Yesterday I wrote about a homeless woman who sued Sacramento cops for throwing out some of her stuff when they rousted her encampment. The woman was mistaken, I said, for thinking she had a right to set up a camp on public property. She didn’t, as a Judge ruled when he threw out her case. The city, he declared, had no obligation to store her belongings just because she couldn’t afford to do it herself.
Now, in a related incident, a homeless guy in Tennessee was arrested and indicted on a felony for camping in a public park and refusing to leave when he was ordered to by the police. The guy thus became, according to liberal NPR, “one of a handful of homeless people in the country to be arrested and charged with a felony for camping on public property.” So is this the beginning? Are we going to see cities start to get tough on encampments, after all these years of blather and babble and doing nothing?
I’ve begged Oakland for years to crack down on encampments, but the city so far has refused to do it. Homeless advocates allege that Oakland can’t roust the homeless unless it can offer them an alternative place to stay. This is factually untrue: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Grants Pass v. Jackson, specifically ruled that cities do not have give homeless people a free space to live before rousting them. But the truth has seldom mattered to homeless advocates. They insist that the public—you and I—pay for most of the expenses of homeless people, which seems to me to be taxation without representation. It’s unsound and politically impossible. The public has clearly indicated its unwillingness to take on the massive task of supporting huge numbers of the homeless. Many of us feel that, while some homeless people may be unhoused due to circumstances beyond their control, many if not most are there because they want to be. And this is in spite of the many warnings officials have given to the homeless to clear their tents from public spaces. The homeless refuse to do so, as did the Tennessee man, so my question is, what is a city supposed to do when confronted by a scofflaw who repeatedly breaks the law and dares the cops to do anything about it?
Well, that’s a good definition of anarchy: people decide which laws, if any, they want to obey. I don’t even want to imagine what kind of society that would result in. Want my wallet? Go ahead, smash my head in with a bottle, then steal all my stuff. Want my home? You’re stronger than I am, so just break in, throw me out, and squat, then refuse to leave, the way the felonious Carroll Fife did when she took over that house years ago. Want to live for free in a nice, creek side location in Lakeside Park? Go right ahead. We have a City Council that tries to make nice with SEIU, the democratic socialist union that wants to tax the middle classes and transfer its wealth to the poor. Never mind that the history of Communism over the last century suggests that wealth redistribution is a very stupid, pointless thing to do. It simply doesn’t work, and usually wrecks countries that attempt it (cf, Cuba, Russia). Most of the world has turned sharply against Communism (this is why we see the rise of so many right wing parties in Europe), but here in Oakland there remains a sense that poor people are the chief constituency of elected officials, and therefore every city policy must be geared to taxing the population as much as is humanly possible, in order to create a useless bureaucracy to give the homeless everything they want.
I know that some of my readers feel compassion toward the worst off of the homeless. “There but for the grace of God go I,” is their thinking. It’s always instructive to have this point of view, but there’s a countervailing attitude that, I suggest, is far truer: each of us has a job to do when it comes to upholding the values of our society. We’re all in this together: that is something even most animals understand. When a rogue animal breaks the norms of the pack, the pack usually turns against it. How else could things be? Life is beautiful when we cooperate with each other. When some outliers decide to rebel by disregarding normal behavior, the greater society has the obligation to turn against those outliers and remind them that they’re not in charge, we are. We survive and thrive, not by turning against our own kind, but by uniting with them.
There’s definitely a shift in the national mood regarding the homeless. Compassion fatigue has set in: it’s hard to feel sorry for someone who is self-destructive. We’ve seen the homeless up close and personal and the experience has not been edifying. The American people are not cruel. We are the most generous nation on earth, sometime to a fault. We want all our brothers and sisters to succeed, and we’re willing to put our money where our mouths are. What we’re not willing to do is to reject millennia of common sense by exempting the homeless to opt out of out standards of responsibility. I say to our City Council, which grapples with this problem every day, you have one job, and that is protect and serve the majority of Oaklanders. The majority of Oaklanders does not include a few dozen recalcitrants who insist on befouling our parks, streets and underpasses. This is Oakland, a great city most of us love. But our tradition of compassion for the underdog doesn’t mean we have to allow the underdogs to take over.
Steve Heimoff