I wish that just once, I could take my early morning walk along Grand Avenue on my way to Trader Joe’s and not have to see the overturned wastebins, strewn trash, broken glass, smashed in bus stop windows and all the other insults to our senses and sensibility, like the massive pile of (presumably human) feces someone had so creatively dumped on top of a public garbage container.
Who would do such things? I call them the Scunge People. They come out at night and commit their carnage. They’re sociopaths. The “Fife & Dumb Corps,” as I call Carroll and her peeps, thinks of them as poor, defenseless victims of structural racism, but I see them, no matter what their skin color, as assholes. They do these things on purpose. It’s their way of lashing out at a system they paranoically believe is against them.
I suppose that most, if not all, of the Scunge People are homeless. Of course, not all homeless people are assholes. Some do their best to respect the neighborhood where they set up their tents, cleaning up after themselves and finding appropriate places for their bodily wastes. I’ve even seen tents in public parks where the residents planted little gardens. Good for those people. They’re still part of the human community.
But the Scunge People? No. They no longer want to belong to the human community. They hate the human community and, by their disrespectful actions, show their contempt for us, for our values, for all the work we do to hold our community together in the face of the forces trying to destroy it.
What can we do with the Scunge People? We can always just ignore them, pretending we don’t see the ravages of their depredations. But those ravages are there, whether we perceive them or not. Some underpaid city worker has to clean up their mess, and the Scunge People disrespect them, too. Ignoring the Scunge People is what our current government has decided to do. Thao, Bas, Kaplan and the rest of the Fife & Dumb Corps have simply decided to opt out of doing anything responsible. They’ve concluded that the Scunge People have the right to befoul our community (in the name, I suppose, of “equity”). They feel sorry for the Scunge People. Besides, virtue signaling on behalf of the Scunge People keeps them in power.
Government makes gestures toward cleaning up the Scunge People. Gavin Newsom’s vaunted Care Court claims to deal compassionately with them, but the multi-million dollar program doesn’t seem to be accomplishing much, two years after its launch. In Oakland, we’ve seen no relief of our own local situation that can be attributed to Care Court, and there’s no reason to expect any in the future.
In San Francisco, London Breed’s efforts to stem the Scunge People, which were a direct consequence of Newsom’s Care Court, similarly have disappointed. The S.F. Chronicle on Sunday ran a front page article in which one-third of the program’s “public conservators” claimed that the program “is not delivering on its promises.” One of them was even quoted as saying, “I cannot think of one case where it has actually helped.” As we’ve also recently learned, Breed’s scandals with her Human Rights Commission and her Dream Keeper initiative have revealed that millions of dollars poured into homeless projects have disappeared. That will come as no shock to Oaklanders, given our city’s own shameful history of waste, fraud and abuse of public funds.
Eventually taxpayers are going to revolt against seizing their hard-earned money and flushing it away on schemes that cannot and do not work. Which is going to leave us in a very difficult situation. As the Scunge People become more numerous and depredatory (witness last week’s throat-slashing incident on BART), citizens are going to demand that more stringent controls be placed on them. What those controls look like, I don’t know, but the ACLU won’t like them.
P.S. Today is Election Day. Let there be peace across this great nation.
Steve Heimoff