I had a nice sit-down with City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas over the weekend, and it was a pleasure to meet her at last. She knew who I was and seemed a little wary at first—did I have horns and claws and breathe fire? But she soon discovered the warm, loving conversationalist I am! I don’t think I changed her mind on the prime issues of police and encampments, and I know for sure she didn’t change mine. But it was good to establish a relationship.
Bas referred over and over to “root causes.” For instance, she said we have to address the “root causes” of homelessness before we get tough on encampments, even the dirtiest, most disruptive of them. We have to address the “root causes” of crime before pumping up the Oakland Police Department, which is why she’s been so luke-warm on supporting cops. You hear this language of “root causes” from many progressives. Carroll Fife tweeted “Join us to discuss real solutions to get at the root causes of violence in Oakland.” Her friend Cat Brooks says we have to “address the root causes” of violence and substance abuse, which she declares as being “white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism” (as if Hernan Cortes’ slaughter of the Aztecs somehow provoked three thugs to hijack Ersie Joyner 500 years later). Sheng Thao, in announcing her candidacy for Mayor, similarly said “We need to address the root causes of crime to stop the violence.”
It’s as if these politicians are reading from the same script. The phrase “root causes” is often used by progressives to understand and explain why poverty and class inequality continue to exist. In their view, individuals are not accountable for their own actions. Instead, external forces (Brooks’s “white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism”) force people into poverty, or compel them to become addicted to drugs and commit crimes. According to this ideology, such individuals, far from being perpetrators of sociopathy, instead are victims of a male, white, racist conspiracy that has existed from the beginning of (European) history and needs to be torn down and replaced. Thus, references to “root causes” typically involve ex post facto determinations by which History is rewritten to reflect this new progressive understanding. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—far from being enlightened democrats who founded the great American republic--are retroactively judged to have been criminal slaveowners, whose legacies must be confessed and overturned.
The important thing to know about “root causes,” however, is that when you hear a politician using that phrase, its hidden meaning, at least in provincial Oakland, is this: “We won’t do anything about encampments and crime for a very long time, if ever, because the root causes of homelessness and criminality will take decades or centuries to address.” In reality, everybody understands, or should, that poverty isn’t going away anytime soon. “The poor ye always have with you,” the Bible says authoritatively. But just because someone is poor doesn’t make him steal, kill or make himself psychotic with drugs. My ancestors were poor. But they were honest, worked hard and succeeded in lifting themselves and subsequent generations up.
No government program, no amount of money, no legislation can make everybody middle class. No shifting of police budgets, no investments in “the community” will miraculously lift entire populations into material solvency, if people do not choose to lift themselves. To suggest otherwise is the progressive Big Lie: or, if not a deliberate lie, then a delusion.
The more a politician like Fife or Brooks talks about “root causes,” the less interest he or she has in actually tackling the very real problems of crime and encampments NOW—and now is the time that counts in Oaklanders’ lives. This is why crime and encampments continue to plague Oakland: we are governed by politicians who refuse to address our problems, while exploiting a fancy phrase to justify their inertness.
Steve Heimoff