It’s been a quiet Spring in Oakland. The trees and flowers blossomed early this year, sharing hue and fragrance with the warm air. The recent rains have been beneficial. Crime is down all over the city (as it is in all other U.S. cities), a reprieve we do not fully understand but can be grateful for.
Our City Council has accomplished some good things. Especially welcome is the passage of Ken Houston’s Encampment Abatement Plan, which makes it easier to clear the many homeless slums that still desecrate large portions of the city. Of course, having the legal ability to clear encampments doesn’t mean the city actually will clear encampments. It requires will power, and I’m afraid Oakland still does not possess the determination to truly clean up the town. There’s still too much influence from wokes and unions (same thing, really), who fancy themselves doing God’s work protecting homeless people, even though the majority of Oaklanders want these encampments ended now.
We’ll see. Maybe this time the will power really is there. I’ll be watching, as a test case, Lakeside Park. If any place in Oakland should be cleaned up and cleared of tents, it’s this crown jewel of Oakland, with bird-busy Lake Merritt as its centerpiece. But the park remains littered with tents and all the garbage and defilement they bring. The two City Council members whose districts abut the park are Carroll Fife (D3) and Charlene Wang (D2). We can forget about Fife ever doing anything to limit encampments. As for Wang, it’s been hard for me to get a handle on her politics. She’s certainly smart and well-educated, but seems like something of a bureaucratic fussbudget. From watching her at Council meetings broadcast on KTOP, she appears to like the sound of her own voice. She asks a lot of questions that are irrelevant to the topic at hand, thereby prolonging tedious meetings that should be shortened, not lengthened. It’s also hard to determine where she really stands on public safety/cops. She claims to be fierce on violence against women. Now, that is a worthy cause, but I often get the impression that politicians who go on and on about gender-based violence use that as an excuse to go soft on violence in general. Some politicians who fulminate the most on violence against women also want to defund the police. Carroll Fife, for example. But we know Fife isn’t really serious because she qualifies her denunciations of violence against women by insisting that almost all of it is against “Black” women. She therefore racializes the issue, as she racializes everything, and so cheapens the authenticity of everything she says. My concern about Wang is that I don’t really know if she’s in favor of strengthening the Oakland Police Department, or if she just talks a good game while letting OPD go to pieces.
If Wang really wants to demonstrate her commitment to law and order, she’ll clean up her side of Lakeside Park. And not only clean it up, but keep it clean. We all know that these homeless people play a game of Whack-a-Mole. They get chased out of a particular location but they’re back within hours, tentatively at first; but when their fellow hoboes see that the city does nothing to re-roust them, they all return, and pretty soon the situation is worse than ever—see, for example, the horrible situation along Grand Avenue by Splashpad Park, which is in Fife’s district. It’s getting as bad as Wood Street used to be, and spills over from Grand Avenue into the parking lot below the 580 freeway (which must have the Farmers Market organizers worried). I’m officially renaming this “The Fife Slum” because we usually name things after the politicians that create them.
Still, as I said earlier, Oakland has been quiet lately, relatively speaking. But we can’t forget how deplorable Oakland has been in the past and is likely to get again in the future. When you think of all the things that progressive Democrats have done to insult Americans—from ebonics in the schools to the insanity of pronouns (“they” “them”), from genderless restrooms to affirmative action, from defunding the police to letting criminals go free because they’re people of color (Pamela Price), from guilt-tripping White Americans for their alleged racism to manipulating our city’s budget to favor woke causes—their most egregious offense has been allowing Oakland to become a third world shit hole. In their furious rage to impose an authoritarian regime to “protect” the rights of people of color, these wokes have taken a wrecking ball to the democracy our founders fought for. If you’re a hard-working, tax-paying White person, or any skin color, really, you should be outraged by what you see all around you. And yet when Carroll Fife is on the ballot, so many people vote for her, in a performative act of virtue signaling.
Well, you get what you vote for. Yes, this Spring in Oakland is off to a good start. We’ll see how summer goes. Keep your powder dry!
Steve Heimoff