The mighty Heather MacDonald boiled down the results of liberalism in her report on the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco.
Here, in microcosm, she lays out the fundamental connections between those with their hands out, and the Liberal mindset that encourages same .
1. Four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.s current relabeling effort sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you? Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby. Dude, do you have any food? His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls, and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth traveler, as the Haight Street punks call themselves, stares dully into space.
a. Starting in late 1965, the emergent drug culture promised liberation from the bourgeois values of self-discipline and hard work. The time has come to be free, a local flyer proclaimed. Be FREE. Do your thing. Be what you are. Do it. Now.
2. Im not begging, Im just asking for money, Cory says, seemingly convinced of the difference. How much do you make? In San Francisco, you dont get muchmaybe $30 to $40 a day, says Eeyore. When youre traveling, you can make about $100 on freeway off-ramps. The defining characteristic of all these travelers seems to be an acute sense of entitlement.
3. Meantime, welfare will do just fine. A strapping young redhead trudging down Haight Street with a bedroll and a large backpack explains the convenience of his electronic food-stamp card, which he can use to pick up his benefits wherever he happens to bewhether in Eugene, Oregon,
4. community frustration with the gutter punks rising aggressiveness had led the Haights police captain, Teri Barrett, to propose a new law that would ban sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 AM to 11 PM. The homelessness industry instantly mobilized against the Civil Sidewalks law. Its first tactic was to assimilate the gutter punks into the homelessness paradigm, so that they could be slotted into the industrys road-tested narrative about the casualties of a heartless free-market economy. Homelessness, at its core, is an economic issue, intoned the Coalition on Homelessness, San Franciscos most powerful homelessness advocacy group, in a report criticizing the proposed law. People are homeless because they cannot afford rent.
a. applied to the able-bodied Haight vagrants, it is simply ludicrous, entailing a cascading series of misrepresentations regarding the role of choice in youth street culture. The Haight punks may not be able to afford rent, but that is because they choose to do no work and mooch off those who do.
b. Shoehorning the street kids into the homeless category requires ignoring their own voices, ordinarily a big no-no among progressives when it comes to official victims of capitalism and other oppressions. They are not homeless, the travelers insist, and they look down on those who are.
5. OK here it comes: The executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community. Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.
a. But a social-services empire has grown up around the street vagrants; its members livelihood depends on a large putative client population, even if the clients arent interested in their services.
6. The homelessness industrys second tactic was to demonize Civil Sidewalks supporters as motivated by hatred toward the poor. This issue makes me sick to my stomach, the head of the Coalition on Homelessness, Jennifer Friedenbach, told a supervisors meeting in May. It makes me sick because were putting into place another law that promotes hatred and that will codify economic profiling.
7. the homelessness advocates pulled out their trump card: associating supporters of the Civil Sidewalks law with business interests. San Francisco progressives regard businessmen as aliens within the body politic whose main function is to provide an inexhaustible well of funds to transfer to the citys social-services empire. If these corporations pay their fair share, supervisor John Avalos explained in 2009 when introducing a new business tax, we can generate millions that will go towards keeping health clinics, youth and senior services, and jobs safe for San Franciscans. (The contradiction between raising business taxes and keeping jobs safe was lost on Avalos.)
8. The supervisors voted in June against the sit-lie law eight to three, though the public had backed it by a 71 to 24 percent margin in an earlier 2010 poll. [It was approved by voters in 2010.]
a. MacDonald calculates that the city spends the equivalent of $26,865 in services for each of its homeless persons. The total is three times what it spends on police and fire departments.
9. At the May hearing on the sit-lie law, a petite young black woman mocked the progressives claim that they were fighting for the [homeless] population. You people in the social-service mafia make money off this population, she retorted, and then go home to neighborhoods where people are not loitering, puking, and pissing outside your door 24 hours a day. We dont need you here; we need accountability for low-income residents who go to work and dont do drugs 24/7.
The Sidewalks of San Francisco by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Autumn 2010
Different size, same problems, on a national level.
Here, in microcosm, she lays out the fundamental connections between those with their hands out, and the Liberal mindset that encourages same .
1. Four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.s current relabeling effort sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you? Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby. Dude, do you have any food? His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls, and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth traveler, as the Haight Street punks call themselves, stares dully into space.
a. Starting in late 1965, the emergent drug culture promised liberation from the bourgeois values of self-discipline and hard work. The time has come to be free, a local flyer proclaimed. Be FREE. Do your thing. Be what you are. Do it. Now.
2. Im not begging, Im just asking for money, Cory says, seemingly convinced of the difference. How much do you make? In San Francisco, you dont get muchmaybe $30 to $40 a day, says Eeyore. When youre traveling, you can make about $100 on freeway off-ramps. The defining characteristic of all these travelers seems to be an acute sense of entitlement.
3. Meantime, welfare will do just fine. A strapping young redhead trudging down Haight Street with a bedroll and a large backpack explains the convenience of his electronic food-stamp card, which he can use to pick up his benefits wherever he happens to bewhether in Eugene, Oregon,
4. community frustration with the gutter punks rising aggressiveness had led the Haights police captain, Teri Barrett, to propose a new law that would ban sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 AM to 11 PM. The homelessness industry instantly mobilized against the Civil Sidewalks law. Its first tactic was to assimilate the gutter punks into the homelessness paradigm, so that they could be slotted into the industrys road-tested narrative about the casualties of a heartless free-market economy. Homelessness, at its core, is an economic issue, intoned the Coalition on Homelessness, San Franciscos most powerful homelessness advocacy group, in a report criticizing the proposed law. People are homeless because they cannot afford rent.
a. applied to the able-bodied Haight vagrants, it is simply ludicrous, entailing a cascading series of misrepresentations regarding the role of choice in youth street culture. The Haight punks may not be able to afford rent, but that is because they choose to do no work and mooch off those who do.
b. Shoehorning the street kids into the homeless category requires ignoring their own voices, ordinarily a big no-no among progressives when it comes to official victims of capitalism and other oppressions. They are not homeless, the travelers insist, and they look down on those who are.
5. OK here it comes: The executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community. Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.
a. But a social-services empire has grown up around the street vagrants; its members livelihood depends on a large putative client population, even if the clients arent interested in their services.
6. The homelessness industrys second tactic was to demonize Civil Sidewalks supporters as motivated by hatred toward the poor. This issue makes me sick to my stomach, the head of the Coalition on Homelessness, Jennifer Friedenbach, told a supervisors meeting in May. It makes me sick because were putting into place another law that promotes hatred and that will codify economic profiling.
7. the homelessness advocates pulled out their trump card: associating supporters of the Civil Sidewalks law with business interests. San Francisco progressives regard businessmen as aliens within the body politic whose main function is to provide an inexhaustible well of funds to transfer to the citys social-services empire. If these corporations pay their fair share, supervisor John Avalos explained in 2009 when introducing a new business tax, we can generate millions that will go towards keeping health clinics, youth and senior services, and jobs safe for San Franciscans. (The contradiction between raising business taxes and keeping jobs safe was lost on Avalos.)
8. The supervisors voted in June against the sit-lie law eight to three, though the public had backed it by a 71 to 24 percent margin in an earlier 2010 poll. [It was approved by voters in 2010.]
a. MacDonald calculates that the city spends the equivalent of $26,865 in services for each of its homeless persons. The total is three times what it spends on police and fire departments.
9. At the May hearing on the sit-lie law, a petite young black woman mocked the progressives claim that they were fighting for the [homeless] population. You people in the social-service mafia make money off this population, she retorted, and then go home to neighborhoods where people are not loitering, puking, and pissing outside your door 24 hours a day. We dont need you here; we need accountability for low-income residents who go to work and dont do drugs 24/7.
The Sidewalks of San Francisco by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Autumn 2010
Different size, same problems, on a national level.
