When Barbara Lee was interviewed on KQED the other morning, the first question she was asked was why Oakland is so dirty.
She turned immediately to illegal dumping. Now, I grant dumping is a problem, but it doesn’t really impact most neighborhoods. The big piles of garbage, which look like they arrive in trucks, are mostly in the flatlands, and mostly near the freeways. The Port area by Jack London Square is a prime location for dumping. I always imagine the dumpers are small businesses or independent contractors who don’t want to pay for getting rid of their waste. I agree with everyone, including Lee, who says we should install more cameras to arrest dumpers. But that’s not really the primary cause of Oakland’s filthiness, and I can’t imagine Oakland, which is reducing the size of its police department, actually catching and arresting dumpers.
The true cause of Oakland’s filth is threefold: overturned garbage bins, littering, and the detritus left by homeless people. These three categories all involve bad behavior by human beings, but Barbara Lee, being the “democratic socialist” she is, will never tell the truth about that. It’s taboo, and we’re not allowed to say taboo things in this society.
So let me say some taboo things.
The problem of overturned garbage bins is widespread in the flats and happens overnight when homeless scroungers are out looking for who knows what (food, items they can sell for drugs, useful gadgets). They’re the ones who overturn the bins so that, every morning like clockwork, half the garbage bins along Grand Avenue and Broadway look like they’ve been hit by missiles.
The littering is caused by almost everyone but when I think of it I envision a group of junior high or high school kids who get Big Gulps at 7-Eleven and then toss those big plastic containers in the street without even thinking about it. Or it might be the wrapper and packaging from a cheeseburger or a French fry container.
As for the detritus left by homeless people, some of that can be considered litter, but a lot of it is more like an abandoned campsite. Empty food cans, the remains of a fire, dirty aluminum plates, scrunched up paper towels—you know exactly what I’m talking about.
All of these three categories are dominated by people who suffer from the same psychological sickness: sociopathy. Nobody in their right mind, who’s been raised properly by respectable parents, would overturn a garbage bin, or throw a Slurpy container in the street, or set an illegal fire to warm up (possibly stolen) foods and then leave the mess for someone else to clean up. This form of sociopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy for others, impulsive behavior with no regard for the consequences, and a total disregard of social norms. People who are normal, sane and balanced are not sociopaths, nor is anyone born sociopathic. Sociopaths are created in bad homes with little or no parental supervision, often in single-parent circumstances, where morals and ethics are virtually non-existent. And these are the very people whom far-left progressives represent.
They’re often people of color. That’s not an easy thing for me to say, because I know I’ll get jumped on and accused of being a racist. But most of the taboo things in our cancel-culture society have to do with telling the truth about racial matters, and I, like so many others, am tired of being muzzled. We’re not allowed to say what we perceive with our senses. And because we can’t speak the truth, our situation continues to deteriorate because a society that won’t even define what’s wrong with it can’t fix itself. If anything, the problem gets worse. And of course, sociopaths also are likely to break the law in many other ways.
I think, with Trump’s election, he’s forcing us to have this uncomfortable conversation. Progressives really don’t want to talk about what’s the matter with so many poor people of color. Barbara Lee prefers to blame anonymous “dumpers” rather than her own constituents. But those of us who live in inner cities see the evidence every day, and we know that denying it is insane. I remain hopeful that we’ll be rid of Trump in due time, and that Democrats retake the Congress, but only after they learn that they made a mistake of historic, cosmic proportions when they decided to support wokeism, racist politicians, and anti-democratic cultural warriors, thus turning their back on their traditional constituency, decent working people of all colors, races and backgrounds who are now voting Republican.
Steve Heimoff