Reality Test Your Plans and Politicians
When something doesn't work, don't keep doing more of the same
Here is why everything is horrible in San Francisco (and indeed, in the world at large): people see a problem and go “shucks, doesn’t affect me any,” and move on. They throw in a little virtue signaling, then they escape from the situation. The problem, meanwhile, does not go away. It builds and builds until finally it does affect them, and by then it’s too late to fix it, or at least to fix it easily. Everyone then throws up their hands and says, “Gee, who could have foreseen this? Why does San Francisco now look like Somalia on a good day?”
Step up when you can. Don’t run from the facts of the situation. Reality test proposals. If an idea sounds good but has proven that it doesn’t work, don’t just do more of the same. (This goes for politicans, too.) Seek solutions that actually fix things, rather than those which flatter your preconceived political posturing. If that means adjusting your views, well, that’s more likely to work than adjusting reality to conform to your views.
So many jackasses in my office live in the suburbs, commute in every day (by electric car, of course), and then back to San Mateo or Redwood City at night. They recite the patter by heart: “shucks, have a heart, be kind and compassionate to these poor, suffering people experiencing unhousedness” when I express disdain at having to step over piles of syringes and shit every single day, or call for any sort of political action to put an end to the same.
This is because they never had to deal with some guy on PCP punching himself in the face in front of their doorstep when they come home at night. They never had to steer their toddler away from the syringes hidden in the bushes at the playground, or hear their wife tell them about how that crazy filthy guy who gets roaring drunk and pisses on the wall of the Walgreen’s down the street every single day was screaming at her and threatening her for no reason, again. They don’t have to put up with any of that. They deal with the homeless in passing, for 15 or 20 minutes a day, while walking to the office from their car and back, and while going out to lunch. They vote to decriminalize shoplifting, and they vote for woke judges who routinely dismiss charges for poor oppressed homeless person doing anything short of murder, and they vote for politicians who promise to defund the police, because social justice.
This fleeting exposure to “the real world” is therapy for them. It makes them feel better about their liberal guilt complex to repeatedly telegraph self-awareness of their “white privileged” existence in the safe and sanitized suburbs, far from the dinge of the Mission or the Tenderloin. They must loudly squawk their virtuous egalitarian solidarity with these disenfranchised junkies and thugs and crackheads, these agencyless victims of capitalism, as they briefly pass by on their way to buy a $23 sandwich, which they then take back to the safety of their well-stocked tech office kitchen replete with free snacks and free beer and an armed security guard who keeps all that well out of their world. Then they return to sanitized suburban bubble at night, where they no doubt regale their spouse and friends with stories of how they virtuously gave that 120 pound person experiencing unhousedness $5 so he could go buy more crack. He didn’t even thank them for it!
For them, the City itself is a mere psychological prop, a rhetorical foil that allows them to tut-tut sadly, shake their heads knowingly, and mainly, to showcase their own grandiose egalitarian empathy for their fellow human beings, no matter their station in life — nothing more. Actually changing the horrid objective conditions of reality would tend to diminish their virtue, or at least their ability to signal it. They will talk a lot instead, occasionally give someone cash on the street, and of course they eagerly vote for any progressive politician who mirrors their own virtuous image sufficiently to produce identification.
Then there are the hipsters; so many cool young hipsters, who’ve just moved to San Francisco from some repressed small rural town or some wealthy conservative suburb for three or four years after college. They openly endorse the benefits of the ongoing decline of street conditions, because “it keeps the kind of people out who don’t like it.” This means they view “people getting stabbed on the sidewalk over $20 every other week” as an effective filter against people like their parents, whom they dislike for various potentially valid reasons (but they still accept the Venmo’ed cash allowance.)
This sort of posturing makes them feel cool and rebellious to live amidst squalor and violence; their stuffy old parents would hate it. They went to schools like MIT and Stanford (on Mama and Daddy’s dime.) They graduate, and get a cushy tech job and an apartment with four similar roommates in the Mission (inadvertently pricing out everyone who used to live there.) It’s cool, they can wear t-shirts to work and show up at noon! There’s ping pong and free beer in the office. The boss is totally cool with “mental health days” and there’s a nap / meditation room. After work, they get wasted at that gentrified former dive bar that now sells $16 beers to yuppie tech workers like them all night, but still has the old punk rock stickers on the wall, and hasn’t yet started cleaning the bathrooms, so they still smell appropriately divey, like stale beer and piss and vomit. Gross. Now we’re living in the real world! Mom and Dad would be disappointed, and Grandma would be apoplectic.
These tech hipsters thus extend their college days for a few years with roommates and partying, then they grow up and leave town. While they’re here, they vote for Dean Preston and Gordon Mar, and they vote to decriminalize shoplifting, and they vote to defund the police. Then, they get married, they get a down payment (which they could never afford even with a tech salary) from Mom and Dad as a wedding present, and they move back to Marin, leaving behind the detritus of their poor political positions and decisions for everyone else to deal with. But Stanford is still pumping out eager young comp sci grads; a new generation of hipsters arrives, and the cycle repeats, intensifies, all over again.
Meanwhile, the City crashes and burns. San Francisco, the most beautiful city in the world, has been sacrificed to their hubris and arrogance, on the altar of “look at me, I’m such a moral and self-aware person.” It lies bleeding before us.
Everyone living outside of California does the same, of course. Everyone looks at all this and laughs or shakes their head sadly, but ultimately they say, “not my problem, doesn’t affect me any”…. Yeah, well, just wait till Gavin Newsom is president.