« Books | Main | 15 Year Old Stabs His Mother »
July 7, 2011
The Next Revolution: 16th and Mission
At lunch, I've been walking around the neighborhood lately. I have the motorcycle, but recently I've just been walking around the hood. It's a much different perspective. It allows me to interact more with the locals, as it were. Not that this is necessarily a good thing.
The neighborhood is about as rough as you can imagine. Police standing around with yellow tasers at the ready. The BART tunnels regurgitate armies of homeless people of all shapes, sizes, and colors from subterranean tubes.
The homeless and the hopeless are basking in the sun, smoking weed, drinking beer. Cashing their welfare checks and living off the toil of others.
Looking around, you get the feeling that a revolution could break out here at any minute. All it would take is the right spark and this place would riot in the blink of an eye.
The homeless actually took over the Sierra Hotel this weekend at 20th and Mission.
There are women here. Walking down the sidewalk. And I've never been physically assaulted. But this is about as rough as any place I've been.
And you think about that...you look at the crime maps of San Francisco and see how many robberies and murders and muggings there are every day, and you see how insane it is to be down here. But then you think, yeah, but there are a million people in the city. So, the odds of this happening to me are fairly slim.
And, that's true. Statistically speaking, that's sound rationalization. But right away, I realize that I'm basically employing the same strategy to stay alive as a school of bait fish. Basically, I'm a human, with a brain that has evolved over billions of years, and at the pinnacle of our society, I've basically come up with the same strategy for survival as a minnow.
I think that, instead of just praying the homeless don't devour us en masse on any given afternoon, we should go for a Fantastic Planet type of solution. We should take these people out in the bay and drown them. Seriously. I don't think that we should be paying them to do nothing, and I promise you that we are. I think that these people ought to be rounded up, put in chains, and forced to work in the fields. Or they ought to brand their faces with hot irons like Hernan Cortez did when he took over a village.
But I promise you this, if they don't do something in San Francisco to get the homeless under control, this city is going to go down the drain. At this rate, it'll be no different than Tijuana in another 10 years.
Posted by Rob Kiser on July 7, 2011 at 12:16 AM
Comments