Everything that sucks finds its way to Oakland, the city that normalizes dysfunction

Potholes. Filth. Bipping. Human feces on the sidewalk. Car stereos blasting. Sideshows. Overturned trash cans. Ranters and lunatics. Random attacks on pedestrians. Shuttered shops. 9-1-1 non-response. Taxation without representation. Robbery, burglary, assault, carjacking and, yes, murder.

That’s just part of the stuff we deal with in Oakland. It’s become so normalized that people—especially younger ones like Gen Y and Gen Z-- think it’s this way everywhere, always has been and always will be.

Well, it’s not. But our feckless leaders have convinced them that it’s just the way things are and have to be. “Get used to it, White Karens” says Carroll Fife, in effect. “That’s the price of social change. Your privileged middleclass comfort ends where BIPOC empowerment begins.” “You should be happy you live in Oakland,” smiles Sheng Thao, “our wonderful rainbow village of beauty, love and equity.” “Quit your yapping,” snarls Nikki Bas. “If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem.”

The crazy thing is, White progressives agree. “I don’t mind paying higher taxes if it will help people of color” says “Tim,” who works in tech. “I don’t mind if I don’t feel safe downtown. Why should I feel safe if people of color don’t?” reasons “Debbie,” who designs games. “I don’t mind if someone defecates on my front sidewalk” says Nia, who identifies as them/they/theirs and is a life coach. “People of color have to poop somewhere, right?”

“A lot of what our society has accepted as normal is anything but,” observes an actual life coach, Tamara Reed. She continues, “Sadly more and more, we continuously normalize dysfunction. We then go from the mindset of ‘that’s horrible’ to ‘that’s life’.”  This mindset is widespread in Oakland, where a generation of politicians has lectured us that degeneration and dysfunction exist because of racial and ethnic inequality, and are only to be expected as long as inequity goes on.

There are a lot of people, however, who resist this notion, including me. When dysfunction reaches the point where the life of a city is at risk, we have the right to ask what we can do to fight it now. We don’t have generations of time to address the alleged “root causes” of dysfunction; we need relief today. The political scientist John J. Dilulio Jr., who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, has enumerated five ways we can begin to “define societal dysfunction and criminality back up,” i.e. to de-normalize them. These five ways are:

1. Keep rosy crime statistics in perspective.

2. Acknowledge the banal brutality of today’s criminals.

3. Hold the line on vicious juvenile crime.

4. Focus on prisoners’ total criminal histories.

5. Save the children.

The recent news that crime is “down” in Oakland should be taken in context. It means nothing. Crime is built into Oakland’s DNA; it will be up one month, down the next, but it’s not going away. Today’s criminals under the age of 25 are not “our children, our babies,” as Pamela Price claims. There are super-predators out there to whom life means nothing, neither theirs nor yours, and if we treat them as merely misbehaving youths, we’re in trouble. When criminals are brought into the justice system, jurists should look at everything bad they’ve done before; Price believes that testimony regarding prior conduct should not be allowed in trial. As for our actual children, we have to intervene in “the community” before five- and six-year olds’ minds and hearts have been destroyed by deranged influencers. We must save an entire generation of youths before it’s too late.

There’s no greater challenge before us than this: to save the children. This will require a complete change of attitude in the way we view parenting. We have to decide that the mere biological fact of being a parent isn’t enough to allow the adult to have unrestricted control of the child, if in fact they’re allowing him to evolve into sociopathic criminality. We’re going to need harsher, even draconian laws in order to rescue children from depravity. What greater responsibility could a society have?

Steve Heimoff