend a lot of intellectual capital trying to figure out why so-called progressive voters vote the way they do. Why would any reasonable person vote for Carroll Fife or Nikki Bas? I confess the answer has eluded me; it’s like banging my head against the wall. I know those voters are wrong and muddle-headed. But they don’t appear to be mentally incapacitated; many of them have responsible jobs that involve critical thinking. And yet voting for Carroll Fife is exactly the same as rubbing dog feces into an open sore. It’s bound to get infected, so don’t do it! But these progressives do it anyway. From the elite White women of the Hills to the tattooed skateboarders of the flatlands, they flatter themselves by thinking they’re oh, so virtuous by electing to office candidates who claim to care for poor people, people of color and other “underrepresented” groups. The stupidity of their thinking is proven by the fact that, wherever progressives control U.S. cities, those cities die. Oakland is the obvious example, but I could also name Richmond, San Francisco and Vallejo, and, beyond the Bay Area, Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. These progressive voters just prove that having a college is no barrier against confused thinking.
These truths are self-evident:
Accountability means rousting homeless people from the parks and public streets and telling them that they made the choice to be homeless and now they’re going to have to deal with the consequences. Accountability means telling the thug who got busted stealing a purse from an elderly Asian lady that he made the choice to be an asshole and now he’s going to have to deal with the consequences. Accountability means telling an 18-year old girl who was arrested shoplifting from Sephora that you feel sorry for her parents, but she’s going to jail anyway, as a consequence of her actions. Accountability means telling progressive District Attorneys to do their job and send thugs to prison. Accountability means instructing mayors to support their police departments, not wreck them. Accountability means getting the message out loud and clear to oddballs and jerks: shape up or ship out. Accountability doesn’t necessarily mean voting for Republicans, but it does mean making sure no racist progressive is ever elected to anything, ever again, anywhere.
P.S. Last night your City Council voted unanimously to vote on Jan. 9 whether to increase the sales tax in Oakland. Of course, they will. They’ll also probably approve yet another parcel tax. Your money will never be safe in your pocket as long as you live in Oakland. Between the thieves on the streets and the thieves in City Hall, they’re going to steal from you until YOU get sick and tired of it and stop electing these wokes with their big promises and dire results!
Steve Heimoff