mendax.org

San Francisco is not the city of the sane. A stroll through the Tenderloin district, not named for its choice cuts of meat, will tell you as much. From the burnt-out hippies in the Haight, with their vagabond youths crowding near the Golden Gate Park half-high and half-stupid, to the yuppie trust-fund children who plague the Marina district with their fancy shoes and unrealistic preoccupation with money and exotic cars, San Francisco is mostly without a middle class. Transvestites, homeless, drug dealers, the Pacific Union Club - these people do not understand the real world, for they live in their own, shaping their beliefs into a fragile glass paradigm that would collapse under its own preposterous nature were it to escape the confines of liberal California.

But to the transplants, the students, the few whose wages are too high for housing assistance and too low to afford a nice apartment without at least two incomes, the insanity of San Francisco is perceptable to anyone who chooses not to consciously ignore it. This is how it is today, and how it was yesterday. The only difference is that the crazy has finally gotten some real news coverage, even if it won’t last.

It won’t be long before Jack Thompson mentions Grand Theft Auto when relating the depravity of hitting at least 14 people with an SUV throughout San Francisco streets, weaving on and off-road, onto sidewalks with the express desire to plow through human targets. The culprit, a 29-year-old man who may have thought the devil was after him, is only a recent nut-job who endangers San Francisco city life, however. About a week ago, a 59-year-old man decided to shoot two random hang-gliders in San Francisco for no apparent reason. The shooter, determined mentally ill, killed himself after the deed.

With over 60 homicides this year alone (there were 96 in total last year), the bohemian city of San Francisco is not simply another large city with a crime problem, but a city where random attacks, even in stereotypically “safe” districts, are a cause for concern. An optimist might suggest that Mayor Newsom take a stern look at how the mentally ill are treated in San Francisco, though a realist will note the city will likely draw no conclusions about these latest random violent events and the “counterculture” phenomenon that plagues the city’s streets. It may be some years yet before a reasonable psychologist determines some sort of cause and effect between growing up or living in an area where rampant societal liberalism plants the seeds for uncouth and outright inappropriate behavior, but I’d be more inclined to say that sensical people ought already be concerned with raising their children in a city where beggars and pariahs of normal cities are happily, or at best unconcernably, treated as appropriately common denizens of San Francisco.

Admittedly, neither the aforementioned shooter, nor the vehicular manslaughterer, were street-dwellers, but their mental illnesses were at best excused as reasonably acceptable, else these men would not have been in possession of weapons and the freedom to divulge in their homicidal fantasies. The gravest circumstance in San Francisco is precisely such lack of concern for the state of people’s surroundings. It’s time to wake up, people, and not just smell the urine on the streets, but to finally do something about it.

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