There’s some debate out there about how to define the word “woke.” I think there’s not one simple definition, but that the term covers a range of aberrant ideologies and behaviors; and one of the most prominent concerns money. Woke people think that anything they want can be paid for with public funds—and if there’s not enough funding, then just raise taxes and all will be well.
We see this bizarre belief mostly in the woke attitude toward the homeless. Just build enough housing for all of them, the wokes argue, and, presto, the problem is solved. Five thousand nice, tidy, free apartments in Oakland will do it! As for the psychotics wandering the streets, just hire tons of psychiatrists, social workers, therapists and support staff for all of them, and, wham bang, no more psychotics on the streets!
Where these billions or tens of billions of dollars are supposed to come from, nobody knows. But this has never stopped the wokes. They assume that the money is to be had, somehow, magically—maybe from non-existent federal or state grants, maybe from growing magical money trees that blossom million-dollar bills instead of leaves.
The latest manifestation of this craziness concerns the Oakland school district. If you follow the news, you know that the district has been outspending its budget for years, running close to bankruptcy. But the wokes on the school board don’t care. Who cares about budgets, when there are so many kids of color with such gigantic needs? The board refused to close a handful of schools last year that attract only a tiny number of students, after some parents complained about inconvenience for their kids—and if there’s one thing the Oakland school district can’t stand, it’s whiney parents, whom they always knuckle under to. Now, last night, the district rejected making badly needed budget cuts that would have eliminated some positions. The cuts had been urged by the Superintendent of Schools and by the board president. But “unexpectedly…at the last minute,” the Chronicle reports, “the Oakland Education Association”—the teachers’ woke union—“voiced opposition to the cuts,” and “three board members who had supported the cuts changed their minds.”
This testifies, not only to the woke delusion that there’s always enough money for stuff, but also to the power of unions in Oakland, which have grown to deplorable malignance. It was the unions that stuck us with Sheng Thao and Nikki Bas and Pamela Price. Where does this money-grows-on-trees belief come from? In my opinion, from several generations of money being pumped into poor communities—starting with LBJ’s War on Poverty and extending into the present day. Naturally, the U.S. can’t mint money infinitely with no consequences. This is why San Francisco, Oakland and so many other cities are flirting with bankruptcy, to the extent they can’t even keep their public transit systems running or their police departments functioning. With our infrastructure crumbling, woke politicians insist on more and more money for anti-violence schemes that don’t work, for pro-homeless schemes that are useless, for “social housing” that will turn into slums, and on and on. Sixty years of magical money spending have convinced leftist socialists that money is never a problem. Like I said, in the end woke governments can always raise business and property taxes, extort a few million here, a few million there, from woke governments, and continue to demand more and more things that don’t work and can’t be paid for.
Steve Heimoff